Speaker: Hal Tily
\nTitle: Linguistic representations are probabilistic: evidence from production
\nchoices, articulation, visual attention and reading times
\nTime: Tues 11\/2, 12pm
\nLocation: 46-3189<\/P><\/p>\n
\nComprehenders are sensitive to the probability of linguistic material:
\nthey read more predictable words faster, resolve ambiguities to a more
\nlikely outcome, and complete sentences in ways similar to actual
\nspeakers’ productions. However, this does not necessarily mean that our
\nknowledge of language includes knowledge about the probability of
\nlinguistic material, since we could simply be sensitive to the
\nprobability of events in the world (plausibility), which is typically
\nconfounded with the probability of the words used to describe them.
\nLuckily, languages sometimes give multiple ways of expressing a single
\nevent which may differ in their probability, such as the English
\nditransitive: “give the princess the necklace” means the same thing as
\n“give the necklace to the princess”. I present work showing that these
\nconstructions are indeed used by speakers with different probabilities
\ndepending on the linguistic environment. Those probabilities even
\ninfluence the realization of the utterance in speech: using the more
\nprobable construction in a given situation leads to shorter word
\ndurations and improved fluency. Using eyetracking, we next show that
\ncomprehenders are sensitive to linguistic probabilities and use them to
\nanticipate the order that referents will be mentioned. Finally, in
\nonline self paced reading, I show that low probability construction
\nchoices lead to difficulty in comprehension. These results suggest that
\nlinguistic forms which do not differ in meaning nevertheless have
\nassociated probabilistic usage patterns which are fundamental to both
\nproduction and comprehension.<\/P><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaker: Hal Tily Title: Linguistic representations are probabilistic: evidence from production choices, articulation, visual attention and reading times Time: Tues 11\/2, 12pm Location: 46-3189 Comprehenders are sensitive to the probability of linguistic material: they read more predictable words faster, resolve ambiguities to a more likely outcome, and complete sentences in ways similar to actual speakers’ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1902"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1904,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1902\/revisions\/1904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}