WHO:	Elsi Kaiser , Department of Linguistics University of Pennsylvania
TOPIC:	Interpreting and anticipating reference in discourse
ABSTRACT:	Previous on-line comprehension studies of languages with flexible word order have found that noncanonical structures induce more processing difficulty than canonical structures (e.g. Hyona & Hujanen 1997). This difficulty is often attributed to the struct ural complexity / infrequency of the noncanonical forms. However, the dispreference for noncanonical orders may arise from the fact that most existing studies used sentences presented in isolation - even though, in naturally-occurring language use, such s tructures only occur when triggered by a particular kind of discourse context. I conducted two experiments that test this idea using Finnish. The first of these studies (Kaiser & Trueswell 2001) used a reading task that recorded word-by-word reading times in order to measure processing load of canonical SVO and noncanonical OVS structures when they appeared in discourse appropriate and inappropriate contexts. The results show that the usual difficulty associated with noncanonical constructions is greatly alleviated in the presence of appropriate discourse contexts. The second study (Kaiser & Trueswell 2002) used an eye-gaze-during-listening technique to test the on-line referential processes that I hypothesize are involved in SVO/OVS comprehension: I.e., upon hearing an OV... sequence, Finnish listeners should expect the upcoming noun to be discourse-new, because in Finnish, OVS order is used when the object is old and the subject is new. In contrast, an SV... sequence makes no such prediction, as the ob ject can be old or new information in such sentences. To test this prediction, participants viewed pictures while they listened to stories and their eye movements were recorded. The results confirmed the predictions: Word order allows Finnish listeners to anticipate the discourse status of yet-to-be-mentioned nouns. As compared to SVO, OVS sentences showed anticipatory eye movements to a discourse-new referent at the onset of the second noun, even before participants had enough phonetic information to recognize this word. Thus, our findings illustrate that listeners and readers extract pragmatic implications of structure incrementally as the sentence unfolds in real time, and in fact even anticipate upcoming referents based on information encoded in word order.
WHEN:	3/19/2003 3:00:00 PM
WHERE:	Meliora 418

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