Abstract for Gregory Murphy's talk

Prototypicality in Sentence Production
Gregory Murphy (New York University)
November 22, 2005 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Considerable controversy surrounds whether neural circuitry subserving grammar is common to human cognition or whether it is unique. Grammatical-specific language impairment (G-SLI) is a disorder of language acquisition - specifically grammatical acquisition - in children who otherwise appear to be normally developing. Some researchers claim a domain-general deficit in auditory processing speed or capacity causes G-SLI, whereas others claim impairment to a domain-specific system devoted to grammar itself causes G-SLI. We found evidence from electrical brain responses for a selective impairment to grammatical processing of language in G-SLI.

People have a preference to produce names of typical entities ahead of atypical entities in certain contexts, e.g., apples and lemons rather than lemons and apples. Prior work by Kay Bock and colleagues concluded that this effect was lexical rather than conceptual. However, research on concepts concludes that typicality is a conceptual variable. The present experiments investigate the mechanisms by which typicality influences sentence production and manage to sort out this contradiction. Mostly.