Abstract

The theory of the Universal Grammar developed by Chomsky has been known for many years. The main idea behind the theory was that the processing of the language does not depend on the culture but it universal among all the languages. Further psycholinguistic studies developed the ideas about schematic comprehension of the language, giving rise to the idea of the "garden path effect". Research focused on the processing of the ambiguous sentences and found the tendency for readers to prefer interpretations of specific sentence areas as objects. The current study summarizes the ideas of psycholinguistic study and incorporates a novel language structure to study readers' syntactic preferences. In addition, conducting the study in Russian language accompanies previous research in other languages, also arguing in favor of the Universal Grammar model given the hypothesis was supported. It was hypothesized that readers would prefer the comparison of the two direct objects over the subjects, which would be reflected by faster reading times. Self-paced reading ask was administered to the participants in order to measure their reading times. The analysis found no significant differences in the reading times of the critical area, thus hypothesis was not supported. Possible explanations, limitations, and further directions are discussed.

Thesis Completion

2019

Semester

Spring

Thesis Chair/Advisor

Modianos, Doan T.

Co-Chair

Villegas, Alvaro

Degree

Bachelor of Science (B.S.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

Psychology

Degree Program

Psychology

Language

English

Access Status

Open Access

Release Date

5-1-2019

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