Exam 8: Understanding Sentence Structure and Meaning

ERP and eye tracking have both been found to be useful for studying predictive language processing in spoken language, but there may be specific experimental circumstances in which one would be more appropriate than the other. What would you need to consider when deciding whether to use the ERP or the eye-tracking method?

Which sentence is a garden path sentence?

Understanding thematic relations of a verb

In the sentence The cruel man beat his puppy with a thick stick, _______ is the indirect object.

In which situation would speakers be most likely to use prosodic cues that are helpful for disambiguating spoken language?

Grammatically, _______ exemplifies a sentence in passive voice; whereas _______ uses an active voice.

Describe the task researchers used to measure cognitive control in working memory, and how this relates to the processing of garden path sentences.

Isabelle, 4, has the vocabulary of a 5-year-old. Sam, 5, has an average vocabulary for his age. In a study of language processing based on predictive eye movement,

In the sentence The stew simmered on the stove turned out to be delicious, the phrase simmered on the stove is ambiguous because it is missing certain function words. This grammatical structure is known as a

_______ suggested that people often use heuristics to solve problems, and sometimes these shortcuts in thought lead us to make errors in judgments.

Based on ERP studies of language predictability, which sentence would likely generate the largest N400 effect in response to the underlined word?

Which outcome suggests that participants process meaning during the shadowing task?

Which sentence contains a sentential complement verb?

The garden path theory places emphasis on the _______ rather than _______ of processing during the initial parsing phase.

Consider the sentence Let's eat grandma. Which vocal cue would help disambiguate the sentence?

Which of the following is a confound, preventing researchers from concluding that bilinguals have an advantage in cognitive control?

Do individual differences affect people's language parsing abilities? Provide empirical evidence to support your argument.

Kamide and colleagues (2003) investigated predictive language processes and found that after hearing only the first few words, Japanese speakers

Refer to the figure. Based on the results of the experiment illustrated, how does context affect a subject's ability to make sense of the ambiguous component in the sentence Put the apple on the towel in the box?

The mouse the cat chased keeled over. For the sentence, identify the main and subordinate clauses and the reasons for this classification.