Browsing by Author "Yoo, Myung Hye"
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Item The role of semantic and syntactic features in dependency interference effects(University of Delaware, 2022) Yoo, Myung HyeThe processing of long-distance dependencies has been one of the primary means of investigating the linguistic components involved in working memory mechanisms behind the maintenance of wh fillers and retrieval of the stored filler at the gap site. This thesis investigates how semantic and syntactic features of the filler and an intervening element interact and have an impact on dependency formations. Specifically, this thesis explores the extent to which semantic and syntactic features can modulate the interference effects in dependency formations. First, I examine the effect of NP types concerning the filler and the intervening noun to probe how different semantic information of NP types interacts with contextual information in the processing of filler-gap dependencies. In three experiments, I found that semantic information on different NP types of an intervening noun plays a role in interferences during dependency formations and the semantic property of NP types is a crucial factor determining the susceptibility to contextual information. Secondly, I use the processing of subject-verb agreement dependencies involving the filler-gap dependency to probe how syntactic information, in terms of the argument status of a filler-gap dependency and an intervening element, modulates the difficulty of dependency formations. The processing of subject-verb agreement serves as a tool to explore the difficulty of dependency formations, which can elicit a temporary illusion of grammaticality/ungrammaticality. Two experimental studies reveal that the argument status of a filler-gap dependency can also modulate the processing of subject-verb agreement. I propose two stages of subject-verb agreement formation, which consider the argument status of both the filler and intervening noun in the memory encoding and retrieval process.Item Transitivity and non-uniform subjecthood in agreement attraction(Memory & Cognition, 2023-12-19) Yoo, Myung Hye; Tollan, RebeccaResearch on human language converges on a view in which a grammatical “subject” is the most saliently encoded entity in mental representation. However, subjecthood is not a syntactically uniform phenomenon. Notably, many languages encode morphological distinctions between subjects of transitive verbs (i.e., verbs that require an object) and subjects of intransitive verbs. We ask how this typological pattern manifests in a language like English (which does not morphologically signal it) by examining the “distinctiveness” of transitive versus intransitive subjects in memory during online sentence processing. We conducted a self-paced reading experiment that tested for “attraction” effects (Dillon et al., Journal of Memory and Language, 69(2), 85–103, 2013; Wagers et al., Journal of Memory and Language, 61, 206–237, 2009) in the processing of subject-verb number agreement. We find that transitive subjects trigger attraction effects, but that these effects are mitigated for intransitive subject attractors (independently of the number of other noun phrases present in the intervening clause). We interpret this as indicating that transitive subjects are less distinctive and therefore less representationally salient than intransitive subjects: This is because a transitive subject must compete with another clause-mate core argument (i.e., a direct object), which draws on resources from the same pool of memory resources. On the other hand, an intransitive subject minimally only competes with a non-core argument (i.e., an oblique noun phrase); this consumes fewer memory resources, leaving the subject to enjoy greater spoils.