Agenda
ELiTU MA Student Special: Gabriel Carlin-Coleman & Bram Buijkx present their thesis projects
Gabriel Carlin-Coleman
Title: Computer mouse movements can replicate reading behaviour from eye tracking studies: evidence from syntactic and semantic interference effects
Abstract: This study investigates the effectiveness of ‘mouse tracking for reading’ (MoTR), a novel incremental processing paradigm developed by Wilcox et al. (2024). MoTR adapts the procedure of eye-tracking tasks but allows implementation over the internet. The present experiment is a replication of Mertzen et al.’s (2023) English-language eye-tracking task. Participants (n = 40) were native English speakers recruited via Prolific. 12 completed the experiment using a trackpad and 28 used a regular mouse. Stimuli consisted of sentences containing a ‘distractor’ noun which was either a syntactic subject or object (e.g. ‘…that the strict nun’ vs. ‘…about the strict nun’), and which was either animate or inanimate (e.g. ‘…the strict nun’ vs. ‘…the strict church’). Sentences contained a ‘true’ subject noun, separated from its verb by the clause containing the distractor. Reading slowdowns at and following the verb were predicted whenever distractors were subjects, animate, or both. As predicted, subjecthood and animacy led to reading slowdowns in MoTR experiment and in the original eye-tracking study. Compared to Wilcox et al.’s original study, the present work used MoTR to replicate not just syntactic but also semantic effects on reading, tested longer and more complex sentences, and directly compared the behaviour of trackpad and regular mouse users. The successful replication of eye-tracking results suggests that MoTR can be a useful supplement to or even replacement for eye-tracking.
Bram Buijkx
Title: The strength of the weak universal allemaal (‘all’) in L1 Dutch: Evidence from bilingual speakers
Abstract: The study to be presented in the talk examined the extent to which cross-linguistic influence (CLI) from Hungarian affects the acquisition of the weak (intersective) interpretation of the Dutch quantifier allemaal in simultaneous bilingual Hungarian-Dutch children. This quantifier gets a strong reading when positioned postnominally (De vogels vliegen allemaal à ‘The birds are all flying’), whereas it gets a weak reading when occurring prenominally (Er vliegen allemaal vogels à ‘There are many birds flying’). Dutch monolinguals (N = 60) and Hungarian-Dutch bilinguals (N = 35) aged 7 to 11 participated in a truth-value judgement task, featuring illustration-sentence combinations that probed strong and weak readings of allemaal as well as control quantifiers (alle and sommige). Monolingual children showed low acceptance of allemaal’s weak reading until age 10, after which their acceptance increased significantly, while the bilinguals performed poorly across all ages. Both groups scored near ceiling on other conditions. These results suggest that cross-linguistic influence from Hungarian affects how bilinguals interpret allemaal. This influence may stem from surface overlap between the languages, allemaal’s syntax-semantics interface nature, participants’ age, or language dominance. Further research is needed to clarify the role of these factors and better understand the bilingual mind.
Teams
Meeting ID: 341 381 169 663 4
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