Talks by Caroline Andrews
A New Argument for Co-Active Parses During Language Comprehension
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2018
Assessing the pragmatics of experiments with crowdsourcing: The case of scalar implicture
Papers by Caroline Andrews
Model mimicry analysis: Code + Results
Data analysis: Code, modeling, + data
Dependencies are all alike: every illusion is illusory in its own way
Open Mind
A central aspect of human experience and communication is understanding events in terms of agent ... more A central aspect of human experience and communication is understanding events in terms of agent (“doer”) and patient (“undergoer” of action) roles. These event roles are rooted in general cognition and prominently encoded in language, with agents appearing as more salient and preferred over patients. An unresolved question is whether this preference for agents already operates during apprehension, that is, the earliest stage of event processing, and if so, whether the effect persists across different animacy configurations and task demands. Here we contrast event apprehension in two tasks and two languages that encode agents differently; Basque, a language that explicitly case-marks agents (‘ergative’), and Spanish, which does not mark agents. In two brief exposure experiments, native Basque and Spanish speakers saw pictures for only 300 ms, and subsequently described them or answered probe questions about them. We compared eye fixations and behavioral correlates of event role extr...
Experimental research in cross-linguistic psycholinguistics
Routledge eBooks, Jul 7, 2023
Brian gracefully accepted the role of my chair well before he had the title officially. He is a n... more Brian gracefully accepted the role of my chair well before he had the title officially. He is a natural scientist in the way he thinks, with a deep grasp on how the details matter, and his influence shaped me into a far better scientist. It is thanks to him and his unshakeable commitment to being a good advisor for his students that I was able to go from a first-year with slightly outthere research goals to leaving with a dissertation and a postdoc that meets those goals. John Kingston has been at once a phenomenal mentor, a climbing buddy, and a friend. I shall miss dearly him for all of these. This document (and much more besides) would certainly not have been possible without him and if I were someday to be half as good a mentor as he is, I should be very pleased. Adrian Staub's mark on this dissertation comes from his consistently on point scientific scepticism, that at once makes it clear how complex psycholinguistic problems are and makes them more interesting. In addition to my dissertation committee, there were other faculty members as UMass who deserve serious thanks. Kyle Johnson was an invaluable source of good syntax-related questions, patience with psycholinguists, professional advice, and humor. Ellen Woolford made me a much better writer and was supportive of my interest in fieldwork. Gaja Jarosz has been an enthusiastic adventure buddy, a good friend, and a python mentor. Lyn Frazier was an inspiration for her tremendous insight as both a psycholinguist and teacher. Caren Rotello and Andrew Cohen are responsible for reinventing statistics for me and making it a joy in its own right. Additional thanks goes to Rajesh Bhatt and Peggy Speas. Non-UMass faculty who made my graduate career possible include Claire Halpert, Matthew Wagers, and of course, Pranav Anand. Beyond the faculty, a number of people deserve credit for enriching my time at UMass. In Linguistics, this included Katia Vostrikova, David Erschler, Jyoti Iyer, Jeremy Pasquereau, and more recently Anissa Neal. Anthony Yacovone and Stephanie Rich belong on this list as well, no less for being undergrads at the time. Equal thanks goes to Will Hopper, Josh Levy, Andrea Cataldo, and Merika Wilson, who made the cognitive division of Psychology a second home. v Much appreciation goes to Coral Hughto, for being witty, kind, and an all-around decent person, Sakshi Bhatia for many hours of syntactic (and non-syntactic) discussion, Rodica Ivan, also for many hours of non-scholastic discussion, Lap-Ching Keung for being my twin in over in Tobin, and Claire Moore-Cantwell, for taking on the role of older psycholinguist, for much needed daydreaming about adventures, and for freezing in the desert in winter with me. Thuy Bui was my office buddy and all-around best person to kvetch with at a time when kvetching was very much needed. I'm grateful to Ria Mai Geguera for first being the best student in my class, then a truly excellent lab manager, and then a good friend. Several research assistants contributed greatly to this work, especially Christian Muxica, Bhavya Pant, Amanda Doucette, and Annina van Riper. There are four additional people who deserve special mention, and who truly shaped my graduate student career. Shayne Sloggett has been an older academic brother in so many ways. Amanda Rysling deserves thanks for inviting me to stay on her (Shayne's) couch, and really just about everything that happened after that, including panda, wine, late nights at the office and their apartment, and the shelter of a like-minded place. Alex Goebel was, well, a friend under what were at times the hardest possible circumstances to be a friend. I'm grateful to him for lending me space in his office to work, for sticky notes, for company on rides home, for playing Ocarina of Time, and being a fellow fan of the Mountain Goats. The last, but certainly not least in this category is Tom Maxfield, who somehow managed to be better at problem solving than I was at creating at problems (no small feat). I owe him for endless hours of chatting, much chocolate, advice, and making so many things possible. Finally, I'm grateful to my family-Ned, Sharon, and Graham-for being curious alongside me from the beginning.
Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, Jan 20, 2018
One perennially important question for theories of sentence comprehension is whether the human se... more One perennially important question for theories of sentence comprehension is whether the human sentence processing mechanism is parallel (i.e., it simultaneously represents multiple syntactic analyses of linguistic input) or serial (i.e., it constructs only a single analysis at a time). Despite its centrality, this question has proven difficult to address for both theoretical and methodological reasons (Gibson & Pearlmutter, 2000; Lewis, 2000). In the present study, we reassess this question from a novel perspective. We investigated the well-known ambiguity advantage effect (Traxler, Pickering, & Clifton, 1998) in a speeded acceptability judgment task. We adopted a signal detection theoretic approach to these data, with the goal of determining whether speeded judgment responses were conditioned on one or multiple syntactic analyses. To link these results to incremental parsing models, we developed formal models to quantitatively evaluate how serial and parallel parsing models should...
Proceedings of SALT, 21, 2011
In some contexts, plural nominals have inclusive interpretation, allowing atoms in their referenc... more In some contexts, plural nominals have inclusive interpretation, allowing atoms in their reference domain; in others, they are exclusive, allowing only sums. Selecting between the two interpretations has been shown to be sensitive to both world-knowledge pressures (Farkas & de Swart 2010) and contextual relevance (Grimm To Appear). The principal semantic factor claimed to be involved is monotonicity direction (Sauerland, Anderssen & Yatsushiro 2005; Spector 2007; Zweig 2009; Farkas & de Swart 2010): upward monotone environments tend to select exclusive readings; downward monotone ones, inclusive readings. In four image verification experiments, we tested this claim and found support for the generalization. The effect of monotonicity direction, however, is small. Moreover we find that varying whether a plural is in the scope of a quantified description has a much larger effect on the prevalence of the exclusive interpretation. This suggests that monotonicity, though involved, is not a decisive factor in plural interpretation.
Published articles by Caroline Andrews
Neural correlates of processing case in adults and children
Brain and Language, 2025
Sentence-initial arguments with role-specific case markers (e.g., accusatives) have been reported... more Sentence-initial arguments with role-specific case markers (e.g., accusatives) have been reported to be processed slower than arguments with default case markers (e.g., nominatives), both in adults and children. However, the evidence for this comes from studies that conflate word order and case, comparing initial arguments with default case and fronted (scrambled) arguments with role-specific case. Here, we disentangle these effects by studying the parsing of Basque sentences, where both role-specific (ergative) and default (absolutive) case can occur sentence-initially in canonical word order. Two EEG experiments explore how adults and six-year-old children process ergative and absolutive markers in sentence-initial position. We find that the ergative case elicits a power synchronization in theta compared to the absolutive case in both adults and children, an effect we attribute to retrieving more specific relational information from memory. In contrast, processing ergative case markers leads to a beta power desynchronization in adults but a synchronization in children. This suggests that six-year-old children are still developing top-down processing mechanisms for the parsing and integration of case marking information.
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Talks by Caroline Andrews
Papers by Caroline Andrews
Published articles by Caroline Andrews