Co-authors: Bob van Tiel & Peter de Swart. This presentation explores the assignment of commitments in conversation. While theoretical work has explored the range of commitment-bearing acts, key questions remain unresolved, such as the role of addressees, the gradability of commitment, and the effect of evidentials. To empirically address these questions, we propose facial electromyography…

Joint work with Andrea Santi (UCL), Fani Karageorgou and Shayne Sloggett (University of York) Many current models of sentence comprehension employ a content addressable memory architecture which does not privilege structural information [1–5]. A seminal finding comes from [2], who suggest that even nouns outside the current sentential context interfere with the formation of intra-sentential…

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…

A much-debated question in linguistics is whether learning language requires a language-specific learning capacity or can arise from input alone. Neural language models (NLMs) can greatly influence this debate as they learn solely from input and their inductive biases, without built-in linguistic representations. Recent work has examined how NLM’s handle various grammatical phenomena, including syntactic…

** This talk is organized in collaboration with the Syntax Interface Lectures Utrecht (SIL) ** Grammatical aspect in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and English: Insights from experimental studies This talk addresses important theoretical issues concerning grammatical aspect in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and English. Three experimental studies on L1 and L2 processing of grammatical aspect are then presented. L1 processing of…

This study investigates the effect of connectives on the processing and comprehension of coherence relations in struggling readers. Using eye-tracking methodology, we examined how 110 Chilean primary school students (aged 11-13 years) with low reading proficiency processed texts containing different coherence relations (additive, causal, and contrast) with and without connectives. The experimental design employed nine…

This ELiTU Special will consist of a workshop connected to Tijn Schmitz’ defense, to take place in the morning. We will host talks by Matthew Husband and Patrick Sturt: Matthew Husband – “Bridging computational and algorithmic levels of explanation in word predictability” Patrick Sturt – “The role of active dependencies in agreement processing”More details TBA….

An important discussion in syntactic research revolves around the question whether the phenomena we observe are due to specific constraints on language structure or due to non-syntactic components of human cognition. A central topic in these discussions are so-called ‘island configurations’ (Ross 1967), i.e. unacceptable long-distance dependencies such as in (1b). (1)    a. Which Taylor Swift…

Indirect utterances, such as “The election outcome was interesting!” appear suboptimal from the point of view of efficient information transmission. However, we can still see the choice of indirect utterances as rational if we include social utility in the factors that determine utterance choice. We offer a Rational Speech Act model of indirect communication that captures…

While the scientific discourse has been primarily concerned with English and other Indo-European languages, little is known about the broader cross-linguistic picture with respect to presuppositions (PSPs). In general, the investigation into universals and parameters of variation, especially in the realm of pragmatics, still has a lot of field to cover (cf. von Fintel and…