Trueswell, John C.
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Publication The Convergence of Lexicalist Perspectives in Psycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics(2000-01-01) Kim, Albert E; Srinivas, Bangalore; Trueswell, John C.Publication On the Processing of "might"(2013-01-28) Atanassov, Dimka; Schwarz, Florian; Trueswell, John C.This study examines the processing of the implicature of “might” (NOT must). The literature on implicatures contains both studies that suggest rapid computation of scalar implicatures, and studies that provide evidence for extra processing costs in generating them. The present study extends existing work by comparing “might” to “must”, and by adapting a paradigm that integrates experimental sentences into a natural discourse within a game. The experiment employed the visual world paradigm, using a guessing game with a confederate: in critical trials participants’ eye movements were recorded while they listened to utterances (guesses) made by a confederate. Our results show a delay in incorporating the ‘not must’ implicature of “might”, which is comparable in size to previous studies finding delays in implicature computation. Hence our results provide further support for the notion that implicatures incur processing cost, based on different implicature triggers and using an experimental paradigm based on natural dialogue.Publication Semantic Seed EEG Study(2025-09-15) Trueswell, John C.; Laver, Abigail; Cheng, Angelina; Allon, DayaLanguage acquisition occurs in two steps. First, learners pick up new words from their surroundings to build a small vocabulary, known as a semantic seed (ex. dog). Second, they use a process called syntactic bootstrapping, in which they analyze meaningless words by their grammatical distribution to learn their meanings (ex. think). This study aims to explores the result of these two mechanisms interacting, via electroencephalography (EEG) methods and a replication of previous work with a behavioral study.