course title
Reanalysis

instructor
Shravan Vasishth

dates and location
First class: 19 October 2010
Tuesdays 1015-1145, Golm campus, Haus 24, Room 0.52

what this course is about
This is a course on an important research question in psycholinguistics: reanalysis. For details, see the reading list below and on moodle.

prerequisites
All students taking this course should have taken at least one class on psycholinguistics.

how lectures will be structured
There will be no presentations of papers by students. Each lecture (apart from the first one) will begin with a short written quiz (see below, grading), and then a lecture about the topic for the day. I expect active class participation.

grading
Grading will be based on the grades of in-class assignments (described below), class participation, and the final literature review (described below). There will also be a final written exam.
The weighting of grades is as follows: in-class assignments (50%), class participation (10%), and the final exam (40%).
In-class assignments (50% of the final grade) For every class except the first one, I will assign one article to be read in preparation for the following week. Each class will begin with a small in-class quiz, where I will give 15 minutes to answer one or two short questions about the paper (this is an open-book quiz, i.e., you can consult the paper while answering the quiz). The questions will test whether you read and understood the paper or not. I will provide an example in the first class of the kind of questions to expect.
Class participation (10% of the final grade) Class participation means contributing to the discussion by raising thoughtful questions and critical comments about the research questions being discussed in class.
Final exam (40% of the final grade) This is a standard closed book exam.
Final scores will be based on the following mapping described in the Studienordnung: 95-100%=1,0 (A);90-94=1,3 (A-);85-89=1,7 (B+);80-84=2,0 (B);75-79=2,3 (B-);70-74=2,7 (C+);65-69=3,0 (C);60-64=3,3 (C-);55-59=3,7 (D+);50-54=4,0 (D);45-49=5,0 (F). If a student's score falls between the cracks, it will be treated as falling in the higher bin.
Students are expected to attend class regularly. If a class is missed, the student is responsible for finding out what the assignment was, what readings were assigned, and what material was covered.


frequently and infrequently asked questions
  • Q: Can I write my quiz and final exam answers in German?
    A: Absolutely.
  • Q: Can I ask or answer questions in class in German?
    A: Absolutely.
  • Q: Why is this course structured so that everyone has to read every paper?
    A: The traditional German Method of students doing presentations does not teach students much. Specifically, only the student presenting the paper reads it, the rest sit passively in class. My in-class written quiz approach is intended to solve this problem.
  • Q: How much time do we have to spend on preparing for this class?
    A: This is an empirical question. I'll have an objective answer after the course, because I will be asking each student to write in the amount of time they spent preparing for this class at the beginning of each quiz (this means you have to keep track of how much time you spent on preparing each week!). I intend to obtain longitudinal data on preparation time, which I will publish online as it appears. This is intended to be useful to future generations of students, so accuracy of data is important--please cooperate in this exercise, it will help future students.
  • Q: How can I get a high-quality university education?
    A: Getting a high-quality education involves two parties, the teacher and the learner. From the teaching side, I try to provide the same quality I would get in the best courses I took in my alma mater, Ohio State (i.e., I do have a mental picture of what a good course looks like). I'm never sure if it's good enough but I'm doing my best. One central ingredient for a good quality education is that you, the learner, have to put in significant work to acquire the material being taught; without that component, it won't really matter how well I teach. If you do your job, I will do mine, and in the end we'll both get something good out of this course.
  • Q: What can I do to become a more effective student?
    A: Track your time spent actually working. Delete your facebook account, shut down your email, and spend time on the material you have to learn. There's no magic bullet. Intelligence is overrated. It's just hard work.
  • Q: Will it be on the final exam?
    A: probably.
  • Q: I hate this course. Whom can I complain to? A: You can complain to me. Tell me what's wrong with it and I will try to fix it. On the moodle site you will find a link to an anonymous feedback form. I cannot know the sender's identity. Please use this form, but please don't use it to be abusive; just tell me objectively what the issue is.


    • conduct in the classroom
  • Please do not engage in private conversations during class.
  • All cell phones must be switched off (except by permission from me).
  • Please do not surf the web or read email while the class is on.
  • Please do not walk into class after it starts, unless you have a really good reason to be late (example: Deutsche Bahn screwed up yet again). Barring such cases, 10:15 is the deadline to be ready for class.
  • Questions to the instructor are actively encouraged.


    • schedule
    Download all papers from moodle: here.

    Part 1: What are the theories?
    topic date assigned reading (what you will be tested on on this day) in-class quiz questions in-class quiz grades
    Introduction Oct 19 none - -
    CANCELLED DUE TO WARNSTREIK Tutorial on Reanalysis Oct 26 Frazier 1987 here here
    Reanalysis in German Nov 2 Bader and Meng 2000 here here
    Repair-based reanalysis Nov 9 Fodor and Inoue 2000 here here
    Against repair-based reanalysis Nov 16 Grodner et al 2003 here here
    Reanalysis as good-enough parsing Nov 23 Ferreira et al 2000 here here
    Reanalysis: A constraint-based process? Nov 30 Spivey and Tanenhaus 1998 here here
    Reanalysis: The unrestricted race model Nov 23 van Gompel and Pickering 2001 here here
    Reanalysis as probabilistic reranking Nov 30 Jurafsky 1996 here here
    What's the role of grammatical constraints in reanalysis? Dec 7 Schneider and Phillips 2001 here here
    Local coherence and reanalysis Dec 14 Tabor et al 2004 here here


    Part 2: What's the evidence?
    topic date assigned reading (what you will be tested on on this day) in-class quiz questions in-class quiz grades
    Is the parser serial? Jan 4 Bader and Meng 1999 here here
    Is there evidence against Reanalysis as Last Resort? Jan 11 Staub 2007 here here
    Is there evidence for the garden-path theory? Jan 18 Meseguer et al 2002 here here
    Broader issues and wrap-up Jan 25 none none none
    Final exam Feb 1 none none none
    Post-final exam meeting Feb 8 none none none


    Reading list (download from moodle)
    [1] L. Frazier. Sentence processing: A tutorial review. 1987. [ bib ]
    [2] M. Meng and M. Bader. Mode of disambiguation and garden-path strength: An investigation of subject-object ambiguities in German. Language and Speech, 43(1):43, 2000. [ bib ]
    [3] J.D. Fodor and A. Inoue. Garden path repair: diagnosis and triage. Language and speech, 43(3):261, 2000. [ bib ]
    [4] D. Grodner, E. Gibson, V. Argaman, and M. Babyonyshev. Against repair-based reanalysis in sentence comprehension. Journal of psycholinguistic research, 32(2):141-166, 2003. [ bib ]
    [5] F. Ferreira, K. Christianson, and A. Hollingworth. Misinterpretations of Garden-Path Sentences. In 13th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, La Jolla, CA, 2000. [ bib ]
    [6] M.J. Spivey and M.K. Tanenhaus. Syntactic ambiguity resolution in discourse: Modeling the effects of referential context and lexical frequency. JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY LEARNING MEMORY AND COGNITION, 24:1521-1543, 1998. [ bib ]
    [7] R.P.G. Van Gompel, M.J. Pickering, and M.J. Traxler. Reanalysis in Sentence Processing: Evidence against Current Constraint-Based and Two-Stage Models* 1. Journal of Memory and Language, 45(2):225-258, 2001. [ bib ]
    [8] D. Jurafsky. A probabilistic model of lexical and syntactic access and disambiguation. Cognitive Science, 20(2):137-194, 1996. [ bib ]
    [9] D. Schneider and C. Phillips. Grammatical search and reanalysis. Journal of Memory and Language, 45(2):308-336, 2001. [ bib ]
    [10] Whitney Tabor, Bruno Galantucci, and Daniel Richardson. Effects of merely local syntactic coherence on sentence processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 50:355-370, 2004. [ bib ]
    [11] M. Bader and M. Meng. Subject-object ambiguities in German embedded clauses: An across-the-board comparison. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 28(2):121-143, 1999. [ bib ]
    [12] A. Staub. The return of the repressed: Abandoned parses facilitate syntactic reanalysis. Journal of Memory and Language, 57(2):299-323, 2007. [ bib ]
    [13] E. Meseguer, M. Carreiras, and C. Clifton Jr. Overt reanalysis strategies and eye movements during the reading of mild garden path sentences. Memory and Cognition, 30(4):551-561, 2002. [ bib ]

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