Welcome to the Event Structure in Language Comprehension Page

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0132380. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

The Event Structure in Language Comprehension project, specifically the telicity voice change monitoring experiment, is supported by an NSF Grant entitled "Doctoral Dissertation Research: Telicity and Event Structure in Language Comprehension". The Event Structure in Language Comprehension project is also supported by the University of Arizona Cognitive Science Program.

Abstract
This dissertation presents and evaluates the hypothesis that event structure information such as telicity is used during language comprehension. A verb or verb phrase is telic if it denotes an event that necessarily progresses towards an endpoint. The prediction that is tested in this dissertation is that garden pathing is less severe in reduced relative clause sentences with telic embedded verbs than in those with atelic embedded verbs. Optional versus obligatory transitivity of the embedded verb is also included as a factor, and it is fully crossed with telicity in all of the experiments in order to tease apart the effects of these two types of verb information. The hypothesis is evaluated based on new experiments using the voice change monitoring paradigm and the word maze paradigm and post-hoc analyses of previous self-paced reading experiments. The results show that telicity and transitivity both have independent effects on the severity of the garden path, but telicity has on earlier effect, on the by-phrase, while transitivity has an effect later on the main verb. This suggests that verb telicity information is used during comprehension and that it is not derived from transitivity (argument structure) information.

Experiments under this project

This web site provides the data and materials from the Telicity Voice Change Experiment, which is described in Chapter 5 of the dissertation. This web site for making the materials & data available was promised in the NSF grant that supported the research. The materials & data may be downloaded from the links below.

If you are interested in how to categorize events as telic or atelic, please email me about my current research on operationalizing event type using computerized questionnaires.

For more information on this research, please visit my dissertation page.
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Last modified 03/03/2004
Erin O'Bryan