Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

ESSL Meeting 4/23 - Wataru Uegaki

Speaker: Wataru Uegaki
Date/Time: Monday, Apr 23, 5:30p
Location: 32-D461

In this talk, I will discuss some prospects for a new project investigating the realtime construction of alternatives used in the interpretation of “only”. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, Kim et al. (2008) observe that subjects fixate their eye-movement to a real-world image of the focus-associate of “only” in the auditory stimulus faster when the context mentions the target item than when it mentions a semantically unrelated item. We interprete this result as arising from the varied accessibility of the different strategies to construct alternatives for the interpretation of “only”. More specifically, a structure-based algorithm as proposed by Fox and Katzir (2011) would be more easily accessible than online inference of Question under Discussion. We will present an experimental design to test this hypothesis building on Kim et al’s experiments.