The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Matthew Wagers, Professor and Department Chair at the Department of Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz.   Dr. Wagers will speak on "Alignment, Reanalysis and Reencoding in a Verb-initial Language".

When do two DPs interact in sentence processing, and how does their similarity relationship affect that interaction? My principal case study will be the processing of relative clauses (RCs) in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec (SLZ), an Oto-Manguean language of Oaxaca. SLZ is a verb-initial language whose ambiguous RCs consist of N - V - N sequences. Resumptive pronouns (RPs) can be inserted to disambiguate, either in subject, or object position; but object RPs sometimes appear to be quite difficult to comprehend. In a series of judgment and eye-tracking experiments, we find that SLZ -- like many languages -- shows a version of the Subject Advantage. However, it is weak and defeasible. We further find that the similarity of the two DPs is a principal determinant of difficulty. We take this as evidence of encoding interference, a somewhat surprising finding given the positional distinctness of the two nouns. We link the existence of encoding interference, instead, to their interaction via reanalysis. Finally, the results from SLZ will be compared to similar, recent findings in other languages with optional object RPs (Hebrew) and ambiguous N - V - N RCs (Chamorro).

Dr. Wagers is a linguist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interest is in language processing, especially the coordination of syntactic information in memory.  He teaches courses at UCSC on psycholinguistics, experimental methods & design, language and memory, and syntax.

Dr. Wagers completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics at UMD (2008), supervised by Colin Phillips. Before that, he received his A.B. in Molecular Biology at Princeton University (2003), with Certificates in Neuroscience and in Linguistics.