The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Tuesday, November 25, at 3-4pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/bQ4IXlJxTTShVcMHOosNtQ
Dawn Lau (McGill) will be presenting “Surprisals, The Brain, and How Thematic Roles Are Processed.” Here is the abstract:
Cross-linguistically, experimental data from neurolinguistics has initially shown blindness towards the processing of agents and patients in a sentence in filler-gap verb final sentences, such as in (1) and (2):
(1) The owner forgot which customer the waiter had served.
(2) The owner forgot which waiter the customer had served.
However, offline cloze probabilities clearly show a difference between the two. In this talk, I will present a re-analysis of this data using Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001). Surprisal Theory has shown good correlation with both ERP N400 readings and other processing phenomenon such as garden path sentences, and has been increasingly used as a psycholinguistics model. I will also discuss what this implies for our current theoretical models of thematic roles with respect to this data.