http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 … 123313.htm
"An Australian-American team of investigators has made novel discoveries about the human ability to predict what other people are about to say. Their findings could have significant applications for educators, speech therapists, entrepreneurs, and many others interested in communication and comprehension... "
Original: Predicting Syntax: Processing Dative Constructions in American and Australian Varieties of Englis
Abstract:
The present study uses probabilistic models of corpus data in a novel way, to measure and compare the syntactic predictive capacities of speakers of different varieties of the same language. The study finds that speakers' knowledge of probabilistic grammatical choices can vary across different varieties of the same language and can be detected psycholinguistically in the individual. In three pairs of experiments, Australians and Americans responded reliably to corpus model probabilities in rating the naturalness of alternative dative constructions, their lexical-decision latencies during reading varied inversely with the syntactic probabilities of the construction, and they showed subtle covariation in these tasks, which is in line with quantitative differences in the choices of datives produced in the same contexts.
Last edited by nest0r (2010 March 31, 4:33 am)
