Edinburgh Research Archive logo

Edinburgh Research Archive

University of Edinburgh homecrest
View Item 
  •   ERA Home
  • Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, School of
  • Psychology
  • Psychology Undergraduate thesis collection
  • View Item
  •   ERA Home
  • Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, School of
  • Psychology
  • Psychology Undergraduate thesis collection
  • View Item
  • Login
JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

Incremental interpretation and the role of disfluencies in human language comprehension

View/Open
Wilson thesis.pdf (166.9Kb)
Date
2006
Item status
Restricted Access
Author
Wilson, Andrew
Metadata
Show full item record
Abstract
Following a substantial amount of research, language comprehension is now generally regarded as an incremental process in which both linguistic and non-linguistic input is integrated and interpreted as early as possible within the time course. However, disfluencies, such as filled pauses like ‘er’ and ‘um’, are not as well regarded by the literature in terms of incremental processing. Nonetheless, a model of disfluency processing within such a system has been proposed by Ferreira and Bailey (2004) who utilise a formalism called Tree Adjoining Grammars to explain the reanalysis of disfluencies in a process termed ‘overlay’. The experiment reported below addresses this through the adoption of a methodology used by Altmann and Kamide (1999), whereby participants examined visual scenes while hearing corresponding sentences, in the attempt to, firstly replicate their findings concerning restriction selectional at the verb can be used to predict thematic role assignment, in addition to investigating the role of disfluencies in comprehension in terms of an overlay account. Results from participant’s eye movements supported Altmann And Kamide’s (1999) findings that the information extracted at the verb was used to predict upcoming referents. An overlay account of disfluency processing was not conclusively supported by the data. However, the results still suggest that disfluencies can affect the comprehension of language in a system based on fine-grained incremental interpretation.
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/1842/2340
Collections
  • Psychology Undergraduate thesis collection

Library & University Collections HomeUniversity of Edinburgh Information Services Home
Privacy & Cookies | Takedown Policy | Accessibility | Contact
Privacy & Cookies
Takedown Policy
Accessibility
Contact
feed RSS Feeds

RSS Feed not available for this page

 

 

All of ERACommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsPublication TypeSponsorSupervisorsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsPublication TypeSponsorSupervisors
LoginRegister

Library & University Collections HomeUniversity of Edinburgh Information Services Home
Privacy & Cookies | Takedown Policy | Accessibility | Contact
Privacy & Cookies
Takedown Policy
Accessibility
Contact
feed RSS Feeds

RSS Feed not available for this page