Conference Presentations by Lewis Pollock
by Marianna Bolognesi, Євгенія Бондаренко, Francesca Franzon, Diego Frassinelli, Pia Sommerauer, Anna Jelec, Liu Pei, Claudia Mazzuca, Gerard Steen, Lidiia Melnyk, Gregory Mills, Elliot Murphy, Alessandro Panunzi, Lewis Pollock, Maria Rosenberg, Elisa Scerrati, Sylvia Springorum, Yao Tong, and Sally Zacharias This document collects the posters that have been presented at the International symposium Abstra... more This document collects the posters that have been presented at the International symposium Abstract Concepts 2016, Amsterdam.
The authors have agreed to share their posters on this platform, in this collection, but the copyright of each poster remains their personal property. (https://abstractconceptsnet.wordpress.com/)
Non peer review papers by Lewis Pollock
Two theories of complement coercion (as in 'Mary began the book'), termed the lexico-semantic the... more Two theories of complement coercion (as in 'Mary began the book'), termed the lexico-semantic theory and the syntactico-pragmatic theory, are examined. A new experiment motivated by two factors is reported. Firstly, it has been recently shown that previous studies of complement coercion overlook a confound in their stimuli that renders their findings open to question. Secondly, proponents of the lexico-semantic account assume that complement coercion structures have default interpretations, and that their theory explains how these default interpretations are generated. However, studies that support this assumption contain normed experimental materials that bias specific interpretations. The reaction time data of the new experiment returned null results, but the error data show that the assumption that complement coercion structures have default interpretations is unfounded. The syntactico-pragmatic theory is shown to be flawed on theoretical grounds. However, on the basis of the error data, the lexico-semantic theory is argued to be incomplete without acknowledging that pragmatic processing helps resolve the underspecification inherent in complement coercion.
Papers by Lewis Pollock
The purpose of this article is to highlight problems with a range of semantic psycholinguistic va... more The purpose of this article is to highlight problems with a range of semantic psycholinguistic variables (concreteness, imageability, individual modality norms, and emotional valence) and to provide a way of avoiding these problems. Focusing on concreteness, I show that for a large class of words in the Brysbaert, Warriner, and Kuperman (Behavior Research Methods 46: 904–911, 2013) concreteness norms, the mean concreteness values do not reflect the judgments that actual participants made. This problem applies to nearly every word in the middle of the concreteness scale. Using list memory experiments as a case study, I show that many of the “abstract” stimuli in concreteness experiments are not unequivocally abstract. Instead, they are simply those words about which participants tend to disagree. I report three replications of list memory experiments in which the contrast between concrete and abstract stimuli was maximized, so that the mean concreteness values were accurate reflections of participants’ judgments. The first two experiments did not produce a concreteness effect. After I introduced an additional control, the third experiment did produce a concreteness effect. The article closes with a discussion of the implications of these results, as well as a consideration of variables other than concreteness. The sensorimotor experience variables (imageability and individual modality norms) show the same distribution as concreteness. The distribution of emotional valence scores is healthier, but variability in ratings takes on a special significance for this measure because of how the scale is constructed. I recommend that researchers using these variables keep the standard deviations of the ratings of their stimuli as low as possible.
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Conference Presentations by Lewis Pollock
The authors have agreed to share their posters on this platform, in this collection, but the copyright of each poster remains their personal property. (https://abstractconceptsnet.wordpress.com/)
Non peer review papers by Lewis Pollock
Papers by Lewis Pollock
The authors have agreed to share their posters on this platform, in this collection, but the copyright of each poster remains their personal property. (https://abstractconceptsnet.wordpress.com/)