Biology Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2749
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Item Developmental Parsing and Cognitive Control(2022) Ovans, Zoe; Huang, Yi Ting; Novick, Jared; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Processing sentences incrementally entails making commitments to structure (and sometimes role assignments) before all information in a sentence is present. Children in particular have been shown to have difficulty revising the initial structural commitments they make when these turn out to be incorrect (Trueswell et al., 1999; Hurewitz et al., 2000; Weighall, 2008; Choi & Trueswell, 2010; Anderson et al., 2011). While prior research has generally ascribed this to limitations in the development of children’s non-linguistic cognitive-control system, a precise account of how cognitive control limitations might lead to difficulty with incremental sentence processing is missing from the literature. In part, this is because existing research has focused on individual differences in children’s ability to exert cognitive control over their thoughts and actions. In contrast, this dissertation makes use of within-child variation in cognitive-control engagement to provide evidence that children’s domain-general cognitive-control system pushes them to rely more heavily on reliable parsing cues (and less heavily on unreliable ones) when the system is highly engaged. This conclusion brings together seemingly disparate results from child and adult conflict adaptation studies, where adults appear to adapt to conflict but children do not. Overall, it is concluded that cognitive-control engagement leads both children and adults to re-rank parsing cues to attend more to ones that are more task-relevant, but the criteria they use to determine which cues are most relevant can change with language experience.Item Toward a Psycholinguistic Model of Irony Comprehension(2018) Adler, Rachel Michelle; Novick, Jared M; Huang, Yi Ting; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how listeners reach pragmatic interpretations of irony in real-time. Over four experiments I addressed limitations of prior work by using fine-grained measures of time course, providing strong contexts to support ironic interpretations, and accounting for factors known to be important for other linguistic phenomena (e.g., frequency). Experiment 1 used a visual world eye-tracking paradigm to understand how comprehenders use context and frequency information to interpret irony. While there was an overall delay for ironic utterances compared to literal ones, the speed of interpretation was modulated by frequency. Participants interpreted frequent ironic criticisms (e.g., “fabulous chef” about a bad chef) more quickly than infrequent ironic compliments (e.g., “terrible chef” about a good chef). In Experiment 2A, I tested whether comprehending irony (i.e., drawing a pragmatic inference) differs from merely computing the opposite of an utterance. The results showed that frequency of interpretation (criticisms vs. compliments) did not influence processing speed or overall interpretations for opposites. Thus, processing irony involves more than simply evaluating the truth-value condition of an utterance (e.g., pragmatic inferences about the speaker’s intentions). This was corroborated by Experiment 2B, which showed that understanding irony involves drawing conclusions about speakers in a way that understanding opposites does not. Opposite speakers were considered weirder and more confusing than ironic speakers. Given the delay in reaching ironic interpretations (Exp. 1), Experiments 3 and 4 examined the cognitive mechanics that contribute to inhibiting a literal interpretation of an utterance and/or promoting an ironic one. Experiment 3 tested whether comprehending irony engages cognitive control to resolve among competing representations (literal vs. ironic). Results showed that hearing an ironic utterance engaged cognitive control, which then facilitated performance on a subsequent high-conflict Stroop trial. Thus, comprehenders experience conflict between the literal and ironic interpretations. In Experiment 4, however, irony interpretation was not facilitated by prior cognitive control engagement. This may reflect experimental limitations or late-arriving conflict. I end by presenting a model wherein access to the literal and ironic interpretations generates conflict that is resolved by cognitive control. In addition, frequency modulates cue strength and generates delays for infrequent ironic compliments.