Cues to grammatical relations: A cross-linguistic look

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Aims of this research include furthering our understanding of how language is comprehended in the normal human brain. This project aims to make a closer investigation of the interaction of these linguistic cues, in English and Russian adults. The predictive value of several comprehension cues, including discourse status (whether a referent has been mentioned before), voice (the verb's relation to the referents), and word order (whether the subject or object comes before the verb), will be explored, using an eye-tracking paradigm. Experiments will all have a crossed factor design, with discourse status and either voice (English) or word order (Russian) as factors. Participants will view pictures on a computer screen while listening to prerecorded sentences, and will choose the picture that matches the sentence using a computer mouse. Participants will be eye-tracked, allowing for a fine-grained analysis of what referents they are considering at any given time (every 60th of a second) over the course of the sentence. Reaction time (how long participants take to make a mouse click) and accuracy (whether participants click on the correct Picture) will also be analyzed.