The difficulty of coercion: A response to de Almeida (Pickering et al. 2005) Martijn van den Heuvel

The goal of the experiment Showing enriched composition does take place. Sentences that require coercion are more difficult than ones that do not require coercion. Showing faults in de Almeida’s experiments and conclusions.

Critique on de Almeida Mostly on Almeida’s experiment 1: –Likely a type II error due to small itemset. –Norming the itemset (Almeida’s coercing verbs were longer on average). –Easier coercion due to higher frequency of items. –No norm for plausibility of possible words. –Relatively high removal of observations.

Pickering’s Experiment Use of both de Almeida’s stimuli and a new set of normed stimuli. –If the coerced condition is no harder than the rest in both sets, processing difficulty is weakened –If the coerced condition is harder than the rest, de Almeida produced a type II error. Use an additional control condition: –Full verb phrase: The secretary began to type the memo

Pickering’s Experiment: Method 20 participants 21 sets of stimuli (de Almeida) 33 sets of normed stimuli (Davis) Eye-tracking ANOVA for statistical analysis Example set: -The carpenter began the table during the morning break (coerced) -The carpenter built the table ….. (preferred) -The carpenter sanded the table …..(non-preffered) -The carpenter began building the table ….. (full-VP/prefferred)

Pickering’s Experiment: Results Scoring regions: –Main verb region –Noun region –Post-noun region The carpenter began the table during the morning break. First pass time and total time.

Pickering’s Experiment: Results

Pickering’s Experiment: Discussion Concludes coercion produces processing difficulty. –Emerging early in processing (clearly in first pass in noun region on Davis set (?)) Results from de Almeida set are less stable than the Davis results  type II error Preferred and non-preferred conditions do not differ if plausibility is matched (error in McElree?) Coercion costs emerge very early in processing –De Almeida:“[emerge in] later interpretative processes”

Critical evaluation Positive points: –Compatible with both decompositional and atomistic view of lexical representation. –Use of materials and stimuli Negative points: –Not all results significant Enlarge dataset/number of participants –Contradictory conclusions?

Additional research Expectation instead of plausibility –Specific fields render different plausibility Needs specific participants/stimuli Try to locate the involved brain parts which are responsible for the ‘cost’ –Use fMRI if possible Results could reinforce the current paper’s hypotheses and conclusions.

Questions?