Garden path tripartite compounds

Mauch, Heather Marie

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/78650 Copy

Description

Title

Garden path tripartite compounds

Author(s)

Mauch, Heather Marie

Issue Date

2015-04-22

Department of Study

Educational Psychology

Discipline

Educational Psychology

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

M.A.

Degree Level

Thesis

Keyword(s)

• garden path sentences
• good enough processing
• ambiguity
• spaced tripartite compounds

Abstract

Because it is a Germanic language, compounding in English is extremely productive. In German, compounds are always non-spaced (die Waschmaschine is the equivalent of washing machine in English) and could, in theory, be infinitely long. In English, however, compounds occur in both spaced (washing machine) and non-spaced (background) forms. Spaced compounds introduce a particular type of ambiguity because the reader must decide if the compound should be parsed as one lexical unit or as two (or more) separate units. A classic example of this is the sentence Washing machines can be boring. To a more extreme degree, spaced tripartite compounds such as dog bite victim, where the middle constituent is a homonymous verb-derived noun, present an even greater ambiguity since these tripartite compounds appear to follow the canonical NVN word order found in English. Previous research has shown that readers struggle with ambiguous or “garden path” sentences. Readers often maintain both the initial incorrect parse of the sentence as well as the final correct parse, resulting in a “good enough” representation of the sentence structure. To my knowledge, no research has analyzed spaced tripartite compounds with respect to Good Enough sentence processing. The present study utilizes eye-tracking in order to analyze how garden path tripartite compounds affect sentence processing.

Graduation Semester

2015-5

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/78650

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2015 Heather Mauch

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