On August 26, 2016, there will be a double Friday seminar with two short presentations related to priming, one in Experimental Aesthetics, the other in Experimental Syntax.
Room: HF: 301. Time: 14:00-16:00.
Presentation 1: Priming the gender of Christ
by Per Folgerø & Christer Johansson (University of Bergen)
We show that briefly presenting a word (male / female) before a letterbox-shaped image of eyes of a portrait affects the recognition of gender of the face. Our participants were reliably able to tell the the gender of the images in less than a second. A congruent word speeded up decisions. Renaissance images of the Holy Face, were also significantly more often recognized as a female image when primed by the word “female”. Implications for Experimental Aesthetics will be discussed.
Presentation 2: The subject of PRO
By Tori Larsen & Christer Johansson (University of Bergen)
An experimental study of big PRO is presented. PRO is a mysterious hypothetical empty category in modern grammatical theory, which has some promise to unify phrase structure such that all clauses, including infinite clauses, have a formal element for the subject. According to the PRO theorem, PRO must be ungoverned, which contrasts with PRO carrying case in some languages. Our study focus on reactivation at PRO-positions, as measured by reaction time differences. Our observations indicate an effect, in Norwegian, when PRO reactivates the subject of the matrix sentence. The closer object position does not reliably show reactivation at its related PRO-position. Is this specific for Norwegian?
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