Exploring the interplay between register and verb-argument structure across situation-formality contexts
Thesis
Overview
Overview
abstract
Register represents one of the many facets of social and contextual information that could be hypothesized to modulate comprehension, along with higher-level linguistic information, such as a verb’s thematic requirements. The present master thesis encompasses one pilot study, as well as two main experiments with different item presentation modes. Each experiment employed cumulative self-paced reading as primary task, as well as picture selections as a secondary, post-sentence comprehension task. The aim of these studies was to assess the interplay between semantic information resulting from matches, respectively mismatches between social formality contexts and register information, as well as semantic information stemming from correct or incorrect verb-argument relations. 64 participants were anonymously recruited for each of the main experiments and presented with experimental stimuli consisting of a sentence that introduced a social-formality context, as well as with a target sentence that contained the experimental manipulation in form of combinations of register and verb-argument relations matches and mismatches. Their behavioral responses in form of reading and reaction times were analyzed with stateof- the-art linear mixed-effects models, while analyses using generalized linear-mixed effects models were performed on participants’ accuracy measured in the picture selection task. The results yielded significant effects of verb-argument relations on sentence comprehension and reaction times, as well as accuracy of picture selections. However, no significant effects of register were observed as a result of experimental manipulations. Implications of the results will be outlined, as well as potential experimental designs that could be employed to further explore the influence of register information on language comprehension.
