LEAP workshop

Our next speaker, Dave Kush (Asst. Professor, Linguistics, Univ. of Toronto), will be coming in person this Friday, 17 November to speak at 11 am in Classics 113 and on Zoom (see details below).

Here are the details of the talk:

Grammatical prediction in active dependency resolution: Insights from cataphora

Real-time dependency resolution is an active process. Nearly all researchers agree that active dependency resolution relies, to some extent, on prediction: comprehenders appear to commit to analyses in advance of unambiguous confirmatory evidence. Researchers disagree, however, on how far in advance prediction occurs, what portions of linguistic representation(s) are predicted, and how to characterize the mechanisms that subserve predictive processes. In this talk, I’ll present results from a series of collaborative studies on the processing of cataphora in Norwegian, Dutch, and English to probe the limits of prediction. I'll argue (i) that comprehenders can make predictions earlier than is commonly assumed, (ii) that fine-grained predictions are made above the lexical level, and (iii) that predictive mechanisms are (relatively) grammatically faithful. I discuss how these results support a model of hierarchical prediction as inference to the best analysis across multiple levels of linguistic representation.