CNL Lunch

Robert Fiorentino

Exploring Phrase-Structure Building in Noun Phrases

Thursday October 17th, 12:30pm, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

Studying the syntax and parsing of noun phrases may provide a window into the nature of online syntactic structure building. Here we present a noun phrase (NP) paradigm not previously explored, whose items differ minimally, crucially, in the information available to cue initial phrase structure assignment. Using these stimuli, we present a phrase-level self-paced reading method for testing the hypothesis that morphological and semantic cues to structure building are used online for the assignment of phrase structure to lexical items. We predict that the different routes to structure building should be reflected in processing differences. Specifically, we predict that, while morphology aids in structure building, it also results in an increase in local computational load in the region of the cue, and that in the morphology-free conditions, the parser should show sensitivity to the semantic fit of the constituent nouns. We will present the results of the reading time experiment and the outline of an MEG experiment which will further explore the nature of the parsing of these items.