Proceedings of the 47th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference
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30
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2024
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 21
Publication Effects of Talker’s Dialect Labeling and Listener’s Language Experience on the Perception of Nasal Codas in Shanghai Mandarin(University of Pennsylvania, 2024-04-20) Gao, XinThis study delves into the impacts of both talker dialect labeling and listener language experience on the perception of a phonetically ambiguous nasal coda among Shanghai Mandarin speakers. Through a matched-guise online perception experiment, we explore how these factors influence speech perception. Our results indicate that greater exposure to a specific linguistic variety leads to a closer alignment of speech perception patterns with that variety. However, it is noteworthy that, in the context of the present study, talker's dialectal labeling does not appear to wield a significant influence on speech perception.Publication New and Changing Social Evaluations of All-lowercase and Exclamation Points(University of Pennsylvania, 2024-04-20) Abirou, Lena; Kerrigan, Aly; Michell, Jay; Wade, LaceyThis study examines the social evaluations of two variables---all lowercase (compared to standard capitalization) and exclamation point usage (!, !! or none)---in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). We present the results of a matched guise experiment investigating social perceptions of various combinations of these two variables when used in SMS text messages. Results reveal a range of social meanings associated with both features. All lowercase is associated with a younger, trendier, more online texter, as predicted based on previous literature, and is also evaluated as more feminine and queer, novel social meanings that are further supported by participants' open-ended judgments of all lower-case. The open-ended responses reveal more nuanced associations of lowercase, specifically indexing a stance of trying hard to appear like you're not trying hard or carefully-calibrated casualness. Exclamation points reveal an incremental evaluative pattern, such that 1 exclamation point is judged as more extroverted, image-oriented, laidback, queer, and feminine than no exclamation points, and evaluations are strengthened for 2 exclamation points. Additionally, 2 exclamation points are seen as particularly trendy and tech-savvy, unlike a single exclamation point. We find limited evidence for significant interactions between all-lowercase, exclamation point usage, and perceived texter gender, but we do observe a general trend for ratings to be stronger, especially for lowercase, among younger participants. We interpret these results as indicating emerging and changing social meanings of all lowercase and exclamation point usage.Publication Prosody Reveals Syntactic Structure: Secondary Predication in Finite Metrical Corpora(University of Pennsylvania, 2024-04-20) Caso, AnabelleThe mapping of syntax to prosody is regulated by correspondence requirements that hold between abstract syntactic structure and prosodic structure (Selkirk 2011, Elfner 2012, Ito and Master 2013, among others). Cross-linguistically, secondary predicates can be marked with special prosody indicative of their complex syntactic-semantic structure (Winkler 1997, Guzzo and Goad 2017). Serbian and Modern Irish provide two unique examples of this, demonstrating differential sentential stress and initial mutation application between secondary predicate and attributive adjectival constructions, respectively. In ancient languages with extant metrical corpora, prosodically marked structures are encoded via positions of isolation in a line (Hale and Kissock 2021). The goal of this paper is to demonstrate consistency in the distribution of secondary predicates in the RigVeda and the Homeric poems—secondary predicates are prosodically isolated structures, and are therefore prosodically marked. I show that the tendency to prosodically isolate secondary predicates in metrical texts is indicative of their treatment in non-metrical prose. I conclude that secondary predicates in the Vedic and Ancient Greek languages were prosodically marked structures with relative syntactic-semantic complexity, placing these languages into the cross-linguistic typology of secondary predication.Publication The Effects of Gender and Autism Spectrum Disorder on Prosody(University of Pennsylvania, 2024-04-20) Knutsen, Sten; Kuziemski, Alexandra; Kenny, Megan; Peppé, Susan; Stromswold, KarinTo date, surprisingly little research has investigated how people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) use prosody, and no research has investigated whether there are gender differences in ASD prosody. To address these gaps in the literature, we studied the functional use of prosody in 116 native English-speaking college students, 25 of whom had ASD and 91 of whom did not. Participants were tested on their ability to comprehend and produce affective prosody, question/declarative intonation, phrase boundaries, lexical stress, phrase stress, and contrastive stress. Bayesian ANOVAs revealed that women generally outperformed men, particularly in prosody production. Participants who did and did not have ASD generally performed similarly on most subtests, a finding that likely reflects that the participants with ASD were college students with no history of written or spoken language impairments. The one subtest where participants with ASD performed substantially worse than those without ASD was the contrastive stress production subtest, which is the only production subtest that specifically taps discourse pragmatics. On this test, women who did and did not have ASD performed similarly, whereas men with ASD performed substantially worse than men who did not have ASD. Previous studies have shown that people with ASD sometimes use camouflaging techniques to hide their ASD symptoms in public, and that women with ASD camouflage their behavior more than men with ASD. We believe that, taken as a whole, our findings provide the first evidence of gender differences in prosodic camouflaging in ASD.Publication Detecting the Effects of Antecedent Complexity on VPE Resolution(University of Pennsylvania, 2024-04-20) Yue, Jiayuan; Xiang, MingPrevious studies on filler-gap dependencies have shown that complex antecedents, relative to simpler ones, can facilitate subsequent memory retrieval. However, studies on ellipsis resolution have consistently found a null effect of complex antecedents. Making improvements on the design of previous studies, this paper investigates the effect of antecedent complexity on VP ellipsis (VPE) resolution. We report a self-paced reading experiment on VPE sentences with simple or complex antecedents. We use a plausibility judgment task to encourage participants to deeply process the VPE structure, as the retrieval and integration of the entire antecedent VP is necessary in order to perform the plausibility judgment task. The results show that a more complex VP antecedent indeed facilitates processing at the ellipsis site, but only when the sentence is implausible. We discuss implications of our findings on theories of ellipsis processing and memory retrieval.Publication Differential Object Marking in North Levantine Arabic: Exploring the Role of Noun Type(University of Pennsylvania, 2024-04-20) Zarka, Aya; Hacohen, AviyaDifferential Object Marking (DOM) is a widely studied crosslinguistic phenomenon, whereby only certain objects are case marked (e.g., Bossong 1991). In Northern Levantine-Arabic (NLA), DOM is only grammatical with definite objects (Aoun 1999). Beyond definiteness, individuation has been argued to be key in licensing Arabic DOM (Brustad 2000, Khan 1984). Zarka (2021) further observes that NLA DOM is sensitive to nominal quantification, such that DOM marking is licit with count but not with mass nouns. The broader goal of the current study is to systematically explore the effect of noun type on the distribution of NLA DOM. More specifically, we experimentally test the individuation generalization, particularly, Zarka's (2021) proposal that quantification is the relevant feature in licensing the distribution of DOM in NLA. In a departure from ZarkaÕs original proposal, though, our study takes 'quantification' to involve not only the morphosyntactic level but also the perceptual level. Using a gradable acceptability judgment task with 48 native speakers, we test which of these two aspects of nominal quantification is the relevant aspect for NLA DOM. Our experimental data generally support the observation in previous literature that individuation is relevant for the distribution of DOM in Arabic, with prototypically individuated nouns (i.e., count nouns) receiving high acceptability scores in DOM structures, and unindividuated nouns (mass nouns) receiving low acceptability scores in these structures. Further, our results show that the specific individuation feature for NLA DOM is quantification (Zarka 2021). However, contra Zarka (2021), we show that 'morphosyntactic countability' is not the right dimension for characterizing the distribution of nominals with DOM. Instead, licensing DOM depends on whether the direct object denotes perceptually discernible individuals.Publication Superiority Effects and the French Plural Pronoun Construction(University of Pennsylvania, 2024-04-20) Hénot-Mortier, AdèleFrench Inclusive Plural Pronoun Constructions (IPPCs) of the form Avec pro_x, pro_{x+y} VP, are subject to person restrictions: pro_x cannot be first or second person, if y refers to a third person individual. We propose an account of this phenomenon in terms of the Weak Person Case Constraint (PCC), building on Deal's (2022) "Dynamic Interaction and Satisfaction" framework, and show that it is consistent with other empirical facts specific to the IPPC in French and Russian (Feldman, 2016). If our analysis is on the right track, it may constitute additional evidence that the PCC is not restricted to clitic clusters, as pro_x in the French IPPC is a strong pronoun. Moreover, it would suggest that PCC strength is not only language-dependent, but also probe-dependent, given that French is subject to the Strong (and not the Weak) PCC in the v-domain.Publication Adults Behaving Childishly: Errors in Adult Responses to Wh-Questions(University of Pennsylvania, 2024-04-20) Lutken, Jane; Stromswold, KarinEnglish speaking kindergarteners sometimes incorrectly answer questions with medial wh-relativizers by apparently responding to the relativizer. For example, they might answer How did Lewis tell Sally what he picked? by saying what was picked (e.g., apples). In other words, they interpret it to mean: What did Lewis tell Sally (that) he picked? These errors are reminiscent of the wh-scope marking (WSM) construction found in languages like German, where the true wh-phrase appears medially while the scope of the wh-phrase is marked by an initial, contentless wh-phrase (Lutz, Muller, & von Stechow, 2000). deVilliers and Roeper (1995) argue these errors are due to children having an immature WSM-like grammar, whereas Lutken, Legendre, and Omaki (2020) argue they are due to immature processing. If children’s errors are due to an immature grammar, adults should not make WSM errors because their grammars are fully developed. If children’s WSM errors stem from their language processors being overtaxed, adults might also make WSM errors if they are similarly overtaxed. We present the results of two experiments in which we taxed adults’ processing mechanisms and examined their responses to questions with medial wh¬-relativizers. Adults read short, yet complex stories and answered questions following them. We also included a working memory task which adults did simultaneously in Experiment 1. We found that adults did make WSM errors in both experiments and they did so at a rate similar to children. Furthermore, adults were more likely to make errors – and WSM errors, specifically – when they simultaneously did the WM task. We suggest that our findings are consistent with an immature processing account of these errors.Publication Every Provides an Implicit Comparison Class When Each Does Not(University of Pennsylvania, 2024-04-20) Knowlton, Tyler; Schwarz, FlorianAlthough the English universal quantifiers "each" and "every" are highly similar, it's often noted that "each" is 'more individualistic' than "every" in some way. In a recent proposal, outlined in Knowlton (2021), this difference is explained in terms of distinct lexical meanings. The idea is essentially that the meaning of an expression like "every frog" has a semantic constituent that corresponds to the plurality "the frogs", whereas the meaning of "each frog" introduces no such plural element. The bulk of the evidence in support of this view comes from sentence verification tasks (e.g., participants recall group properties, like average frog color and the number of frogs, after evaluating sentences like "every frog is green" better than after evaluating corresponding sentences with "each"). To broaden the empirical landscape, we test a novel prediction of this semantic proposal: since the mental representation that serves as the meaning of "every" calls for grouping the things quantified over, that group representation should be available to serve as the comparison class for predicates like "is the same color" and as a plural antecedent for predicates like "was told that they should jointly select a winner". We show that this prediction is borne out in a simple forced choice judgment study: "every NP" is preferred over "each NP" in both cases, at least relative to baseline preferences for using either quantifier.Publication Definiteness in Plural Generics: Decomposing Maximality(University of Pennsylvania, 2024-04-20) Schoenfeld, AvivThis paper is about the implications of a cross-linguistic generalization on theories of genericity. The generalization is that if kind-denoting and generic-characterizing plurals are non-uniform in definiteness, then definiteness is better with the former compared to the latter. This poses a challenge to the prediction of uniform definiteness between the two sorts of plurals by the neo-Carlsonian and optimality-theoretic approaches to genericity. We meet the challenge by integrating the observation that kind-reference involves a narrower notion of maximality than generic-characterization.