A Norming Study of Plausibility in American English
Open Access
Author:
Deal, Timothy Edward
Area of Honors:
Psychology
Degree:
Bachelor of Arts
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Dr. Giuli Dussias, Thesis Supervisor Paola Eulalia Dussias, Thesis Supervisor Dr. Richard Alan Carlson, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
psycholingustics norming study shallow structure hypothesis plausibility verb bias
Abstract:
Sentence processing research has shown that monolingual speakers of English primarily make of use of syntactic information when interpreting sentences. However, there is reason to believe that bilingual speakers of English prefer to use semantic information when interpreting the same sentences. Researchers have posed the shallow structure hypothesis in order to put to test these differences in processing. One way to test the shallow structure hypothesis would be to replicate Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, and Lotocky (1997) using proficient second language speakers of English. An ERP study would be employed in order to enhance timecourse research. Before conducting such a study, a norming study had to be conducted to determine whether the target nouns following a group of direct object bias and sentential complement bias verbs were considered to be plausible or implausible completions by native speakers of English. In this norming study 41 participants were presented with a series of sentence fragments. Then, they either indicated that the fragments were plausible or completed them to make them plausible.
