Garden path tripartite compounds

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Educational Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Mauch, Heather Marie

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

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2015 Heather Mauch

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

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

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/78650