Conference Proceedings by Inbal Arnon
CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. March, Mar 1, 2007
Speakers frequently have a choice among multiple ways of expressing one and the same thought. Whe... more Speakers frequently have a choice among multiple ways of expressing one and the same thought. When choosing between syntactic constructions for expressing a given meaning, speakers are sensitive to probabilistic tendencies for syntactic, semantic or contextual properties of an utterance to favor one construction or another. Taken together, such tendencies may align to make one construction overwhelmingly more probable, marginally more probable, or no more probable than another. Here, we present evidence that acoustic features of spontaneous speech reflect these probabilities: when speakers choose a less probable construction, they are more likely to be disfluent, and their fluent words are likely to have a relatively longer duration. Conversely, words in more probable constructions are shorter and spoken more fluently. Our findings suggest that the di¤ering probabilities of a syntactic construction in context are not epiphenomenal, but reflect a part of a speakers' knowledge of their language.
Relative clauses have been extensively studied in language acquisition due to their complex struc... more Relative clauses have been extensively studied in language acquisition due to their complex structure and the apparent difficulty children have with them. Their study has been made more intriguing by the well-documented asymmetry between subject and object relatives. It has long been noted that children comprehend subject relatives better than they do object relatives (Correa, 1995; Friedmann & Novogrodsky, 2004; de Villiers, 1979).
Proceedings of BLS, Jan 1, 2006
Design – 2 x 2 wh-FILLER (first wh-phrase: which NP vs. bare what) wh-INTERVENER (second wh-phras... more Design – 2 x 2 wh-FILLER (first wh-phrase: which NP vs. bare what) wh-INTERVENER (second wh-phrase: which NP vs. bare who) Manipulating the accessibility by choosing either the more accessible which-phrase or less accessible bare wh-phrases.
The processing of object relative clauses in young Hebrew speakers
Poster presented at the Tenth International Congress …, 2005
In has long been noted, in a variety of languages (French, English, Hebrew) and tasks (act-out, p... more In has long been noted, in a variety of languages (French, English, Hebrew) and tasks (act-out, picture-selection) that children have difficulty in comprehending object relative clauses. Two studies examining the production and comprehension of both resumptive and non-...
Proceedings of the 31st …, Jan 1, 2010
Human infants and adults are able to segment coherent sequences from unsegmented strings of audit... more Human infants and adults are able to segment coherent sequences from unsegmented strings of auditory stimuli after only a short exposure, an ability thought to be linked to early
language acquisition. Although some research has hypothesized that learners succeed in these tasks by computing transitional probabilities between syllables, current experimental results do not differentiate between a range of models of different computations that learners could perform. We created a set of stimuli that was consistent with two different lexicons—one consisting of two-syllable words and one of three-syllable words—but where transition probabilities would not lead learners to segment sentences consistently according to either lexicon. Participants’ responses formed a distribution over possible segmentations that included consistent segmentations into both two- and three-syllable words, suggesting that learners do not use pure transitional probabilities to segment but instead impose a bias towards parsimony on the lexicons they learn.
Proceedings of the 29th Boston University Conference …, Jan 1, 2005
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Conference Proceedings by Inbal Arnon
language acquisition. Although some research has hypothesized that learners succeed in these tasks by computing transitional probabilities between syllables, current experimental results do not differentiate between a range of models of different computations that learners could perform. We created a set of stimuli that was consistent with two different lexicons—one consisting of two-syllable words and one of three-syllable words—but where transition probabilities would not lead learners to segment sentences consistently according to either lexicon. Participants’ responses formed a distribution over possible segmentations that included consistent segmentations into both two- and three-syllable words, suggesting that learners do not use pure transitional probabilities to segment but instead impose a bias towards parsimony on the lexicons they learn.