Biomedical subjects

Holly P Branigan

Publications and source records attributed to Holly P Branigan.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Syntactic alignment and participant role in dialogue.

We report three experiments that investigated whether the linguistic behavior of participants in a dialogue is affected by their role within that interaction. All experiments were concerned with the way in which speakers choose between syntactic forms with very similar meanings. Theories of dialogue assume that speakers address their contributions directly to their addressees, but also indirectly to side participants. In Experiments 1 and 2, speakers produced picture descriptions that had the same syntactic structure as a previous speaker's descriptions which had been addressed to a third person. This indicated that syntactic alignment is not limited to speaker-addressee dyads. However, the prior participant role of the current speaker affected alignment: prior addressees aligned more than prior side-participants. In contrast, Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that alignment was unaffected by the prior participant role of the current addressee. We interpret these findings in terms of depth of processing during encoding.

Communication↗

PubMed2005

Priming prepositional-phrase attachment during comprehension.

Strong evidence suggests that prior syntactic context affects language production (e.g., J. K. Bock, 1986). The authors report 4 experiments that used an expression-picture matching task to investigate whether it also affects ambiguity resolution in comprehension. All experiments examined the interpretation of prepositional phrases that were ambiguous between high and low attachment. After reading a prime expression with a high-attached interpretation, participants tended to interpret an ambiguous prepositional phrase in a target expression as highly attached if it contained the same verb as the prime (Experiment 1), but not if it contained a different verb (Experiment 2). They also tended to adopt the high-attached interpretation after producing a prime with the high-attached interpretation that included the same verb (Experiment 3). Finally, they were faster to adopt a high-attached interpretation after reading an expression containing the same verb that was disambiguated to the high-attached versus the low-attached interpretation (Experiment 4).

Comprehension↗

PubMed2005

Do speakers avoid ambiguities during dialogue?

What affects speakers' production of ambiguous utterances in dialogue? They might consider ease of production for themselves, or ease of comprehension for their addressees. Previous research has demonstrated that ease of production plays a role in speakers' syntactic choices, but that ease of comprehension does not. However, such studies have not employed dialogues that involve role swapping on a turn-by-turn basis. In our experiment, participants alternated in giving and following instructions to move objects around on a grid. They tended to repeat the syntactic form just used by their interlocutor, reflecting sensitivity to ease of production. More interestingly, they were more likely to disambiguate their utterances when the visual context was potentially ambiguous than when it was not, reflecting sensitivity to ease of comprehension. We conclude that speakers pay attention to their beliefs about their addressees' ease of comprehension, in addition to considering ease of production for themselves.

Communication↗

PubMed2003

Thematic processing of adjuncts: evidence from an eye-tracking experiment.

We investigated thematic processing in sentences containing a prepositional phrase that was ambiguous between a locative and a temporal interpretation. We manipulated context (temporal or locative), target sentence (temporal or locative), and whether or not the main verb of the target and the context was repeated. Results showed that context dictated the participants' thematic expectations. Thematically, congruent target and context pairs were read faster than incongruent pairs. This effect was not modulated by verb repetition. We argue that wh-words cause readers to lodge semantically vacuous thematic roles in their discourse representation that bias a reader's interpretation of subsequent thematically ambiguous adjuncts in their discourse representation.

Eye Movements↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Grammatical gender in the production of single words: some evidence from Greek.

The present study investigated the effect of prior grammatical gender information provided by the production of a bare noun on the production of a syntactically unrelated, gender-inflected color adjective. The target language was Greek. A lexical priming task involving picture naming was employed. Participants saw a series of pictures, some in color and some in black-and-white; they had to name a black-and-white picture with the single noun (prime) and a color picture with the appropriately inflected color adjective (target). Prior gender information was shown to affect subsequent production of gender-marked words. The effect was restricted to nouns of one gender class (masculine) only. The implications of these results for the representation and processing of gender in production are discussed.

Humans↗