[{"id": "elm-4857", "words": "5664", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "58", "author": "Castroviejo, Elena; Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Dimitra; Ponciano, Marta; Vicente, Agust\u00ed\u00adn", "title": "Generics as default? Comparing the acquisition of universals and generics in Spanish", "date": "2021", "keywords": "adults; age; chatzigoga; children; generics; group; lazaridou; spanish; uqs", "summary": "Table 1 summarizes the mean accuracy and standard deviation of responses by NP type (GS vs. UQS) and age group (young, old, adult) in a by-item analysis. While young children (4-5 years old) seem to be more tolerant to exceptions for generics than older children (8-9 years old), they do not have an adult-like behavior in the interpretation of GS.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4858", "words": "5614", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "55", "author": "Zevakhina, Natalia; Pasalskaya, Elena", "title": "Overspecification of small cardinalities in reference production", "date": "2021", "keywords": "cardinalities; cardinality; color; condition; experiment; objects; overspecification; participants; reference", "summary": "An efficiency- based analysis of color overspecification. Overspecification of small cardinalities in reference production Natalia Zevakhina and Elena Pasalskaya*", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4860", "words": "5976", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "65", "author": "Mihoc, Teodora; Davidson, Kathryn", "title": "Superlative-modified numerals and negation: A multiply negotiable cost", "date": "2021", "keywords": "antcond; exp; neg; pos; restuniv; smns", "summary": "We did not find a general penalty for the modifier being DE, though this is likely still there, being simply obscured by the strong interaction of SMN modifier monotonicity with the two kinds of polarity. General effects: For all environment types, and for both CMNs and SMNs, ratings were significantly lower for ModMon=DE, Pol=NEG, the interaction of ModMon=DE with Pol=NEG, and also (marginally) for Env=RESTUNIV.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4863", "words": "6809", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "56", "author": "Bleotu, Adina Camelia; Benz, Anton; Gotzner, Nicole", "title": "Where truth and optimality part. Experiments on implicatures with epistemic adverbs", "date": "2021", "keywords": "description; epistemic; implicatures; reward; sentences; statements; subjects; task; truth; wrong", "summary": "We implement two reward versions of this paradigm, one that asks subjects to reward characters based on judgements about truth and falsity (Right- Wrong task) and one that asks them to reward characters based on judgements about the appropriateness of sentences (Best Description Task). Our experiments show that implicature rates with the epistemic adverb poate \u2018maybe\u2019 are significantly higher in the case of the optimality judgment task (Best Description Task) than in the Truth Value Judgment Task (Right-Wrong Task), thus emphasizing an important methodological point: that results and, consequently, the theory accounting for them are largely dependent upon the methods used.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4864", "words": "6235", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "53", "author": "Davis, E. Emory; Landau, Barbara", "title": "Seeing vs. Seeing That: Children's Understanding of Direct Perception and Inference Reports", "date": "2021", "keywords": "children; event; evidence; inference; participants; perception; sentences; understanding", "summary": "Data from adult and child participants were analyzed together to more easily identify children whose responses were similar to those of adults (and vice versa). Given that the children 7 and older in Experiment 1 performed like adults, the overall lack of an age effect for children ages 4-6 suggests that there is a qualitative change in children\u2019s understanding of see that around the age of seven.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4865", "words": "7056", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "56", "author": "Anderson, Carolyn Jane", "title": "Coming in, or going out? Measuring the effect of discourse factors on perspective prominence", "date": "2021", "keywords": "come; discourse; effect; experiment; person; perspective; prominence; sentence; subject; subjecthood; \u25cf \u25cf", "summary": "Measuring the effect of discourse factors on perspective prominence Carolyn Jane Anderson* Abstract. This paper contributes to the growing body of work on perspective prominence (Harris 2012, Kaiser & Lee 2017a,b, Hinterwimmer 2019) by providing experimental data on a relatively under- explored class of perspectival expressions: motion verbs like come and go.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4866", "words": "6697", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "58", "author": "Bleotu, Adina Camelia; Benz, Anton; Gotzner, Nicole", "title": "Shadow playing with Romanian 5-year-olds. Epistemic adverbs are a kind of magic!", "date": "2021", "keywords": "adverbs; bleotu; children; epistemic; olds; paradigm; participants; romanian; sentences; shadow; statements; year", "summary": "Children produce deontic modals as early as 1;1, while they produce epistemic modals later (around 3). The first linguists to use this paradigm to investigate the semantics of epistemic modals were Hirst & Weil (1982), who implemented a Look for the Peanut Task, where 3-to-6-year-olds children heard statements (with epistemic modals) about a peanut, and they had to find it.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4867", "words": "7015", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "63", "author": "Choi, Sea Hee; Ionin, Tania", "title": "What's the smallest part of spinach? A new experimental approach to the count/mass distinction", "date": "2021", "keywords": "categories; category; count; english; korean; languages; mandarin; mass; nouns; plural", "summary": "A potential limitation of the quantity judgment task is that, in plural-marking languages such as English and French, the task confounds morphosyntax with interpretation: count nouns are presented in plural form (Who has more chairs / chocolates?) while mass nouns are presented in singular form (Who has more mustard / chocolate / spinach?). diagnostic count nouns mass nouns indefinite article a (count) \uf0d6a chair / chocolate / bean *a furniture/mustard/spinach plural marking (count) \uf0d6chairs / chocolates / beans *furnitures/mustards/spinaches ability to occur in bare (determiner-less) form (mass)", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4868", "words": "3569", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "52", "author": "Kruitwagen, Imke; Winter, Yoad; Hampton, James", "title": "Reciprocal predicates: a prototype model", "date": "2021", "keywords": "binary; form; intentionality; sentences; verbs", "summary": "If this is the case, effects of collective intentionality on acceptance of reciprocal verbs may only be an epiphenomenon of its effect on binary forms: the acceptability of unary form sentences may depend only on the acceptability of their binary correlates. This typicality approach is supported by experimental results on filmed scenarios where speakers accept reciprocal sentences (1) but reject sentences like (2).", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4869", "words": "6345", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "61", "author": "Gergel, Remus; Kopf-Giammanco, Martin; Puhl, Maike", "title": "Simulating semantic change: A methodological note", "date": "2021", "keywords": "change; doch; eben; english; gergel; german; giammanco; kopf; meaning; remus", "summary": "The current work discusses the Human Diachronic Simulation Paradigm (HUDSPA), a method to experimentally probe into historical meaning change set up to (i) scan for configurations similar to attested alterations of meaning but in (typi- cally, but not necessarily, related) languages or varieties which did not actualize the change(s) under investigations; (ii) measure the reactions of native speakers in order to ascertain the verisimilitude as well as the particular semantic and pragmatic prop- erties of the items scrutinized. Simulating semantic change: A methodological note Remus Gergel, Martin Kopf-Giammanco, & Maike Puhl* Abstract.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4871", "words": "4370", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "63", "author": "Malt, Barbara C.; Yang, Xingjian; Joseph, Jessica", "title": "(Not) acquiring meaning in a second language: Are input deficits key?", "date": "2021", "keywords": "group; labels; language; learning; malt; meanings; phase", "summary": "Word meanings are not always parallel across languages, and second language (L2) learners often use words in non-native ways. We used a domain where word meanings cross-cut each other in the L1 and the to-be-learned language.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4872", "words": "5688", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "57", "author": "Castillo-Gamboa, Jaime; Wellwood, Alexis; Rudin, Deniz", "title": "Being tall compared to compared to being tall and being taller", "date": "2021", "keywords": "comparatives; context; difference; semantics; standard", "summary": "This paper investigates the semantics of implicit comparatives (Alice is tall compared to Bob) and its connections to the semantics of explicit comparatives (Alice is taller than Bob) and sentences with adjectives in plain positive form (Alice is tall). This paper investigates the semantics of implicit comparatives (1), and its con- nections to the semantics of explicit comparatives (2) and sentences with adjectives in their plain positive form (3):1 (1) Alice is tall compared to Bob. (2) Alice is taller than Bob. (3) Alice is tall.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4873", "words": "5146", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "49", "author": "Torres, Ilana; Slusarczyk, Kathryn; Alikhani, Malihe; Stone, Matthew", "title": "Intention and Attention in Image-Text Presentations: A Coherence Approach", "date": "2021", "keywords": "caption; coherence; image; pronouns; relations; text; types", "summary": "Additionally, we have not yet been able to report results for the distribution of sentence structure types in Identification coherence relation image caption pairs yet. Predicate 0.3% 1.5% 0.0% 0.4% 0.4% Other 0.3% 1.4% 0.2% 0.0% 0.6% Table 5: The distribution of sentence structure types in coherence relation types.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4874", "words": "6572", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "54", "author": "Zhang, Yuhan; Davidson, Kathryn", "title": "De re interpretation in belief reports: An experimental investigation", "date": "2021", "keywords": "belief; dicto; dps; experiment; interpretation; judgment; participants; readings; reports; scenario", "summary": "We report three novel experiments which highlight some ad- vantages of obtaining quantitative judgments for readings with this ambiguity, focusing on definite DPs, given that they have already generated some judgment inconsistency in the litera- ture. One may wonder whether Nelson\u2019s reason- ing is representative of a dispreference for de re: to test this, it helps to gather judgment data across a wider variety of scenarios.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4875", "words": "6011", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "42", "author": "Geiger, Jeffrey; Xiang, Ming", "title": "Toward an accommodation account of deaccenting under nonidentity", "date": "2021", "keywords": "accommodation; antecedent; constituents; deaccenting; deaccentuation; experiment; material; new; verbs", "summary": "If the broader context supports parallel readings for inferable verbs and their antecedents, participants might find it more natural to accommodate the necessary alternative antecedent according to the accommodation model, increasing ratings for tokens with deaccented inferable verbs. In turn, this might encourage accommodation of the necessary alternative antecedent to license deaccenting, increasing the ratings for sentences with deaccented inferable verbs.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4876", "words": "6468", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "43", "author": "Storbeck, Jesse; Kaiser, Elsi", "title": "Discourse behavior of possessives reflects the importance of interpersonal relationships", "date": "2021", "keywords": "animacy; continuation; discourse; hypothesis; possession; possessives; prominence; relationships; sam; subject", "summary": "Therefore, the Anima- cy Hypothesis proposes that animate possessions (e.g. Sam\u2019s doctor) are more prominent in discourse than inanimate ones (e.g. Sam\u2019s car) for the same reasons and to the same extent that simpler nominals exhibit animacy effects (the/a doctor vs. the/a car). On the other hand, Di Eugenio (1998) proposes (for possessives involving animate possessors) that the ranking depends on the animacy of the possession; animate possessions im- mediately outrank their possessors, while inanimate possessions are ranked immediately below their possessors.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4877", "words": "6002", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "50", "author": "Chanchaochai, Nattanun", "title": "The interpretations of scalar implicatures, presuppositions, and implicated presupposition by Thai children with autism", "date": "2021", "keywords": "adults; asd; autism; box; children; condition; group; implicatures; presuppositions", "summary": "No additive effects of implicated presuppositions are found in any group of the participants. While it is claimed that implicated presuppositions are pragmatically derived in the same fashion as implicature, they are still backgrounded in the presuppositional domain.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4880", "words": "4090", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "56", "author": "Bosch, Jasmijn E.; Chailleux, Mathilde; Foppolo, Francesca", "title": "Incremental processing of telicity in Italian children", "date": "2021", "keywords": "children; condition; event; lexical; processing; sentence; verb", "summary": "It is a well-known fact that, during sentence processing, we can anticipate upcoming nouns on the basis of the lexical semantics of prenominal verbs. From a psycholinguistic perspective, the question that can be tested experimentally is whether (and when) this interpretation is carried out incrementally during sentence processing.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4883", "words": "4918", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "49", "author": "Dieuleveut, Anouk; Cournane, Ailis; Hacquard, Valentine", "title": "Finding the force: a novel word learning experiment with modals", "date": "2021", "keywords": "epistemic; force; modals; necessity; novel; possibility; situations; teleological", "summary": "Necessity teleological modals are quite often translated with possibility modals (21%), but epistemic modals are not (8%). Epistemic necessity modals are quite often translated with be; teleological modals with verbs.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4885", "words": "5687", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "59", "author": "Neal, Anissa; Dillon, Brian", "title": "Definitely Islands? Experimental investigation of definite islands", "date": "2021", "keywords": "definite; definiteness; distance; effect; experiment; gap; islands; participants; questions", "summary": "Cognitive constraints and island effects. Experimental syntax and the variation of island effects in English and Italian.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4886", "words": "7616", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "67", "author": "Zaitsu, Anissa; Wehbe, Jad; Hacquard, Valentine; Lidz, Jeff", "title": "Clause types and speech acts in speech to children", "date": "2021", "keywords": "act; acts; children; clause; declarative; interrogative; polar; question; speech; type", "summary": "The question of how and when children learn to associate clause type with its canonical function, or speech act, is currently unknown. Although these canonical links between clause type and speech act are principled, they are known to be defeasible.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4887", "words": "6903", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "57", "author": "Bar-Asher Siegal, Elitzur Avraham; Bassel, Noa; Hagmayer, York", "title": "Causal selection \u2013 the linguistic take", "date": "2021", "keywords": "agent; causal; causative; conditions; effect; order; participants; selection; set", "summary": "We can now consider proper- ties taken previously as contributing factors to causal selection as parameters in the licensing of Proceedings of ELM 1: 027-038, 2021 Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal, Noa Bassel and York Hagmayer: Causal selection: the linguistic take. We take CC-selection to underlie causal selection, since the latter is restricted by the linguistic possibilities re- sulting from the former.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4889", "words": "6760", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "55", "author": "Francis, Naomi; Jones, Shuli; Rosenstein, Leo; Hackl, Martin", "title": "On the acquisition of either and too", "date": "2021", "keywords": "additive; adult; children; data; environments; grammar; like; polarity; rullmann; sentences", "summary": "Either would be marked to occur with negative sentences, taking necessarily wide scope over the negative operator, while too would be confined to positive sentences either via designated marking or as the result of competition with its more marked counterpart either.1 (2) Jeither/tooK(p) = \u03bbw: \u2203q \u2208 ALT(p) This model showed main effects of polarity and age; chil- dren were more likely to select either in negative sentences than in positive sentences (Pr(>|z|) = 0.000171 ***), and 6-year-olds were less likely to select either overall (Pr(>|z|) = 0.009378 **).", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4894", "words": "5128", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "55", "author": "Bade, Nadine; Schwarz, Florian", "title": "New data on the competition between definites and indefinites", "date": "2021", "keywords": "choices; competition; determiner; implicatures; indefinite; non; picture; schwarz; uniqueness", "summary": "To sum up, non-uniqueness inferences associated with indefinite determiners drive picture choices (Exp 1), but only when its \u2019exactly-one\u2019 implicature is true (Exp 1). -8.754 < 2e-16 *** Table 1: Output of glmer for interaction between picture context and determiner To see whether determiners differed in the rate of target choices for the picture condition where both pictures satisfied the implicature, we looked at the interaction between context and determiner with target coded as the dependent variable.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-4946", "words": "4250", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "52", "author": "Bergey, Claire; Yurovsky, Daniel", "title": "Listeners use descriptive contrast to disambiguate novel referents and make inferences about novel categories", "date": "2021", "keywords": "contrast; feature; object; participants; target; use", "summary": "Can they turn this process around, using the principle of descriptive contrast to learn about novel objects and categories in the world? In a reference game, participants see groups of novel objects and hear a referring expression asking them to pick one, e.g., \u201cFind the small toma.\u201d", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5013", "words": "4663", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "59", "author": "Dionne, Danielle; Coppock, Elizabeth", "title": "Tattoos as a window onto cross-linguistic differences in scalar implicature", "date": "2021", "keywords": "english; finger; model; production; thumb; toe", "summary": "The second model is a prevalence-based speaker model that has perfect knowledge of speaker production (henceforth referred to as the Production model). For the big toe and ring toe image pair, English participants showed a slight preference for the ring toe image, with roughly 63% of participants choosing that image.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5026", "words": "6516", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "68", "author": "Romero, Maribel; Meertens, Erlinde; Beltrama, Andrea", "title": "Or not Alternative Questions, Focus and Discourse Structure", "date": "2021", "keywords": "beltrama; caqs; cornering; discourse; light; naqs; pqs; questions", "summary": "Following Beltrama et al. (2020), we have reframed Cornering Part 2 as non intrinsic to NAQs per se, but as a general constraint on question strategies in general. We note, though, that there exist discourse initial contexts which do allow for question forms that deliberately signal that the only relevant live possibility is the content proposition p and that no other alternative q, r, s\u2026 matters.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5072", "words": "7146", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "59", "author": "Modarresi, Fereshteh; Krifka, Manfred", "title": "Pseudo-Incorporated Antecedents and Anaphora in Persian: The Influence of Stereotypical Knowledge", "date": "2021", "keywords": "anaphora; anaphoric; antecedents; bias; drs; krifka; modarresi; objects; persian; pins; pseudo; sara; singular", "summary": "a, b) speak against the possibility that anaphora to bare objects in Persian is predominantly by associative anaphora, as in this case we should find full DPs as the preferred case of anaphoric uptake. Modarresi assumes that bare objects differ minimally insofar as they introduce number neutral DRs (already assumed by Kamp & Reyle 1993 for different phenomena), which are given here by Greek letters \u03be.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5329", "words": "4928", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "54", "author": "Gergel, Remus; Puhl, Maike; Dampfhofer, Simon; Onea, Edgar", "title": "The rise and particularly fall of presuppositions: Evidence from duality in universals", "date": "2023", "keywords": "change; experiment; gergel; group; gure; meaning; order; participants; phase; remus; results", "summary": "0.1 \u2018 \u2019 1 Table 6: Anova for presupposition test model, Experiment 2 3.3 DISCUSSION. Crucially for the current enterprise, the question how lexical items come to be presupposition triggers or lose this property has been much less discussed on a principled basis, although case studies on presuppositional items certainly exist (see Beck, Berezovskaya & Pflugfelder 2009, Schwenter & Waltereit 2010, Los & Komen 2012, Beck & Gergel 2015, Gergel, Bl\u00fcmel & Kopf 2016, Gergel & Kopf-Giammanco 2021, Carlier & Lamiroy 2018, among others).", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5336", "words": "5602", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "52", "author": "Krebs, Julia; Malaia, Evie A.; Wilbur, Ronnie B.; Roehm, Dietmar", "title": "Visual boundaries in sign motion: processing with and without lip-reading cues", "date": "2023", "keywords": "event; experiment; language; malaia; motion; participants; processing; ronnie; sign; signers; telic; wilbur", "summary": "Event visibility in sign language motion: Evidence from Austrian Sign Language. Strickland et al. (2015) provided an example of action-to-language processing transfer, showing that non-signers are capa- ble of identifying telic/atelic semantics of sign language verbs in the absence of any prior exposure to a sign language.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5361", "words": "4355", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "59", "author": "Porrini, Anna Teresa; Surian, Luca", "title": "The investigation of quantity implicatures during typical development: a systematic review", "date": "2023", "keywords": "age; children; data; development; implicatures; language; quantity; tasks", "summary": "It seems that the task used to test children may have a considerable impact on how they perform in implicature tasks. As a matter of fact, several hypotheses have been put forward to explain children\u2019s delay in acquiring lexical quantity implicatures (Barner et al. 2011, Foppolo et al. 2012, Katsos & Bishop 2011, Pouscoulous et al. 2007, Reinhart 2004, Skordos & Papafragou 2016 among others).", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5363", "words": "5697", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "54", "author": "Harris, Jesse", "title": "The enduring effects of default focus in let alone ellipsis: Evidence from pupillometry.", "date": "2023", "keywords": "accent; carlson; ellipsis; focus; harris; jesse; let; object; pitch; processing; pupil; remnant; subject", "summary": "In particular, I follow Harris & Carlson (2018) and assume that processing clausal ellipsis requires, at a minimum, the processor to engage in the following tasks: (4) Basic tasks of the processor in ellipsis processing: a. Parse the remnant by constructing the appropriate phrase structure for the remnant given the input. The 20 items from Experiment 1 in Harris & Carlson (2018) formed the basis of the 2\u00d72 design, crossing remnant type (ObjectRem vs. SubjectRem) with contrastive pitch accent location on the correlate (ObjectPA vs. SubjectPA).", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5364", "words": "5688", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "58", "author": "Rostworowski, Wojciech; Ku\u015b, Katarzyna; Ma\u0107kiewicz, Bartosz", "title": "Semantics of Non-Doxastic Attitude Ascriptions from Experimental Perspective", "date": "2023", "keywords": "ascriptions; attitude; clause; complex; experiment; truth", "summary": "This result indicates that non-doxastic attitude ascriptions are indeed sensitive to the way in which the content of the complement clause is structured, which means that non-doxastic attitude verbs operate on structured contents (rather than, e.g., sets of possible worlds). attitude ascriptions; entailments; non-doxastic attitudes; presuppositions; semantics; truth-value judgements 1. Introduction.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5366", "words": "5701", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "62", "author": "Fuchs, Mart\u00edn; van der Klis, Martijn", "title": "Crosslinguistic differences on the Present Perfect Puzzle: An experimental approach", "date": "2023", "keywords": "adverbials; chris; marker; past; perfect; present; spanish; time; today", "summary": "Parallel corpus work (van der Klis et al. 2022) actually indicates that standard written Peninsular Spanish not only allows its PERFECT to combine with temporal adverbials that locate the event within the day of utterance, but also with deictic adverbials such as este mes \u2018this month\u2019, which locate the event within an interval that is calculated from speech time and includes the day of utterance, but can also temporally locate the event before that day (e.g., an event that occurred this month might have happened twelve days ago). There are other properties of past-referring temporal adverbials that seem to play a role in their compatibility with PERFECT markers.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5369", "words": "6334", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "54", "author": "Paape, Dario", "title": "Five degrees of (non)sense: Investigating the connection between bullshit receptivity and susceptibility to semantic illusions", "date": "2023", "keywords": "bullshit; dario; et al; illusion; meaning; nonsense; paape; participants; pattern; processing; receptivity; sentences; susceptibility", "summary": "Crucially, bullshit sentences and illusion sentences are not nonsense in the sense that they are random jumbles of words.5 On some level, these sentences look and feel \u201cgood enough\u201d to pass inspection. The question is whether someone who gives higher-than-average ratings to bullshit sentences will, for instance, also give higher- than-average ratings to comparative illusion sentences.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5370", "words": "8633", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "56", "author": "Paape, Dario", "title": "When Transformer models are more compositional than humans: The case of the depth charge illusion", "date": "2023", "keywords": "charge; compositional; depth; doi; gpt-3; head; humans; illusion; injury; language; models; paape; processing; sentence; transformer", "summary": "Accounting for agreement phenomena in sentence comprehension with transformer language models: Effects of similarity-based interference on surprisal and attention. The implicit or explicit gold standard against which language models are usually compared and evaluated in terms of their \u201cshallowness\u201d is human performance.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5371", "words": "6480", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "55", "author": "Ronai, Eszter; Xiang, Ming", "title": "Tracking the activation of scalar alternatives with semantic priming", "date": "2023", "keywords": "alternatives; condition; excellent; experiment; focus; good; prime; priming; word", "summary": "Here, we test whether stronger scalar alternatives are retrieved and activated in the processing of sentences that lead to SI calculation, and are taken to involve reasoning about alternatives. 5.1. If stronger scalar alternatives like excellent are reasoned about and retrieved during SI calculation, then we should see shorter RTs in the related condition than in the unrelated condition.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5372", "words": "7426", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "60", "author": "Bleotu, Adina Camelia; Benz, Anton; P\u0103trunjel, Roxana", "title": "You must worry! The interpretation of mustn\u2019t varies with context and verbal complement", "date": "2023", "keywords": "context; lack; necessity; necessity contexts; participants; physical; sentences; verbs", "summary": "For instance, (1a) exemplifies a lack of necessity context: it is not necessary to eat the bread today, since it will be good to eat tomorrow as well. (lack of necessity context)", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5375", "words": "5667", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "55", "author": "Tsvilodub, Polina; van Tiel, Bob; Franke, Michael", "title": "The role of relevance, competence, and priors for scalar inferences", "date": "2023", "keywords": "alternative; competence; effect; inferences; participants; prior; relevance; speaker; tiel", "summary": "This process is typically explained as an instance of scalar inference. scalar inference; relevance; competence; prior probability; disjunction 1.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5376", "words": "5456", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "55", "author": "Attali, Noa; Pearl, Lisa S.; Scontras, Gregory", "title": "Corpus evidence for the role of world knowledge in ambiguity reduction: Using high positive expectations to inform quantifier scope", "date": "2023", "keywords": "context; corpus; count; hpe; interpretation; inverse; negation; scope; vote", "summary": "On the other hand, experimental studies that directly measure interpretation preference by adult na- tive English speakers find a preference for inverse scope interpretations of every- and all-negation (Carden 1970, Heringer 1970, Carden 1973). Our corpus analysis suggests that a high positive expectation (HPE) expressed directly in the preceding linguistic context can affect scope interpretation preferences for every- negation utterances.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5377", "words": "5454", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "66", "author": "Santorio, Paolo; Wellwood, Alexis", "title": "Nonboolean Conditionals", "date": "2023", "keywords": "conditionals; drop; experiment; ics; participants; probability; square", "summary": "Probabilities of conditionals and conditional probabilities. We test this prediction by investigating probability judgments about sentences of the form \u231ca \u2192 b { and/or } c \u2192 d\u231d.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5379", "words": "4767", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "54", "author": "Soper, Elizabeth; Koenig, Jean-Pierre", "title": "Modeling the Role of Polysemy in Verb Categorization", "date": "2023", "keywords": "bert; categories; categorization; embeddings; polysemy; proceedings; sense; verb; word", "summary": "Previous work using word embeddings to model semantic categorization has treated semantic categorization as categorization of word types, rather than word senses. We evaluate three methods of extracting embeddings from the contextual BERT model: two baseline methods, which create one representation per word form, and a multi-prototype method which generates one representation per word sense.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5380", "words": "4039", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "55", "author": "Zhu, Ziling; Ahn, Dorothy", "title": "Effects of instruction on semantic and pragmatic judgment tasks", "date": "2023", "keywords": "english; instruction; judgment; participants; sentence; stimuli; tasks; violations", "summary": "Sentence judgment tasks are used often in linguistics studies. Our results highlight the need for language- and study-specific norming procedures in sentence judgment tasks.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5382", "words": "5905", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "50", "author": "Jasbi, Masoud; Bermudez, Natalia; Davidson, Kathryn", "title": "Default biases in the interpretation of English negation, conjunction, and disjunction", "date": "2023", "keywords": "cat; conjunction; disjunction; dog; interpretation; negation; negative; trials", "summary": "We created \u201cinclusive disjunction\u201d trials by adding the phrase or both to simple disjunction trials (e.g. has a cat or a dog or both). The model estimated a positive coefficient for inclusive control disjunction trials compared to simple disjunction trials suggesting that simple disjunction was not completely inclusive (\ufffd = 12.00, 95%CI =", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5383", "words": "6486", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "52", "author": "Cowan, Joe; Katsos, Napoleon", "title": "Investigating a shared mechanism in the priming of manner and quantity implicature", "date": "2023", "keywords": "image; implicature; prime; priming; trials", "summary": "Given the high baseline rates of QI derivation, the free choice between the enriched or unenriched QI presented on the cards self-selects for the image pertaining to the enriched interpretation and therefore acts as a prime without having to push participants to the selection (e.g., as in 1b with the \u2018THIS IMAGE!\u2019 caption). Here, given that MI can be primed, if there is a shared derivational mecha- nism between QI and MI, we predict that QI derivation in the preceding prime trials will confer greater MI derivation in the succeeding critical trials.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5384", "words": "5454", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "55", "author": "Levinson, Lisa", "title": "Beyond Surprising: English Event Structure in the Maze", "date": "2023", "keywords": "event; language; levinson; maze; model; participants; processing; result; sentence; structure; surprisal; task; verb; word", "summary": "This work is part of a series of replications in this vein to improve our understanding of the relationship between event structure, prediction, and sentence processing. Put together, this work suggests that the best way to currently model the predictions that humans are making during sentence processing is with probabilities extracted from language models and quantified as surprisals.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5389", "words": "4938", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "52", "author": "Winterstein, Gr\u00e9goire; Cantin-Savoie, Ghyslain; Laperle, Samuel; Van Dorpe, Josiane; Villeneuve, Nora", "title": "Informational content vs. discourse orientation: experimental and computational perspectives", "date": "2023", "keywords": "content; discourse; experiment; language; models; orientation; peine; presque", "summary": "Each experiment focuses on one kind of population (humans or language models), and one kind of meaning (informational content or discourse orientation). Language models exhibit a less transparent be- havior.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5390", "words": "5898", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "52", "author": "Armenante, Giuliano; Hohaus, Vera; Stolterfoht, Britta", "title": "Transparency in the processing of temporal ambiguity: The case of embedded tense", "date": "2023", "keywords": "ambiguity; experiment; interpretation; past; processing; reading; sim; tense", "summary": "Transparency in the processing of temporal ambiguity: The case of embedded tense Giuliano Armenante, Vera Hohaus & Britta Stolterfoht* The first two experiments investigated the two hypotheses for the type of configuration from the introduction, the temporal ambiguous interpretation of a clausal Proceedings of ELM 2: 1-12, 2023 Giuliano Armenante, Vera Hohaus and Britta Stolterfoht: Transparency in the processing of temporal ambiguity: The case of embedded tense.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5391", "words": "5702", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "51", "author": "Zhang, Yuhan; Chen, Wenqi; Zhang, Ruihan; Zhang, Xiajie", "title": "Representing affect information in word embeddings", "date": "2023", "keywords": "affect; bert; embeddings; emotion; human; information; language; linguistics; proceedings; vad; word; word embeddings; zhang", "summary": "Representing affect information in word embeddings Yuhan Zhang, Wenqi Chen, Ruihan Zhang & Xiajie Zhang We used the human-labeled dataset (Mohammad 2018) as the ground truth and performed various correlational and classi- fication tests on four types of word embeddings.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5392", "words": "7265", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "52", "author": "Schlotterbeck, Fabian; Augurzky, Petra", "title": "Reading times show effects of contextual complexity and uncertainty in comprehension of German universal quantifiers", "date": "2023", "keywords": "color; complexity; contexts; effects; exp; inside; outside; preposition; set", "summary": "We also observed RT effects that seemed to depend on a combination of these two factors (e.g. the effect of matching vs. mismatching colors at the preposition in Exp. 3). Secondly, PRAGMATIC EXPEC- TATIONS predicted RT effects already on the adjective, which is the position where the potential for true continuations is decided.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5394", "words": "5885", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "49", "author": "Kaiser, Elsi", "title": "Proportions vs. cardinalities: Comparative ambiguities and the COVID pandemic", "date": "2023", "keywords": "cardinal; cases; comparatives; covid; level; noun; people; readings", "summary": "From a processing point-of-view, it seems that a dispreference for proportional readings would not be unexpected, due to their greater complexity: Proportional readings depend on both the numerator and the denominator, whereas cardinal readers essentially only make reference to the numerator. For example, for the display and the sen- tence in Figure 1 (There are more COVID cases in ___ than ___ ), putting Teakley County in the first blank and Hawkton County in the second blank indicates a cardinal interpretation, whereas putting Hawkton County in the first blank and Teakley County in the second blank indicates a proportional interpretation.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5395", "words": "5870", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "58", "author": "G\u00f6bel, Alexander; Wagner, Michael", "title": "On a concessive reading of the rise-fall-rise contour: contextual and semantic factors", "date": "2023", "keywords": "concessive; experiment; go\u0308bel; intonation; match; rfr; rise; valence", "summary": "Experiment 1 substantiated a contrast between the acceptability of the RFR in positive replies to negative statements and negative replies to positive statements, as argued by Go\u0308bel (2019), Proceedings of ELM 2: 83-94, 2023 Alexander Go\u0308bel and Michael Wagner: (= those alternatives whose truth-value is not yet known) cannot be safely claimed, formalized as in (3) as a conventional implicature.2 Wagner proposes a similar analysis, with the difference that (i) relevant alternatives are speech acts rather than propositions and (ii) that there is an alternative speech act that could have been made, rather than focusing on what alternatives are not claimable, see (4).3 (3) JRFR \u03d5Kci = \u2200p \u2208 J\u03d5Kf s.t. p is assertable in C: the speaker cannot safely claim p. (4) JRFRK = \u03bbS. \u2203S\u2019 in JSKga, S \u219b S\u2019 and performing S\u2019 might be justified: S These two accounts capture the distribution of the RFR in quantifier scales as in (5), where the RFR is felicitous with the middle value some but infelicitous with the extreme values none or all.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5398", "words": "5788", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "54", "author": "Kaiser, Elsi; Storbeck, Jesse", "title": "Real-time processing of indexical and generic expressions: Insights from, and implications for, COVID-related public health messages", "date": "2023", "keywords": "expressions; forms; generic; health; hypothesis; messages; people; processing; reading; time", "summary": "According to the Indexicality Hypothesis, linguistic expressions that could, in principle, be indexical (i.e., refer directly to individuals salient in the speech situation; speaker and/or address- ee, e.g. you, we) are easier to process than non-indexical forms like people, even in contexts where the forms are used non-indexically. This study is a preliminary foray into the real-time processing of non- anaphoric pronouns and generic expressions, and focuses on the use of you, we and people in COVID-19 health messages.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5400", "words": "3985", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "45", "author": "G\u00f6bel, Alexander; Schwarz, Florian", "title": "Comparing Global and Local Accommodation: Rating and Response Time Data", "date": "2023", "keywords": "accommodation; context; florian; presupposition; response; schwarz; triggers", "summary": "The results show that globally accommodating a presupposition led to a larger decrease in acceptance than locally accommodating, and that response times for local accommodation were overall faster. While we take the results to be inconclusive with regard to the question about the underlying mechanism, we conjecture that the contexts tested here were more fa- vorable for local accommodation, and that hence investigating how different contexts affect the relative ease of accommodation type is a promising avenue for future re- search.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5413", "words": "7306", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "53", "author": "Grusdt, Britta; Liu, Mingya; Franke, Michael", "title": "Testing the influence of QUDs on the occurrence of Conditional Perfection", "date": "2023", "keywords": "block; conditional; experiment; participants; qud; situation; stimuli; stimulus", "summary": "105 https://doi.org/10.3765/elm https://www.elm-conference.net/ Figure 1: Exhaustive and non-exhaustive situations of critical trials in Experiment 2. To test this account, we present two novel behavioral ex- periments with non-text based stimuli that take advantage of participants\u2019 intuitive understanding of physics.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5414", "words": "5285", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "59", "author": "Cortez Espinoza, Maya; Fricke, Lea", "title": "On the interpretation of German einige. The effect of tense and cardinality", "date": "2023", "keywords": "cardinality; einige; experiment; future; german; interpretation; participants; past; prs; tense", "summary": "54 https://doi.org/10.3765/elm https://www.elm-conference.net/ Figure 2: Percentage of accepted bet by tense and cardinality 3. Bayesian Modelling. Thus, we want to test the hypothesis that statements involving einige will receive higher acceptance when referring to sets with higher cardinalities, relative to the cardinality of the total set, than when referring to sets with smaller cardinalites.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5757", "words": "6329", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "54", "author": "Walter, Sebastian; Hinterwimmer, Stefan", "title": "An experimental investigation of perspective alignment in gesture and speech", "date": "2025", "keywords": "alignment; cvg; gesture; hinterwimmer; perspective; preference; protagonist; speaker; speech; stefan; study; viewpoint", "summary": "(2021) seminal study investigating align- ment patterns of perspective in gesture in speech, the study reported in this paper controlled for intervening pragmatic factors which potentially block perspective alignment since in this study only CVGs were compared. An experimental investigation of perspective alignment in gesture and speech Sebastian Walter & Stefan Hinterwimmer* Abstract.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5768", "words": "6678", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "51", "author": "Sostarics, Thomas; Ronai, Eszter; Cole, Jennifer", "title": "Relating Scalar Inference and Alternative Activation: A View from the Rise-Fall-Rise Tune in American English", "date": "2025", "keywords": "alternative; condition; eszter; fall; inference; pitch; results; rfr; rise; ronai; tunes", "summary": "When describing the various pragmatic accounts for RFR, what stands out across accounts (rhetorically, though not necessarily implemen- tationally) is a persistent invocation of some notion of \u201chigher alternatives.\u201d SI is famously another domain within semantics/pragmatics where higher alternatives play a role.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5796", "words": "6553", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "52", "author": "Lacina, Radim; Gotzner, Nicole", "title": "Only the (informationally) stronger survive: A probe recognition study with scale-mates and antonyms", "date": "2025", "keywords": "alternatives; antonyms; experiment; gotzner; implicature; lacina; scalar; scale", "summary": "What this research shows is that stronger scalar alternatives are preferentially activated during comprehension in cases where they can support a pragmatic inference and that antonymic mean- ings are activated in that process at the same time. The results of our current probe recognition study showed that strong scalar items (filthy) were more strongly represented in the model when their weaker scale-mates were present in the preceding stimulus as opposed to when the prime was an unrelated word (Experiment 1).", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5797", "words": "4988", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "47", "author": "Lago, Sol; Schulz, Petra; Rinke, Esther; Oltrogge, Elise; Dudschig, Carolin; Kaup, Barbara", "title": "Insensitivity to truth-value in negated sentences: does linear distance matter?", "date": "2025", "keywords": "distance; experiment; kaup; negation; negative; negator; predicate; sentences; truth; value", "summary": "If so, we expected to restore participants\u2019 sensitivity to truth-value in far distance negative sentences (but not in close distance sentences), yielding an interaction between truth-value and the distance between the negator and the predicate. but this facilitation is often reduced or absent in negative sentences, yielding a so-called negation-by-truth-value interaction.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5798", "words": "6969", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "50", "author": "Mognon, Irene; Marree, Amber L. ; Hendriks, Petra", "title": "Are second language speakers more pragmatically tolerant? Explaining the differences in scalar implicature generation between L2 and L1", "date": "2025", "keywords": "generation; group; language; option; participants; proficiency; sentences; sis; speakers; task", "summary": "In other words, do L2 speakers accept underinformative sentences to a larger degree than adult L1 speakers do, and if so, can this be explained by their higher pragmatic tolerance due to their limited L2 exposure? However, as we clarify below, we believe this account to be potentially relevant for explaining SI generation in adult L2 speakers.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5800", "words": "6545", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "56", "author": "Asami, Daiki; Han, Chao; Burger, Jacob; Dunlop, Deanna; Lu, Yue; Yahya M Morad, Effah; Zhao, Chenyue; Hestvik, Arild", "title": "'Negation-blind' N400 effect disappears when lexical priming is controlled", "date": "2025", "keywords": "affirmative; effect; erp; et al; n400; negation; negative; priming; processing; sentence; truth", "summary": "We also found the significant main effect of truth value: false sentences were judged more accurately than true sentences (83 vs. 88%; F(1,29) = 11.1, p < 0.01). Specif- ically, they found that false negative sentences elicited a larger N400 than their true versions, when preceded by contextual phrases (e.g., (7b) vs. (7a), where with proper equipment serves as a contextual phrase).", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5806", "words": "5841", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "48", "author": "Felton, Casey; Jasbi, Masoud", "title": "Non-Implicature Sources of Exclusivity in Linguistic Disjunction", "date": "2025", "keywords": "compatibility; disjunction; disjuncts; exclusivity; experiment; implicature; items; participants", "summary": "Traditional accounts of this ambiguity focus on scalar implicature as the source of disjunction exclusivity, a process whereby Gricean reasoning over Horn scales strengthens the baseline inclu- sive reading to an implied exclusive reading (Grice, 1978; Horn, 1972; Gazdar, 1980). Even though a large portion of the variance in disjunction exclusivity was explained by variance in prior beliefs about disjunct compatibility, there remained a large amount of variance attributable to other factors, such as pragmatic scalar exclusivity implicatures.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5807", "words": "5872", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "59", "author": "Qiu, Zhuang; Felton, Casey; Houghton, Zachary; Jasbi, Masoud", "title": "Experimental Paradigms on Scalar Implicature Estimation", "date": "2025", "keywords": "card; experiment; implicature; participants; pst; scalar; task; trials; tvjt", "summary": "We found that the estimated rate of scalar implicature computation varied noticeably between different tasks as well as scales. We conducted three experiments to explore the effect of task variation on the estimated rate of scalar implicature computation.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5809", "words": "6091", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "45", "author": "Solt, Stephanie; M\u00fchlenbernd, Roland; Burbelko, Mariya", "title": "Social meaning and pragmatic reasoning: The case of (im)precision", "date": "2025", "keywords": "approximate; form; information; knowledge; meaning; precise; speaker", "summary": "Consistent with previous work and our predictions, we find that the choice of numerical precision level carries social meaning: precise speakers are rated higher on competence- related dimensions than approximate ones, but are also found to be more pedantic. In summary, while Experiment 2 did not provide extremely strong evidence for the role of reasoning about speaker knowledge in the derivation of social infer- ences, neither does it provide compelling evidence against the existence of such an effect.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5810", "words": "8335", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "52", "author": "Strohmaier, David; Wimmer, Simon", "title": "Contrafactives, learnability, and production", "date": "2025", "keywords": "ascriptions; attitude; contrafactives; experiment; factive; language; learnability; matching; mind; model; non; presupposition; strohmaier; value; wimmer; world", "summary": "Factive attitude ascriptions are true only if mind and world representations correspond, contrafactive attitude ascriptions only if they do not. Factive attitude ascriptions are not true if mind and world representations do not correspond, whilst contrafactive attitude ascriptions are not true if mind and world representations do correspond.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5811", "words": "6114", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "55", "author": "Smeman, Sven ; Smit, Maaike; Hampton, James A.; Winter, Yoad", "title": "Disambiguating quantity judgements: mass/count and extra-grammatical cues", "date": "2025", "keywords": "cns; count; experiment; judgements; mass; measurement; quantity; smn", "summary": "Comparative quantity judgements are a useful probe into the semantics of the mass/count distinction, where count nouns usually trigger cardinal compar- isons (more dogs), and mass nouns trigger non-cardinal measurement (more rice). By contrast, mass nouns (MNs) are in the singular and show an irregular behavior: \u2018substance\u2019 MNs (SMNs, e.g. clay) prefer non-cardinal measurement (by volume, weight, etc.) while \u2018object\u2019 MNs (OMNs, e.g. baggage, furniture) trigger cardinal comparisons (McCawley 1975).", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5812", "words": "7377", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "49", "author": "Muxica, Christian; Harris, Jesse", "title": "Constructing focus alternatives from context and the limits of semantic priming", "date": "2025", "keywords": "alternatives; associate; context; focus; harris; model; non; priming; probe; response; stage; word", "summary": "Constructing focus alternatives from context and the limits of semantic priming Christian Muxica & Jesse A. Harris* Therefore, priming and the generation of focus alternatives can be separated conceptually, as alternatives are constructed immediately in concert with the context.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5813", "words": "6132", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "52", "author": "Ross, Hayley; Kim, Najoung; Davidson, Kathryn", "title": "Fake reefs are sometimes reefs and sometimes not, but are always compositional", "date": "2025", "keywords": "adjective; bigrams; compositional; context; experiment; fake; frequency; inferences; noun; privative; reefs; subsective", "summary": "Further, we select pairs of high and zero/low frequency bigrams because it is possible that high frequency bigrams might come with more con- ventionalized contexts and/or more fixed meanings and inferences in general, and thus might resist manipulation by provided contexts. This property distinguishes privative adjectives from other types of adjectives, which typically yield an intersective or subsective inference.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5814", "words": "4624", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "60", "author": "Qin, Erying; Sun, Chao; Breheny, Richard ", "title": "Does \u2018a couple\u2019 pattern with scalars or numbers - Insights from inference and \u2018so\u2019 tasks", "date": "2025", "keywords": "breheny; couple; inference; numerals; probe; sun; target", "summary": "Sun et al. took graded responses to \u2018S so not W\u2019 sentences as a measure of \u2018liability to strengthen under negation\u2019 and found that this measure can account for previously unexplained variance in rates of target responses in their replication of van Tiel et al\u2019s inference task study. The overall results for the two groups here compared with scales in Sun et al. (2018) are shown in Figure 6.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5815", "words": "7104", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "54", "author": "Rosina, Emil Eva; Liefke, Kristina ", "title": "Experientiality markers in memory reports: A semantics-pragmatics puzzle", "date": "2025", "keywords": "blue; evidence; experientiality; german; liefke; memory; red; reports; rosina; semantics; study; wie", "summary": "GERMAN MAIN STUDY. Additionally, being able to pinpoint specific experientiality markers like German wie is particularly useful for analyzing production data from psychological memory studies that did not themselves create the remembered (and subsequently reported) experience.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5816", "words": "7254", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "49", "author": "Anderson, Carolyn Jane; Kim, Yoolim", "title": "Parenthesized Modifiers in English and Korean: What They (May) Mean", "date": "2025", "keywords": "alternative; anderson; english; korean; modifiers; participants; rpps; scalar", "summary": "They also argue that the meaning of the parenthesized component and its host are more closely Proceedings of ELM 3: 1-18, 2025 Carolyn Jane Anderson and Yoolim Kim: Parenthesized modifiers in English and Korean: What they (may) mean. Lewen & Anderson (2022) propose that the parentheses in RPPs Proceedings of ELM 3: 1-18, 2025 Carolyn Jane Anderson and Yoolim Kim: Parenthesized modifiers in English and Korean: What they (may) mean.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5817", "words": "5502", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "57", "author": "Liu, Mingya; Rotter, Stephanie", "title": "Linguistic and Social Meaning Match: An experiment on modal concord in English", "date": "2025", "keywords": "concord; data; english; liu; meaning; modal; poss; ratings; results; rotter", "summary": "Our results show a strengthening effect by necessity MC and a weakening effect of possibility MC in that significantly higher speaker commitment ratings were received for necessity MC vs. SM constructions (i.e., must certainly vs. must) with the reverse pattern for possibility modal construc- tions (i.e., may possibly vs. may). This paper deals with the phenomenon \u2018modal concord\u2019 (MC) and addresses the linguistic and social meaning of MC constructions.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5818", "words": "8288", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "65", "author": "Dieuleveut, Anouk; Noveck, Ira", "title": "Devoir, ou pouvoir, that is the question", "date": "2025", "keywords": "adult; children; devoir; dieuleveut; english; experiment; force; french; modals; mother; necessity; possibility; pouvoir; use", "summary": "Previous acquisition research has shown that English-speaking children have particular difficulty with necessity modals: comprehension experiments show that they tend to accept must or have-to in possibil- ity scenarios (Noveck 2001, \u00d6zturk & Papafragou 2015, a.o.); production studies show that they use them less frequently than possibility modals, and when they do, their usage is not always adult-like (Dieuleveut et al. 2022). One challenge is that past studies have focused primarily on English, where necessity modals are much rarer than possibility modals in parental speech, which could suggest that the delay is simply due to less exposure.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5819", "words": "5602", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "54", "author": "Cochard, Antoine; van Hout, Angeliek; Demirdache, Hamida", "title": "Liz can buy a croissant or donut. That\u2019s both together, right? Distinguishing target Free Choice from non-target Modal Conjunction in Child French", "date": "2025", "keywords": "^(\ud835\udc36; children; choice; condition; conjunction; croissant; donut; modal; target", "summary": "The results revealed that free choice inferences are not so early acquired as previously thought. Experiments that investigated the ac- quisition of free choice inferences did so by falsifying one of the two disjuncts.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5820", "words": "6266", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "54", "author": "Cantin-Savoie, Ghyslain; Winterstein, Gr\u00e9goire; Foucambert, Denis", "title": "Studying the interplay of context and semantic content in the interpretation of adversative conjunctions with eye-tracking", "date": "2025", "keywords": "adversative; context; duration; effect; fixation; interpretation; participants; reading; sentences; winterstein; word", "summary": "First-gaze duration are said to be influenced by cognitive processes that are not as fast as those influencing first fixation duration (Rayner 1998), and also by plausibility of words in sentence context, which is not the case for first fixation duration (Inhoff 1984). Valence is a categorical variable with two possible values : plus (\u2019more\u2019) or moins (\u2019less\u2019), that represents whether the word following mais (\u2019but\u2019) in item sentences was plus (i.e. a superiority comparative) or moins (i.e. an inferiority comparative).", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5821", "words": "7867", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "62", "author": "Cao, Angela; White, Aaron; Lassiter, Daniel", "title": "Cause, Make, and Force as Graded Causatives", "date": "2025", "keywords": "alt; cao; causal; cause; force; int; model; player; sufficiency; sufresidalt; verbs", "summary": "To support this argument, we pro- vide experimental evidence for a differentiating semantics of three causing verbs using explicitly- defined causal models, which enable us to calculate measures derived from the stimuli. semantics; causatives; causal models; psycholinguistics 1.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5822", "words": "5315", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "55", "author": "Bleotu, Adina Camelia; Panaitescu, Mara; Benz, Anton; Nicolae, Andreea ; B\u00eelb\u00eeie , Gabriela; Tieu, Lyn", "title": "Coloring disjunction in child Romanian", "date": "2025", "keywords": "bleotu; children; coloring; disjunction; like; object; romanian; sau", "summary": "Children interpret some disjunctions conjunctively: Evidence from child Romanian. A binominal test revealed that the observed proportion of exclusive children (10/34) was significantly different from chance (p<.05).", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5823", "words": "5362", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "52", "author": "Barbosa, Jennifer; Pinz\u00f3n-Henao, Paola; Pasquella , Angelina ; Muentener, Paul; Lakusta, Laura", "title": "Mechanistic Support Language in Colombian Spanish-speakers", "date": "2025", "keywords": "adults; children; events; language; mechanism; spanish; speakers; support; verbs", "summary": "These findings shed light on the development of Mechanical Support language in Spanish-speaking children, the influence of context\u2014specifically, visibility of mechanism\u2014on language, as well as the lexicalization patterns for encoding physical support in Spanish more generally. Of note, in English, lexical verbs that encode the mechanism (often denominals) are common in Mechanical Support language (e.g., tape, pin, clip) yet less is known about whether they are used in Spanish.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5824", "words": "6216", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "56", "author": "Bleotu, Adina Camelia; Nicolae, Andreea ; Panaitescu, Mara; B\u00eelb\u00eeie , Gabriela; Benz, Anton; Tieu, Lyn", "title": "A nonce investigation of a possible conjunctive default for disjunction", "date": "2025", "keywords": "adults; bleotu; children; default; disjunction; fie; interpretation; nonce; tieu", "summary": "The current study explores whether Romanian-speaking children and adults have a default preference for conjunctive interpretations when encountering two items A and B linked by an unknown operator. In our study, we investigate the kinds of meanings children and adults ascribe to a sequence where two nouns are linked by nonce words.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5825", "words": "7293", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "53", "author": "Schlotterbeck, Fabian; Berezovskaya, Polina", "title": "Less-comparatives must be less ambiguous than exactly-differentials, experimental data shows", "date": "2025", "keywords": "ambiguity; comparatives; conditions; data; differentials; draft; modal; pages; paper; proceedings; questions; scope", "summary": "scope ambiguity; degree semantics; comparatives; modals; acceptability judgments 1. Another related account is that of Beck (2012a) who derives scope ambiguity of less-comparatives using an alternative-semantics along the lines of Rooth (1992), but also uses the proposal of Oda (2008) to explain ambiguity in exactly-differentials.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5826", "words": "4850", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "58", "author": "Patel, Premvanti; Syrett, Kristen; Aravind, Athulya", "title": "Using the lower bound set by the universal modal to investigate the status of partial objects and count nouns", "date": "2025", "keywords": "adults; children; count; modal; objects; participants; set; trials", "summary": "These studies provide a good starting point for our experiment, which assesses children\u2019s and adults\u2019 treatment of partial objects and the role of language in mediating how such objects are quantified. Using the lower bound set by the universal modal to investigate the status of partial objects and count nouns Premvanti Patel, Kristen Syrett & Athulya Aravind* Abstract.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5828", "words": "4928", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "52", "author": "Mulligan, Karl; Rawlins, Kyle", "title": "Analyzing naturally-sourced Questions Under Discussion", "date": "2025", "keywords": "answer; discourse; discussion; mulligan; qud; quds; questions; rawlins; variability", "summary": "In Figure 4a, we show a breakdown of answer span syntactic phrasal categories, separated by QUD question type. We consider various analyses designed to address the problem of measuring question similarity.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5829", "words": "4603", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "54", "author": "Benz, Anton; Solstad, Torgrim; Bott, Oliver; Kahnberg, Martin; Schalley, Andrea C.", "title": "A conceptual analysis of verbs of pushing and pulling", "date": "2025", "keywords": "agent; angle; barrel; force; motion; movement; object; pushing; verbs", "summary": "It should be noted that the main research goal in this pilot study was to determine the predictors that trigger the production of different verbs and to classify the verbs in semantic verb clusters. However, less progress has been made in the conceptual space of caused motion events involving both an agent and a patient as for verbs like push and pull.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5830", "words": "5637", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "50", "author": "Erbach, Kurt; Poppe, Magnus; Ebert, Cornelia", "title": "Experimental findings for a cross-modal account of dynamic binding in gesture-speech interaction", "date": "2025", "keywords": "discourse; ebert; experiment; follow; gesture; pointing; pronoun", "summary": "154 https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/ELM/issue/archive https://www.elm-conference.net/ Figure 1: Number of follow-up acceptances in pronoun experiment; max-n = 180 To understand whether or not there is an effect of pointing in the resolution of pronoun binding with otherwise unspecified discourse referents\u2014i.e. to understand if there is a difference between (1-a)+(1-b) and (1-c)+(1-b)\u2014the results were analyzed with a mixed-effects model with binomial error distribution constructed in R (R Core Team 2015) using the lmerTest package (Kuznetsova et al. 2019). Dev. questionID (Intercept) 1.172 1.083 Table 3: Summary of glmer model for pronoun experiment results if there was no interaction between binding pronouns and gesture.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5831", "words": "7103", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "54", "author": "Hoeks, Morwenna; Toosarvandani, Maziar; Rysling, Amanda", "title": "How to compute a focus: Evidence from incremental processing", "date": "2025", "keywords": "alternatives; book; context; foci; focus; processing; read; sentence; slowdowns; sof", "summary": "Even if focus slowdowns are due to the general prioritization of focused material, it is conceivable that such slowdowns disappear for SOF, because such foci may not constitute important information. However, since their studies also found suggestive evidence that focus slowdowns do not entirely disappear in the presence of explicit contextual alternatives, it may be that other aspects of interpreting focus, like deducing the location of F-marking (i) or incorporating the alternatives with the sentence meaning (iii), also play a role.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5835", "words": "6219", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "53", "author": "Wu, Yifan; Aparicio, Helena", "title": "Disagreements do not automatically raise the standard of precision", "date": "2025", "keywords": "experiment; figure; imprecise; participants; responses; results; scale; sop; standard; utterance", "summary": "In particular, we ask whether metalinguistic disagreements result in an automatic update of the SoP. In two acceptability judgment experiments, we show that imprecise utterances are not deemed unacceptable when embedded in a disagreement dialogue. This paper investigates the discourse dynamics of imprecision, focusing on whether metalinguistic disagreements affect the acceptability of imprecise utterances.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5836", "words": "6660", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "50", "author": "Lemke, Robin", "title": "Investigating fragment usage with a gamified utterance selection task", "date": "2025", "keywords": "condition; cost; data; experiment; fragment; lemke; messages; participants; usage; utterance", "summary": "Sentence fragments and the notion \u2018sentence\u2019. Investigating fragment usage with a gamified utterance selection task Robin Lemke* Abstract.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5839", "words": "3350", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "52", "author": "Eliatamby, Andr\u00e9; Tieu, Lyn", "title": "The role of definiteness in ad hoc implicatures", "date": "2025", "keywords": "implicatures; mary; sentences; sweater", "summary": "Such an ex- planation is difficult to support, however, if implicatures are only computed at the sentential level, as suggested by Neo-Gricean models of implicature (Sauerland 2004, Geurts 2010). Uniqueness can be a trigger for implicature if implicatures are computed locally (Chierchia et al. 2012, Fox 2007) within the DP: (10) Mary bought EXH the striped sweater Assuming that an alternative to \u2018the striped sweater\u2019 is \u2018the striped and spotted sweater\u2019, then the enriched DP generated in (10) is \u2018the striped and not spotted sweater\u2019.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5845", "words": "6313", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "58", "author": "Walter, Sebastian", "title": "Indirect discourse as mixed quotation? An experimental investigation", "date": "2025", "keywords": "discourse; fid; gestures; matrix; perspective; pointing; quotation; self; speaker; speech; subject", "summary": "Finally, for ID utterances as in (8b) they hypothesize that self-pointing should not be acceptable when aligned with a third-person pronoun as ID does not involve quotation and therefore the gesture cannot be interpreted as a quoted CVG. For FID utterances (cf. (1c)), an analysis has been proposed treating it as a highly specialized form of mixed quotation where the original thought or utterance of the reported speaker with pronouns and tense markings being systematically unquoted, thus accounting for their shifting behavior (Maier 2015).", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5854", "words": "7026", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "52", "author": "Palucci, Jonathan", "title": "Pseudo-scoping out of tensed clauses: cumulation vs. buildups", "date": "2025", "keywords": "buildup; context; cumulation; predicates; problems; readings; variation", "summary": "In this paper, we report experimental results providing evidence that variation readings are not sensitive to buildups. The contrast between (1) and (2) raises the following empirical puzzle: variation readings appear to be predicate sensitive (Barker 2022).", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5857", "words": "6083", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "53", "author": "Grove, Julian; White, Aaron Steven", "title": "Modeling the prompt in inference judgment tasks", "date": "2025", "keywords": "distribution; factive; grove; inference; models; probability; prompt; scale; semantics; state; white", "summary": "Meanwhile, we find that confidence scale model performs the best on the dataset containing the prompt in (6a), as expected, while the confidence scale and probability of confidence scale models perform about equally on the dataset containing the prompt in (6b) and better than Grove & White\u2019s original prompt model (the probability scale model). We refer to this model as the probability of confidence scale model.", "mime": "application/pdf"}, {"id": "elm-5859", "words": "6185", "extension": ".pdf", "flesch": "52", "author": "Coppock, Elizabeth; Beaver, David; Perkins, Wilder; Richardson, Emily ", "title": "Is there a superlative rabbit in the ordinal hat? A study of ordinals vs. degree modifiers in nested definites", "date": "2025", "keywords": "degree; modifiers; ordinals; position; readings; stair; superlatives; table", "summary": "relative readings; nested definite descriptions; ordinals; superlatives 1. Introduction. In this paper, we show that ordinals resist relative readings to a substantially greater extent than superla- tives (and we find that comparatives easily allow them in our experimental setting).", "mime": "application/pdf"}]