with Hannah Rohde, Maayan Keshev, & Michael Franke
Communication depends in part on the hope that people will tell us things we are interested in with language providing a channel by which speakers can convey, among other things, newsworthy and informative messages. Despite this, research often emphasizes the role of predictability, showing that comprehenders make fast and sophisticated use of knowledge about typical situations to shape their expectations about upcoming words in fine-grained and context-driven ways. This project contrasts these two dimensions, distinguishing knowledge about situation plausibility from knowledge about what people actually choose to talk about.
with Hans Wilke, Hannah Rohde, Bettelou Los, & Antonella Sorace
Relative clause constructions are not all equally easy to process. Prior work on relative clause complexity focuses primarily on syntactic explanations for why some relative clauses (e.g., subject-extracted RCs) are easier to process than others (e.g., object-extracted RCs). However, syntactic explanations alone fail to make the right predictions of comprehenders' processing difficulties. This project investigates the influence of information structure on RC processing, focusing specifically of the roles of information status and at-issueness.
with Timo Buchholz & Klaus von Heusinger
The prominence status of referents in a discourse appears to be influenced by syntactic subordination: in configurations with a main clause and a subordinate clause, the subject of the second clause is less frequently pronominalized in subsequent discourse than when the second clause is also a main clause. However, this effect may not be due to syntactic subordination per se, but rather be the result of the relative prominence of the propositions, for which syntactic subordination is but one cue. This study investigates how syntactic and prosodic cues indicate the level of integration or subordination of clauses in complex sentences and thus affect the accessibility of the referents contained within each clause.
with Hannah Rohde & Andrew Kehler
The idea that predictability influences production has been observed at multiple levels of linguistic structure, but evidence for the influence of predictability on reduction in speakers' choice of reference is mixed. Some studies show more pronominalization for more predictable referents, while others find no influence of predictability and instead link pronominalization to other factors exclusively related to referent topicality. Disentangling these factors is a challenge, as it is difficult to manipulate one factor while holding all others constant. In this project, we test pronominalization in contexts that permit manipulations of predictability and address prior confounds of referent optionality.