Getty, Douglas John
(2024)
How Do Comprehenders Obtain Non-veridical Understanding of Structure? An Examination of Mechanistic Accounts.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
This is the latest version of this item.
Abstract
Given that both spoken and written language are subject to corruption from speech errors, disfluencies, and environmental noise, successful language comprehension sometimes requires deriving a non-veridical understanding of the linguistic input. Recent work has demonstrated that these non-veridical understandings are not merely semantic, but that, when licensed, these non-veridical understandings are also syntactic. For example, implausible dative sentences like “The man gave the apple the child” may be re-interpreted as the man gave the apple to the child. Several recent studies have found, using an implicit measure of structural understanding (structural priming), that comprehenders tend to obtain an understanding of these implausible datives more in line with the re-interpreted form. Across studies, I used structural priming to investigate two possible mechanistic explanations for how this may occur: plausibility-based syntactic prediction, and post-hoc revision. In Study 1 and 2, I find evidence that comprehenders can modify their structural representation of implausible datives on the basis of post-hoc visual context, but not from visual context accessible during online prediction. In Study 3, I find that comprehenders do not obtain non-veridical structural understanding when sentence interruptions ought to entrench structural predictions. Further, this study shows that comprehenders do indeed gain a structural representation that is more like the non-veridical alternative structure than the veridical structure. Study 4 is a novel re-analysis of existing studies, where I find that comprehenders are structurally primed more from the non-veridical interpreted structure than the veridical structure. Altogether, these results support a world where non-veridical understanding of structure is better explained by a post-hoc revision mechanism rather than an online prediction mechanism. These findings are discussed in the context of higher-level accounts of non-veridical understanding, frameworks of communication in dialogue, and figurative language comprehension.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
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| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
| Creators | Email | Pitt Username | ORCID  |
|---|
| Getty, Douglas John | djg94@pitt.edu | djg94 | |
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| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
27 August 2024 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
10 May 2024 |
| Approval Date: |
27 August 2024 |
| Submission Date: |
20 July 2024 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
123 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Psychology |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
structural priming, non-veridical understanding, semantic processing, communication |
| Date Deposited: |
27 Aug 2024 13:21 |
| Last Modified: |
27 Aug 2024 13:21 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/46805 |
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