Acceptability, Decision-making and Parsing (3/4)

Brian Dillon (University of Massachusetts – Amherst)
Acceptability, Decision-making and Parsing

In seminar three we will introduce the Drift Diffusion Model (DDM), which models both the reaction time and accuracy of rapid two-alternative forced choice decisions. The DDM offers a dynamic perspective on the decision processes that underly acceptability judgments by decomposing the decision process into distinct parameters, including how clearly a string is perceived as grammatical and how long it takes a perceiver to compute that analysis. We will see examples of how this aspect of the DDM has been used to investigate the processing of subject-verb agreement, and the nature of the memory mechanisms that support syntactic processing.

Readings

• Ratcliff, R., Smith, P. L., Brown, S. D., & McKoon, G. (2016). Diffusion decision model: Current issues and history. Trends in cognitive sciences, 20(4), 260-281.
• Hammerly,C., Dillon, B., & Staub, A. (in press, Cognitive Psychology). The grammaticality asymmetry in agreement attraction reflects response bias: Experimental and modeling evidence.