Pavel Logacev

Bogazici University · Linguistics

We present two reading-time studies on the processing of prenominal RCs in Turkish, the results of which do not support the presence of underspecification in the attachment of relative clauses.

Swets et al. (2008. Underspecification of syntactic ambiguities: Evidence from self-paced reading. Memory and Cognition, 36(1), 201–216) presented evidence that the so-called ambiguity advantage [Traxler et al. (199820. Traxler, M. J., Pickering, M. J., & Clifton, C. (1998). Adjunct attachment is not a form of lexical ambiguity resolution. Journal...

Traxler, Pickering, and Clifton (1998) found that ambiguous sentences are read faster than their unambiguous counterparts. This so-called ambiguity advantage has presented a major challenge to classical theories of human sentence comprehension (parsing) because its most prominent explanation, in the form of the unrestricted race model (URM), assume...

The aim of the present thesis is to answer the question to what degree the processes involved in sentence comprehension are sensitive to task demands. A central phenomenon in this regard is the so-called ambiguity advantage, which is the finding that ambiguous sentences can be easier to process than unambiguous sentences. This finding may appear co...

Asia Minor Greek (AMG) speakers cohabited with Turkish speakers for eight hundred years until the 1923 Lausanne Convention, which forced a two-way mass population exchange between Turkey and Greece and severed their everyday contact. We compare the intonation of the continuation rise tune in the speech of first-generation AMG speakers born in Turke...

Relative clauses with ambiguous attachment are sometimes processed faster than their unambiguous counterparts. Two broad classes of theories account for this phenomenon: Race-based models posit that ambiguous sentences are read faster due to a “race” between several permissible analyses of the sentence. In contrast, the strategic underspecification...

Previous studies have shown that speakers may find sentences violating subject-verb agreement grammatical when the sentence contains a feature-matching noun phrase. This so-called agreement attraction effect has also been found in genitive possessive structures such as 'the teacher's brother' in Turkish (Lago et al., 2019), which is in contrast wit...

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called ambiguity advantage, i.e., a speed-up in processing ambiguous sentences compared to their unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible with seve...

Traxler et al. (1998) have found that relative clauses with ambiguous attachment are sometimes read faster than their unambiguous counterparts. Two broad classes of theories account for this phenomenon: Race-based models posit that ambiguous sentences are read faster due to a ‘race’ between several permissible analyses of the sentence. In contrast,...

In the field of sentence processing, speakers’ preferred interpretation of ambiguous sentences is often determined using a variant of a discrete choice task, in which participants are asked to indicate their preferred meaning of an ambiguous sentence. We discuss participants’ degree of attentiveness as a potential source of bias and variability in...

Although not widely used, the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) method has produced several prominent findings in sentence processing. While a substantial number of SAT studies has yielded statistical null-results regarding the degree to which certain factors influence the speed of sentence processing operations, the statistical power of the SAT paradi...

We report the results of two speeded acceptability judgment experiments in Turkish. We hypothesized an alternative explanation for agreement attraction effects in Turkish that is based on shallow processing. Our findings contradict our hypothesized form-driven processing strategy and support an account of agreement attraction based on the use of ab...

We examined the effects of argument-head distance in SVO and SOV languages (Spanish and German), while taking into account readers' working memory capacity and controlling for expectation (Levy, 2008) and other factors. We predicted only locality effects, that is, a slowdown produced by increased dependency distance (Gibson, 2000; Lewis and Vasisht...

We examined the effects of argument-head distance in SVO and SOV languages (Spanish and German), while taking into account readers’ working memory capacity and controlling for expectation (Levy, 2008) and other factors. We predicted only locality effects, that is, a slow-down produced by increased dependency distance (Gibson, 2000; Lewis & Vasishth...

This study focused on disentangling the effects of memory and predictions from the completion of unbounded (or filler-gap) dependencies by inspecting the individual memory of the subjects. Results from an eye-tracking experiment showed that retrieval of the filler at the completion of the dependency is not only hindered by more intervening material...

Similarity-based interference (SBI) has recently gained more attention in the domain of sentence processing (e.g., Gordon et al. 2007). In this paper we demonstrate that similarity can also have facilitative effects on processing, a finding that interference theories such as Gordon et al’s cannot explain. We offer an explanation for such interferen...