Lisa Bylinina, Yasu Sudo and Stavroula Alexandropoulou Priming acceptability judgments of NPIs We report on a series of priming experiments whose results indicate that (i) acceptability judgments of the Negative Polarity Item (NPI) ‘any’ can be primed, but (ii) only unacceptable sentences of the same type, i.e., those that contain unlincensed ‘any’, trigger priming effects….

Memory plays an important role in the interpretation of so-called linguistic dependencies, such as pronouns, reflexives or subject-verb agreement. For instance, in the sentence “The key to the cabinets is rusty.”, the singular form of the verb “is” is dependent on the singular form of the subject “the key”. A theory of memory that has…

Priming scalar alternatives: The effects of negation and antonymy Radim Lacina, Stavroula Alexandropoulou, Eszter Ronai, and Nicole Gotzner Weak scalar words such as warm give rise to scalar implicatures that amount to the negation of the stronger term, i.e. warm but not hot. The notion of informationally stronger alternatives has played a crucial role in investigating this phenomenon,…

Hannah Seemann: Modal Particles and their Interaction with Discourse   Different languages offer a variety of features for a speaker to convey epistemic stance. In German, modal particles have these discourse-managing functions: e.g., ‘ja’ can indicate shared knowledge, ‘doch’ signals a contrast between epistemic states and material on the table and ‘wohl’ is used to…

Pim Mak Title: Using the Visual World Paradigm for the diagnosis of DLD in bilinguals Bilingual children are sometimes incorrectly diagnosed with DLD because during a certain phase of language acquisition they make errors in language production that are not distinguishable from those of children with DLD. Several studies (e.g. Mak et al., 2017) have…

Marieke Schouwstra: Language and iconicity in the lab: experience, learning, and interaction Iconicity can aid the learning of a new language, but the relationship between language and iconicity is complex and has many layers. In this talk I will discuss experimental work that aims to help us better understand this complex interconnectedness. First, I will…

Hans Hoeken: Determinants of Perceived Message Convincingness Every day, people face many messages that aim to change their opinions and behaviors. And almost automatically and effortlessly, people have an intuition about how convincing these messages are. Interestingly, Mercier and Sperber (2017) claim that these rapidly produced convincingness intuitions often approximate the judgments that would result…

Merel Scholman: Individual differences in connective comprehension: The effect of linguistic experience and general reasoning skills The comprehension of connectives is crucial for understanding the discourse relations that make up a text. We studied connective comprehension in English to investigate whether adult comprehenders acquire the meaning and intended use of connectives to a similar extent,…

Aviv Schoenfeld: Numeral modification of plural mass nouns: The role of estimation Groceries ‘grocery items’, clothes and cattle lack singular counterparts and are reported as unmodifiable by small numerals. Alongside that, Allan (1980) reports cattle as modifiable by 500. The hypothesized existence of speakers who judge {#2, 500} cattle makes correct corpus predictions. In iWeb (Davies 2018–), six plural nouns without singular counterparts are modified…

Jeremy Kuhn: Diachrony and polysemy of Negative polarity items: An artificial grammar study Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are words that are only grammatical in certain negative contexts. Two well known diachronic patterns involve NPIs. First is Jespersen’s cycle: an NPI appearing in the scope of negation is reanalyzed as itself the marker of negation. Second,…