Charles Clifton | University of Massachusetts Amherst (original) (raw)
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Abstract If a speaker chooses one scalar term (eg, three, or) rather than a stronger one (eg, fou... more Abstract If a speaker chooses one scalar term (eg, three, or) rather than a stronger one (eg, four, and), listeners may assume that the speaker lacked evidence for the stronger claim, giving rise to strengthened meanings like exactly three or exclusive or. Three experiments investigate the circumstances under which or is interpreted as exclusive or. The first tests the hypothesis that accenting a scalar term increases the number of scalar implicatures that are computed.
Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation, 1971
... The output of each Schmitt trigger is fed into a one-shot with a 20-msec period, to inhibit f... more ... The output of each Schmitt trigger is fed into a one-shot with a 20-msec period, to inhibit false signals caused by ringing of the recorded ... the interbeat intervals for each second from Pre sec before the stimulus presentation to Post sec after the stimulus, are stored in a buffer with a ...
Language, cognition and neuroscience, 2015
Unedited speech and writing often contains errors, e.g., the blending of alternative ways of expr... more Unedited speech and writing often contains errors, e.g., the blending of alternative ways of expressing a message. As a result comprehenders are faced with decisions about what the speaker may have intended, which may not be the same as the grammatically-licensed compositional interpretation of what was said. Two experiments investigated the comprehension of inputs that may have resulted from blending two syntactic forms. The results of the experiments suggest that readers and listeners tend to repair such utterances, restoring them to the presumed intended structure, and they assign the interpretation of the corrected utterance. Utterances that are repaired are expected to also be acceptable when they are easy to diagnose/repair and they are "familiar", i.e., they correspond to natural speech errors. The results of the experiments established a continuum ranging from outright linguistic illusions with no indication that listeners and readers detected the error (the inclus...
Language, cognition and neuroscience, 2014
In the current work, we test the hypothesis that 'at-issue' and 'not-at-issue' co... more In the current work, we test the hypothesis that 'at-issue' and 'not-at-issue' content (Potts, 2005) are processed semi-independently. In a written rating study comparing restrictive relative clauses and parentheticals in interrogatives and declaratives, we observe a significantly larger length penalty for restrictive relative clauses than for parentheticals. This difference cannot be attributed to differences in how listeners allocate attention across a sentence: a second study confirms that readers are equally sensitive to agreement violations in at-issue and not-at-issue content. A third rating experiment showed that the results do not depend on the restrictive relative clause intervening on the subject-verb dependency. A final experiment showed that the observed effects obtain with definite determiners and demonstratives alike. Taken jointly the results suggest that the parenthetical structures are processed independently of their embedding utterance, which in tu...
Language and Cognitive Processes, 2013
Semantics and Pragmatics, 2010
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2012
Two experiments are reported that show that introducing event participants in a conjoined noun ph... more Two experiments are reported that show that introducing event participants in a conjoined noun phrase (NP) favours a single event (collective) interpretation, while introducing them in separate clauses favours a separate events (distributive) interpretation. In Experiment 1, acceptability judgements were speeded when the bias of a predicate toward separate events versus a single event matched the presumed bias of how the subjects' referents were introduced (as conjoined noun phrases or in conjoined clauses). In Experiment 2, reading of a phrase containing an anaphor following conjoined noun phrases was facilitated when the anaphor was they, relative to when it was neither/each of them; the opposite pattern was found when the anaphor followed conjoined clauses. We argue that comprehension was facilitated when the form of an anaphor was appropriate for how its antecedents were introduced. These results address the very general problem of how we individuate entities and events when presented with a complex situation and show that different linguistic forms can guide how we construe a situation. The results also indicate that there is no general penalty for introducing the entities or events separately-in distinct clauses as "split" antecedents.
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2011
Memory & Cognition, 1976
Three experiments failed to provide evidence that subjects could search just the digits, or just ... more Three experiments failed to provide evidence that subjects could search just the digits, or just the letters, of a mixed list of digits and letters in deciding whether a probe item was a member of the list. Providing a precue as to the category of the probe shortly before the presentation of the probe decreased the time needed to encode it, but did not change the memory search process. Repeating the category of the probe from one trial to the next, however, did change the pattern of memory search. A "partially selective search" model was proposed which claimed that a mixed list was stored as two categorized sublists, and that a self-terminating search of the sublists could occur in which the first sublist searched was the one which had been probed on the previous trial.
Language and Speech, 2007
Language and Linguistics Compass, 2008
A central issue in sentence-processing research is whether the parser entertains multiple analyse... more A central issue in sentence-processing research is whether the parser entertains multiple analyses of syntactically ambiguous input in parallel, and whether these analyses compete for selection. In this article, we review theoretical positions for and against such competitive ...
Language and Linguistics Compass, 2010
Language and Cognitive Processes, 2013
Three studies investigated how readers interpret sentences with variable quantificational domains... more Three studies investigated how readers interpret sentences with variable quantificational domains, e.g., The army was mostly in the capital, where mostly may quantify over individuals or parts (Most of the army was in the capital) or over times (The army was in the capital most of the time). It is proposed that a general conceptual economy principle, No Extra Times (Majewski 2006, in preparation), discourages the postulation of potentially unnecessary times, and thus favors the interpretation quantifying over parts. Disambiguating an ambiguously quantified sentence to a quantification over times interpretation was rated as less natural than disambiguating it to a quantification over parts interpretation (Experiment 1). In an interpretation questionnaire, sentences with similar quantificational variability were constructed so that both interpretations of the sentence would require postulating multiple times; this resulted in the elimination of the preference for a quantification over parts interpretation, suggesting the parts preference observed in Experiment 1 is not reducible to a lexical bias of the adverb mostly (Experiment 2). An eye movement recording study showed that, in the absence of prior evidence for multiple times, readers exhibit greater difficulty when reading material that forces a quantification over times interpretation than when reading material that allows a quantification over parts interpretation (Experiment 3). These experiments contribute to understanding readers' default assumptions about the temporal properties of sentences, which is essential for understanding the selection of a domain for adverbial quantifiers and, more generally, for understanding how situational constraints influence sentence processing.
Abstract If a speaker chooses one scalar term (eg, three, or) rather than a stronger one (eg, fou... more Abstract If a speaker chooses one scalar term (eg, three, or) rather than a stronger one (eg, four, and), listeners may assume that the speaker lacked evidence for the stronger claim, giving rise to strengthened meanings like exactly three or exclusive or. Three experiments investigate the circumstances under which or is interpreted as exclusive or. The first tests the hypothesis that accenting a scalar term increases the number of scalar implicatures that are computed.
Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation, 1971
... The output of each Schmitt trigger is fed into a one-shot with a 20-msec period, to inhibit f... more ... The output of each Schmitt trigger is fed into a one-shot with a 20-msec period, to inhibit false signals caused by ringing of the recorded ... the interbeat intervals for each second from Pre sec before the stimulus presentation to Post sec after the stimulus, are stored in a buffer with a ...
Language, cognition and neuroscience, 2015
Unedited speech and writing often contains errors, e.g., the blending of alternative ways of expr... more Unedited speech and writing often contains errors, e.g., the blending of alternative ways of expressing a message. As a result comprehenders are faced with decisions about what the speaker may have intended, which may not be the same as the grammatically-licensed compositional interpretation of what was said. Two experiments investigated the comprehension of inputs that may have resulted from blending two syntactic forms. The results of the experiments suggest that readers and listeners tend to repair such utterances, restoring them to the presumed intended structure, and they assign the interpretation of the corrected utterance. Utterances that are repaired are expected to also be acceptable when they are easy to diagnose/repair and they are "familiar", i.e., they correspond to natural speech errors. The results of the experiments established a continuum ranging from outright linguistic illusions with no indication that listeners and readers detected the error (the inclus...
Language, cognition and neuroscience, 2014
In the current work, we test the hypothesis that 'at-issue' and 'not-at-issue' co... more In the current work, we test the hypothesis that 'at-issue' and 'not-at-issue' content (Potts, 2005) are processed semi-independently. In a written rating study comparing restrictive relative clauses and parentheticals in interrogatives and declaratives, we observe a significantly larger length penalty for restrictive relative clauses than for parentheticals. This difference cannot be attributed to differences in how listeners allocate attention across a sentence: a second study confirms that readers are equally sensitive to agreement violations in at-issue and not-at-issue content. A third rating experiment showed that the results do not depend on the restrictive relative clause intervening on the subject-verb dependency. A final experiment showed that the observed effects obtain with definite determiners and demonstratives alike. Taken jointly the results suggest that the parenthetical structures are processed independently of their embedding utterance, which in tu...
Language and Cognitive Processes, 2013
Semantics and Pragmatics, 2010
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2012
Two experiments are reported that show that introducing event participants in a conjoined noun ph... more Two experiments are reported that show that introducing event participants in a conjoined noun phrase (NP) favours a single event (collective) interpretation, while introducing them in separate clauses favours a separate events (distributive) interpretation. In Experiment 1, acceptability judgements were speeded when the bias of a predicate toward separate events versus a single event matched the presumed bias of how the subjects' referents were introduced (as conjoined noun phrases or in conjoined clauses). In Experiment 2, reading of a phrase containing an anaphor following conjoined noun phrases was facilitated when the anaphor was they, relative to when it was neither/each of them; the opposite pattern was found when the anaphor followed conjoined clauses. We argue that comprehension was facilitated when the form of an anaphor was appropriate for how its antecedents were introduced. These results address the very general problem of how we individuate entities and events when presented with a complex situation and show that different linguistic forms can guide how we construe a situation. The results also indicate that there is no general penalty for introducing the entities or events separately-in distinct clauses as "split" antecedents.
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2011
Memory & Cognition, 1976
Three experiments failed to provide evidence that subjects could search just the digits, or just ... more Three experiments failed to provide evidence that subjects could search just the digits, or just the letters, of a mixed list of digits and letters in deciding whether a probe item was a member of the list. Providing a precue as to the category of the probe shortly before the presentation of the probe decreased the time needed to encode it, but did not change the memory search process. Repeating the category of the probe from one trial to the next, however, did change the pattern of memory search. A "partially selective search" model was proposed which claimed that a mixed list was stored as two categorized sublists, and that a self-terminating search of the sublists could occur in which the first sublist searched was the one which had been probed on the previous trial.
Language and Speech, 2007
Language and Linguistics Compass, 2008
A central issue in sentence-processing research is whether the parser entertains multiple analyse... more A central issue in sentence-processing research is whether the parser entertains multiple analyses of syntactically ambiguous input in parallel, and whether these analyses compete for selection. In this article, we review theoretical positions for and against such competitive ...
Language and Linguistics Compass, 2010
Language and Cognitive Processes, 2013
Three studies investigated how readers interpret sentences with variable quantificational domains... more Three studies investigated how readers interpret sentences with variable quantificational domains, e.g., The army was mostly in the capital, where mostly may quantify over individuals or parts (Most of the army was in the capital) or over times (The army was in the capital most of the time). It is proposed that a general conceptual economy principle, No Extra Times (Majewski 2006, in preparation), discourages the postulation of potentially unnecessary times, and thus favors the interpretation quantifying over parts. Disambiguating an ambiguously quantified sentence to a quantification over times interpretation was rated as less natural than disambiguating it to a quantification over parts interpretation (Experiment 1). In an interpretation questionnaire, sentences with similar quantificational variability were constructed so that both interpretations of the sentence would require postulating multiple times; this resulted in the elimination of the preference for a quantification over parts interpretation, suggesting the parts preference observed in Experiment 1 is not reducible to a lexical bias of the adverb mostly (Experiment 2). An eye movement recording study showed that, in the absence of prior evidence for multiple times, readers exhibit greater difficulty when reading material that forces a quantification over times interpretation than when reading material that allows a quantification over parts interpretation (Experiment 3). These experiments contribute to understanding readers' default assumptions about the temporal properties of sentences, which is essential for understanding the selection of a domain for adverbial quantifiers and, more generally, for understanding how situational constraints influence sentence processing.
Language, 2011
Speakers predictably make errors during spontaneous speech. Listeners may identify such errors an... more Speakers predictably make errors during spontaneous speech. Listeners may identify such errors and repair the input, or their analysis of the input, accordingly. Two written questionnaire studies investigated error compensation mechanisms in sentences with doubled quantifiers such as Many students often turn in their assignments late. Results show a considerable number of undoubled interpretations for all items tested (though fewer for sentences containing doubled negation than for sentences containing many-often, every-always or few-seldom.) This evidence shows that the compositional form-meaning pairing supplied by the grammar is not the only systematic mapping between form and meaning. Implicit knowledge of the workings of the performance systems provides an additional mechanism for pairing sentence form and meaning. Alternate accounts of the data based on either a concord interpretation or an emphatic interpretation of the doubled quantifier don't explain why listeners fail to apprehend the 'extra meaning' added by the potentially redundant material only in limited circumstances.
Syntactic accounts of Neg raising would predict a processing cost for Neg raised (+NR) sentences,... more Syntactic accounts of Neg raising would predict a processing cost for Neg raised (+NR) sentences, due to the introduction of a cross-clausal dependency. Some semantic accounts suggest the opposite: +NR sentences should be preferred to un-raised negation (-NR), because negation is typically signaled as early as possible. Three Mechanical Turk acceptability judgement experiments support the latter hypothesis, finding that +NR sentences are preferred over -NR alternatives, with no evidence of a syntactic dependency. We also demonstrate that the +NR benefit is larger when the polarity of the complement is under discussion. Overall, the results support a semantic account for NR.