Sentence Comprehension in Similar Syntactic Structure Term Paper

Sentence Comprehension in Similar Syntactic Structure - Term Paper Example The critical analysis of the two articles will also include a discussion of findings that are (in) compatible with each other, and other relevant comparisons between them. Furthermore, assessment of the extent to which the articles achieves what they claim, is also an important part of the present research paper. The paper also presents a proposal for a new experiment in the same area. The proposal will provide a summary of the assessment that can and cannot be concluded from the examined articles. This will help me propose a further experiment to enhance understanding in this area of psycholinguistics, resolve and address unresolved issues of the studies under review. The proposed experiment will include a hypothesis to be tested, a description of the methodology to be used, examples of the stimuli to be used, at least one complete item from each condition, and a description of the properties of the stimulus set as a whole and interpretation of possible results.   Critical Summari es and Comparisons In order to understand the broader aspect of the impact of similar syntactic structure on sentence comprehension in psycholinguistic research, two articles have been selected. The article by Branigan, Pickering, and McLean (2005) suggests that past language process influences the ways in which individuals interpret language. Similarly, Traxler (2008) investigates conditions in which individuals interpret the pairs of sentences that similar syntactic structure and its impact on their sentence comprehension. Branigan, Pickering, and McLean (2005) study the impact of past language processing on language production. The authors investigate whether syntactic repetition is another such feature that might influence attachment inclinations, that is, verb phrase or high attachment and noun phrase or low attachment. For this purpose, the authors conducted four experiments that investigated the resolution of prepositional phrase ambiguities in phrases in which participants l inked the expressions to pictures, that is, the influences of syntactic repetition were explored. The first procedure tested if prepositional-phrase attachment is influenced by past understanding of sentences that are assigned to high attachment or low attachment, employing prime and target utterances using the identical verb. The second experiment was similar to the first experiment, except that verbs were not repeated. The third experiment enquired whether prepositional-phrase attachment is influenced by past production of phrases consisting of prepositional phrase with a high or low attachment. The last experiment explored whether syntactic recurrence influences the time period in ambiguity resolution (Branigan, Pickering & McLean, 2005). The study presented four procedures that explored whether comprehension is affected by syntactic repetition. In all four experiments, participants were presented with internationally ambiguous phrases comprising of a prepositional phrase that co uld be read as altering the verb (high-attached) or altering the direct object (low-attached) (Branigan, Pickering & McLean, 2005). For the experiments, 24 set of items were created, each of which contained