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Cleveland Kent Evans (Bellevue University) Session 73From Clara Wieland to Janice Meredith: the influence of literature on baby names in the 19 th century United StatesDuring the 19 th century popular fiction inspired the use of many given names in the United States. Data from census recordsshows how certain names increased partly due to literary characters. Some examples include Clara, influenced by both “Wieland”and “Clara Howard” by Charles Brockden Brown at the start of the century, and Janice, invented by Paul Leicester Ford for“Janice Meredith” at the end of it. Other examples include Pearl from “The Scarlet Letter” and English author Marie Corelli’s“Thelma”. Surnames of authors such as Byron and Lowell also became given names under the influence of literature.Michael Falk (Independent Scholar) Session 69The names of Nova Scotia’s covesThis paper deals with the names of the 706 coves along the coast of Nova Scotia. Two of these names are Mi’kmaq, a few areFrench and the vast majority are English. Many coves bear the family name of an early settler. Other common types of name arebased on a physical description of the cove, e.g. Sandy Cove, human activity, e.g. Mill Cove, or animals or fish of possibleeconomic interest, e.g. Seal Cove or Herring Cove. The origin of the name of Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia’s popular touristattraction, will be discussed in detail.Emily Fedele (University of Southern California) Session 17Elsi Kaiser (University of Southern California)Anaphora and cataphora in Italian: consequences of linear order on null and overt pronounsPronoun interpretation is central for comprehension. Prior work focused mostly on anaphora, where pronouns refer topreviously-mentioned antecedents. Less research is on cataphora, where antecedents follow pronouns. Existing work suggestscataphora trigger an active-search mechanism: The parser actively searches for a syntactically-licensed antecedent. Our resultsshow that both processing constraints (‘impatient parser’) and the grammatical properties of referring expressions contribute tothe outcome of reference resolution. Furthermore, in line with related research, we find that strong grammatical principles(Binding Theory) are powerful enough to ‘block’ some processing effects, furthering our understanding of how differentcomponents of language processing interact.Sarah Fish (Boston University) Session 17Rama Novogrodsky (Boston University)Robert Hoffmeister (Boston University)Synonyms and non-native ASL users: the power of phonologyThe present study investigates whether Deaf children of hearing parents (DCHP), a group which typically receives less than idealsign language input in both quality and timing, show decreasing preference for phonological foils and increasing preference forsemantic foils with age. 130 DCHP participants in two different age groups (6;0-7;0 and 13;0-14;0) took a receptive ASLsynonyms test. The performance of both age groups shows significant developmental improvement. In contrast to research withboth hearing and Deaf children natively acquiring a language, our results indicate that these non-native language learners do notswitch their preferences from phonological to semantic foils.Joel Fishbein (Pomona College) Session 34Jesse A. Harris (Pomona College)Using structural cues in processing polysemesPsycholinguistic research suggests that the processor initially activates an underspecified representation of a polyseme consistentwith all its senses, and thereafter selects a specific sense only when grammatically required (Frazier & Rayner, 1990; Frisson &Pickering, 1999, 2001). A self-paced reading and crowd sourced fill-in-the-blanks task indicate that sense-selection is alsosensitive to default thematic-role assignment: the processor provisionally interprets clause-initial animate nouns as agents andthereby commits to a literal sense of the polyseme. Our results support a version of the underspecified processing model whereinthe processor utilizes structural cues to quickly home-in on a specific sense for the polyseme.151