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Archivio digitale delle tesi discusse presso l’Università di Pisa

Tesi etd-02122009-101750


Tipo di tesi
Tesi di laurea specialistica
Autore
ZARCONE, ALESSANDRA
URN
etd-02122009-101750
Titolo
Empirical Correlates of Event Types - A priming study
Dipartimento
INTERFACOLTA'
Corso di studi
LINGUISTICA
Relatori
Relatore Lenci, Alessandro
Parole chiave
  • azionalità
  • event types
  • semantic priming
  • verb semantics
Data inizio appello
16/03/2009
Consultabilità
Parziale
Data di rilascio
16/03/2049
Riassunto
Event types have been widely addressed in linguistics literature, but have received little attention in psycholinguitics, neurolinguistics and computational linguistics research. This thesis dissertation explores the nature of event types from a cognitive point of view: many descriptions and diagnostics on event types are available, but few studies have dealt with the problem of how event types are represented and processed in the mental lexicon. An important prerequisite for this sort of research is the building of a corpus of stimuli that meets our needs (web-based pre-tests were run to test the reliability of the stimuli, which should be balanced to control the variables known to a ect processing costs) and an analysis of pre-existing literature in experimental psycholinguistics of event types.

Our main concern was to explore new experimental settings in verb semantics psycholinguistics and to adapt them to this speci c type of investigation: the choice of the method was narrowed down to the semantic priming paradigm, although the set of stimuli could also be suitable for other experimental settings, such as reading-time studies. The semantic priming paradigm was exploited to contrast processing effects on achievement verbs and activity verbs, which di er with respect to two superordinate features: durativity and resultativity. A series of priming experiments were run to explore differences and interactions between such features and the tense morphology and to evaluate the di erent contribution of the experimental setting in the observation and measurement of the e ffect: experiment 1 and experiment 2 followed a similar design and contrasted the e ects of di fferent neutral primes; experiment 3 focused on the interaction between event types and Italian tense morphology.
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