Papers by David Hargreaves
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1986
Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1986), pp. 401-412
Himalayan Linguistics, 2004
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society
Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Sessio... more Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Grammar of Event Structure (1991), pp. 379-389
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1994
Journal of Memory and Language, 1988
We investigate the following finding concerning the order in which participants are men tioned in... more We investigate the following finding concerning the order in which participants are men tioned in sentences: In a probe recognition task, probe words are responded to considerably more rapidly when they are the names of the first-as opposed to the second-mentioned participants. Seven experiments demonstrated that this advantage is not attributable to the tendency in English for first-mentioned participants to be semantic agents; neither is it due to the fact that in many of our experiments, the first-mentioned participants were also the initial words of their stimulus sentences. Furthermore, the advantage is not attenuated when the first-and second-mentioned participants share syntactic subjecthood, or even when the first-mentioned participants are not the syntactic subjects. In sum, the effect does not appear to be attributable to linguistic factors. We suggest instead that it is the result of cognitive proc esses: Building a coherent mental representation requires first laying a faun• dation and then mapping subsequent information onto the developing representation. First• mentioned participants are more accessible because they form the foundations for their sentence.Jevel representations and because it is through them that subsequent information gets mapped onto the developing representations. � 1988 Academic Press. Inc.
Journal of Memory and Language, 1989
We investigated two seemingly contradictory phenomena: the Advantage of the First Mentioned Parti... more We investigated two seemingly contradictory phenomena: the Advantage of the First Mentioned Participant (participants mentioned first in a sentence are more accessible than participants mentioned second) and the Advantage of the Most Recent Clause (concepts mentioned in the most recent clause are more accessible than concepts mentioned in an earlier clause). We resolved this contradiction by measuring how quickly comprehenders accessed participants mentioned in the first versus second clauses of two-clause sentences. Our data supported the following hypotheses: Comprehenders represent each clause of a two-clause sentence in its own mental substructure. Comprehenders have greatest access to information in the substructure that they are currently developing; that is, they have greatest access to the most recent clause. However, at some point, the first clause becomes more accessible because the substructure representing the first clause of a two-clause sentence serves as a foundation for the whole sentence-level representation. 10 !989 Academic Pre�s. Inc.
Many things are arranged sequentially: the order in which children are born into a family; the or... more Many things are arranged sequentially: the order in which children are born into a family; the order in which words occur in a sentence; and the order in which utterances occur in a discourse. Sequential order requires that some things come first. Items, events, or stimuli that occur in initial posi tion often gain a unique psychological status. Indeed, some of the earliest experiments in contemporary American psychology document the psychological privilege of primacy. For instance, the qualities of a person that we learn about first, figure most prominently in the impression we form of that person (Asch 1946). Consider the traits listed in (1) versus (2) below. (1) smart, artistic, sentimental, cool, awkward, faultfinding (2) faultfinding, awkward, cool, sentimental, artistic, and smart If subjects are given a list of traits and are asked to imagine a person with such traits, they form a more favorable impression if they are given the traits arranged in order (1), and they form a less favorable impression if they are given the very same traits but arranged in order (2) (Anderson and Barrios 1961). The more favorable traits are primary in order (1); the less favorable traits are primary in order (2). Consider the handwritten character in Figure 1. If that character is preceded by the letter A, subjects perceive it as the letter B. If the same character is preceded by the number U, subjects perceive it as the number 13 (Bruner and Minturn 1955). Perception depends on what character comes first.
Uploads
Papers by David Hargreaves