Parker are Phillips are ever in Cognition
October 11, 2016
Linguistics
Now in
Cognition, from 2014 alum
Dan Parker and
Colin Phillips,
Negative polarity illusions and the format of hierarchical encodings in memory. The paper is about cases where comprehenders fleetingly accept sentences with unlicensed agreement or an unlicensed NPI, but judge those same sentences as unacceptable after more reflection, such as: *The diplomats that no congressman could trust have ever supported a drone strike. It argues against the view that these uniformly reflect general faults of memory, and advances a more specific account. On the basis of seven reading-time and acceptability judgment experiments, it shows that NPI illusions, but not agreement illusions, can be reliably switched “on” and “off”, depending on the amount of time from when the potential licensor is processed until the NPI is encountered.