UofT at the 37th Annual Human Sentence Processing Conference

he University of Michigan’s Linguistics Department hosted the 37th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, held at Ann Arbor May 16th-18th. A full list of UofT parrticipants can be found below.

UofT Linguistics presenters gave talks at this exciting conference, including Tiana Simovic of the Department of Psychology, her supervisor Dr. Craig Chambers, focusing on Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Science, and Wesley Orth, a Postdoctoral Fellow who completed his PhD at Northwestern University.

That presentation by Simovic and Chambers looked at how pragmatics (mental state reasoning) is involved in pronoun resolution, a relatively unexplored field.

At HSP 2023, they explored "how reasoning is involved in language processing." 

Orth's talk at the conference was a collaborative effort in relative clauses in Hungarian, a relatively understudied language. Unique properties of its structure allowed Orth and co. to test new hypotheses, testing variants which read to different reading behaviours, offering insights into the role of memory and prediction in processing. Their work will have an impact on tools for investigating such understudied languages.

Some posters from our UofT linguists included Dave Kush's poster on Active expectation in the processing of Urdu and Hindi correlative structures, in collaboration with Urwa Ali, Sanvi Dubey, Ishita Kumar, and Hayah Siddiqui. 

Their work developed a variant of the "violated expectation paradigm," used in work on expectations and prediction. Hypothesizing surprise if readers were presented with something other than a demonstrative pronoun at the start of a sentence after seeing a correlative, they measured reading time to gauge "surprise" in readers presented with a name at the start of a second sentence instead of a pronoun. Indeed, they found this surprise value. 

Future work will clarify whether these results show prediction of a pronoun as a subject of the next clause, or the pronoun as the first thing in the sentence - a challenging task due to Urdu and Hindi's flexible word order. 

Other posters included Ivan Bondoc’s on the subject relative clause advantage in Tagalog; Negative disjunctive sentences in child and adult Romanian: A preference for strong interpretations, co-authored by Lyn Tieu, assistant Professor in the French Department; and a poster on children’s interpretation of the hotly-debated ambiguous singular “they” by Anissa Baird, Nicole Hupalo, Mahnoor Khurram, and Emily Atkinson.

Notable alums presenting at the conference include Ailís Cournane, who earned her Master of Arts and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Toronto, and who now leads the Child Language Lab at New York University.

The Linguistics Department was proud to see so many of our own linguists forging new paths in their fields, and can't wait for HSP Conference #38!

Presentations and talks by UofT Linguists:

Talks:

Tiana Simovic and Craig Chambers: Pronoun Interpretation Highlights the Robustness of Social Perspective Reasoning

Sonny Wang and Craig Chambers: The Trait-Like Nature of Bridging and Instrument Inferences in Younger and Older Adults: An Individual Differences Study

Wesley Orth, Dávid Nemeskey, and Eszter Ronai: Hungarian relative clause processing: Diverging Results in L-maze and A-Maze

Posters by current UofT linguists:

Urwa Ali, Sanvi Dubey, Ishita Kumar, Hayah Siddiqui, Dave Kush: Active expectations in processing Urdu and Hindi correlative structures

Adina Camelia Bleotu, Lyn Tieu, Mara Panaitescu, Gabriela Bîlbîie, Anton Benz, Andreea Nicolae: Negative disjunctive sentences in child and adult Romanian: A preference for strong interpretations

Ivan Bondoc, Dave Kush: Animacy does not modulate the subject relative clause advantage in Tagalog

Anissa Baird, Nicole Hupalo, Mahnoor Khurram, Emily Atkinson: Children’s Interpretation of Ambiguous Singular "They"

Presentations by UofT Linguistics Alum: 

Maxime Tulling, Vishal Arvindam, Ailís Cournane: Maybe now, not later: online processing of possibility and negation in adults and 2-year-olds