Browsing by Author "Snedeker, Jesse"
Now showing items 1-20 of 41
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Breaking and Entering: Verb Semantics and Event Structure
Geojo, Amy Celine (2015-02-25)Any event can be construed from a variety of perspectives. While this flexibility is fundamental to human ingenuity, it poses a challenge for language learners who must discern which meanings are encoded in their language ... -
Cascading Activation Across Levels of Representation in Children's Lexical Processing
Huang, Yi Ting; Snedeker, Jesse (Cambridge University Press, 2010)Recent work in adult psycholinguistics has demonstrated that activation of semantic representations begins long before phonological processing is complete. This incremental propagation of information across multiple levels ... -
Children and adults successfully comprehend subject-only sentences online
Paul, Pooja; Jayden Ziegler, Elizabeth; Snedeker, Jesse (Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2019-01-17)In many offline studies, children show selectively better comprehension of sentences with the focus particle only when it modifies the object argument (Jane only ate an apple) than they do when it modifies the subject ... -
Compositionality and Statistics in Adjective Acquisition: 4-year-olds Interpret Tall and Short Based on the Size Distributions of Novel Noun Referents
Barner, David; Snedeker, Jesse (Blackwell Publishers, 2008)Four experiments investigated 4-year-olds' understanding of adjective-noun compositionality and their sensitivity to statistics when interpreting scalar adjectives. In Experiments 1 and 2, children selected tall and short ... -
Development of the first-mention bias
Hartshorne, Joshua; Snedeker, Jesse; Nappa, Rebecca (Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2014)In many contexts, pronouns are interpreted as referring to the character mentioned first in the previous sentence, an effect called the ‘first-mention bias’. While adults can rapidly use the first-mention bias to guide ... -
Disentangling the Effects of Cognitive Development and Linguistic Expertise: A Longitudinal Study of the Acquisition of English in Internationally-Adopted Children
Snedeker, Jesse; Geren, Joy; Shafto, Carissa L. (Elsevier, 2011-10-03)Early language development is characterized by predictable changes in the words children produce and the complexity of their utterances. In infants these changes could reflect increasing linguistic expertise or cognitive ... -
Effects of contrastive accents on children’s discourse comprehension
Lee, Eun-Kyung; Snedeker, Jesse (Springer Nature, 2016)What role do contrastive accents play in children’s discourse comprehension? By 6 years of age, children use contrastive accents during online comprehension to predict upcoming referents (Ito et al., 2014; Sekerina & ... -
Effects of Maternal Input on Language in the Absence of Genetic Confounds: Vocabulary Development in Internationally Adopted Children
Shafto, Carissa L.; Geren, Joy; Snedeker, Jesse (Cognitive Science Society, 2010)Parents provide children with both genes (nature) and linguistic input (nurture). A growing body of research demonstrates that individual differences in children's language are correlated with differences in parental speech. ... -
Effects of Prosodic and Lexical Constraints on Parsing in Young Children (and Adults)
Snedeker, Jesse; Yuan, Sylvia (Elsevier, 2008)Prior studies of ambiguity resolution in young children have found that children rely heavily on lexical information but persistently fail to use referential constraints in online parsing [Trueswell, J.C., Sekerina, I., ... -
Event Structures Drive Semantic Structural Priming, Not Thematic Roles: Evidence From Idioms and Light Verbs
Ziegler, Jayden; Snedeker, Jesse; Wittenberg, Eva (Wiley, 2018-10-07)What are the semantic representations that underlie language production? We use structural priming to distinguish between two competing theories. Thematic roles define semantic structure in terms of atomic units that specify ... -
Events and the Ontology of Individuals: Verbs as a Source of Individuating Mass and Count Nouns
Barner, David; Wagner, Laura; Snedeker, Jesse (Elsevier, 2008)What does mass-count syntax contribute to the interpretation of noun phrases (NPs), and how much of NP meaning is contributed by lexical items alone? Many have argued that count syntax specifies reference to countable ... -
Give and Take: Syntactic Priming during Spoken Language Comprehension
Thothathiri, Malathi; Snedeker, Jesse (Elsevier, 2008)Syntactic priming during language production is pervasive and well-studied. Hearing, reading, speaking or writing a sentence with a given structure increases the probability of subsequently producing the same structure, ... -
How Broad Are Thematic Roles? Evidence From Structural Priming
Ziegler, Jayden; Snedeker, Jesse (Elsevier BV, 2018-10)Verbs that are similar in meaning tend to occur in the same syntactic structures. For example, give and hand, which denote transfer of possession, both appear in the prepositional-object construction: “The child gave / ... -
Is It All Relative? Effects of Prosodic Boundaries on the Comprehension and Production of Attachment Ambiguities
Snedeker, Jesse; Casserly, Elizabeth (Taylor & Francis, 2010)While there is ample evidence that prosody and syntax mutually constrain each other, there is considerable uncertainty about the nature of this interface. Here, we explore this issue with prepositional phrase attachment ... -
It Takes Two to Kiss, but Does it Take Three to Give a Kiss? Categorization Based on Thematic Roles
Wittenberg, Eva; Snedeker, Jesse (Taylor & Francis, 2013)Language is characterised by broad and predictable mappings between meaning and syntactic form. Transitive sentences typically encode two-participant events while ditransitives typically encode three-participant events. ... -
Linking Language and Events: Spatiotemporal Cues Drive Children’s Expectations About the Meanings of Novel Transitive Verbs
Kline, Melissa Elizabeth; Snedeker, Jesse; Schulz, Laura (Informa UK Limited, 2016)How do children map linguistic representations onto the conceptual structures that they encode? In the present studies, we provided 3-4 year old children with minimal-pair scene contrasts in order to determine the effect ... -
Linking Meaning to Language: Linguistic Universals and Variation
Hartshorne, Joshua Keiles; O'Donnell, Timothy J.; Sudo, Yasutada; Uruwashi, Miki; Snedeker, Jesse (Cognitive Science Society, 2010)To use natural language, speakers must map the participants in events or states in the world onto grammatical roles. There remains considerable disagreement about the nature of these so-called linking rules (Levin & Rappaport ... -
Logic and Conversation Revisited: Evidence For a Division Between Semantic and Pragmatic Content in Real Time Language Comprehension
Huang, Yi Ting; Snedeker, Jesse (Taylor & Francis, 2011-10-18)The distinction between semantics (linguistically encoded meaning) and pragmatics (inferences about communicative intentions) can often be unclear and counterintuitive. For example, linguistic theories argue that the meaning ... -
The logic in language: How all quantifiers are alike, but each quantifier is different
Feiman, Roman; Snedeker, Jesse (Elsevier BV, 2016)Quantifier words like EACH, EVERY, ALL and THREE are among the most abstract words in language. Unlike nouns, verbs and adjectives, the meanings of quantifiers are not related to a referent out in the world. Rather, ... -
Love Is Hard to Understand: The Relationship Between Transitivity and Caused Events in the Acquisition of Emotion Verbs
Hartshorne, Joshua; Pogue, Amanda; Snedeker, Jesse (Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2014)Famously, dog bites man is trivial whereas man bites dog is news. This illustrates not just a fact about the world but about language: to know who did what to whom, we must correctly identify the mapping between semantic ...