Showing papers in "Language, cognition and neuroscience in 2014"
TL;DR: This work proposes that entry into the mechanism for speech planning (a competitive queuing mechanism) is governed by CPs best suited to the particular types of code-switches, and explores predictions of this CP model and its implications for CS research.
Abstract: Code-switching (CS) is central to many bilingual communities and, though linguistic and sociolinguistic research has characterised different types of code-switches (alternations, insertions, dense CS), the cognitive control processes (CPs) that mediate them are not well understood. A key issue is how during CS speakers produce the right words in the right order. In speech, serial order emerges from a speech plan in which items are represented in parallel. We propose that entry into the mechanism for speech planning (a competitive queuing mechanism) is governed by CPs best suited to the particular types of code-switches. Language task schemas external to the language network govern access. In CS, they are coordinated cooperatively and operate in a coupled or in an open control mode. The former permits alternations and insertions whereas the latter is required for dense CS. We explore predictions of this CP model and its implications for CS research.
233 citations
TL;DR: An attempt at integration is reviewed, the state feedback control (SFC) model and its descendent, the hierarchical SFC model, and how phoneme-level representations might fit in the context of the model.
Abstract: Speech production has been studied within a number of traditions including linguistics, psycholinguistics, motor control, neuropsychology and neuroscience. These traditions have had limited interaction, ostensibly because they target different levels of speech production or different dimensions such as representation, processing or implementation. However, closer examination of reveals a substantial convergence of ideas across the traditions and recent proposals have suggested that an integrated approach may help move the field forward. The present article reviews one such attempt at integration, the state feedback control (SFC) model and its descendent, the hierarchical SFC model. Also considered is how phoneme-level representations might fit in the context of the model.
137 citations
TL;DR: This paper showed that training on non-syntactic executive function (EF) tasks improves readers' ability to recover from misanalysis during language processing, and their post-test eye-movement patterns also revealed significantly improved real-time revision following entry into disambiguating sentence regions where cognitive control is hy...
Abstract: How do general-purpose cognitive abilities affect language processing and comprehension? Recent research emphasises a role for cognitive control—also called executive function (EF)—when individuals must override early parsing decisions as new evidence conflicts with their developing interpretation. We tested if training on non-syntactic EF tasks improves readers' ability to recover from misanalysis during language processing. Participants completed pre/post-reading assessments containing temporarily ambiguous sentences susceptible to misinterpretation. Performance increases on a training task targeting conflict-resolution processes (n-back with “lures”) predicted improvements in garden-path recovery. N-back responders—those demonstrating reliable training gains—significantly increased their comprehension accuracy across assessments. Their posttest eye-movement patterns also revealed significantly improved real-time revision following entry into disambiguating sentence regions where cognitive control is hy...
123 citations
TL;DR: This article showed that pronoun production is also insensitive to semantic biases in settings in which a pronoun would be referentially ambiguous, such as when the comprehender's ability to resolve the pronoun is not actually at stake.
Abstract: A standard assumption in psycholinguistic research on pronoun interpretation is that production and interpretation are guided by the same set of contextual factors. A line of recent research has suggested otherwise, however, arguing instead that pronoun production is insensitive to a class of semantically-driven contextual biases that have been shown to inuence pronoun interpretation. The work reported in this paper addresses three fundamental questions that have been left unresolved by this research. First, research demonstrating the insensitivity of production to semantic biases has relied on referentially-unambiguous settings in which the comprehender’s ability to resolve the pronoun is not actually at stake. Experiment 1, a story continuation study, demonstrates that pronoun production is also insensitive to semantic biases in settings in which a pronoun would be referentially ambiguous. Second, previous research has not distinguished between accounts in which production biases are driven by grammatical properties of intended referents (e.g., subject position) or by information-structural factors (specically, topichood) that are inherently pragmatic in nature. Experiment 2 examines this question with a story continuation study that manipulates the likelihood of potential referents being the topic while keeping grammatical role constant. A signicant eect of the manipulation on rate of pronominalization supports the claim that pronoun production is inuenced by the likelihood that the referent is the current topic. Lastly, the predictions of Kehler et al.’s (2008) Bayesian analysis of the relationship between production and interpretation has never been quantitatively examined. The results of both experiments are shown to support the analysis over two competing models.
105 citations
TL;DR: The results of two self-paced reading experiments carried out in Spanish and in Italian show a similar pattern for the resolution of null subjects, as predicted by Accessibility Theory, whereas theresolution of overt pronouns seems to diverge, suggesting that subtle differences restricted to the scope of the overt pronoun yield systematic variation between the two languages.
Abstract: The present study explores the cross-linguistic differences between Spanish and Italian in the anaphoric interpretation of null subjects and overt pronominal subjects. The availability of null subjects in a language is determined by the parametric settings of its syntax, but their felicitous use as an alternative to overt pronouns depends on contextual conditions affecting how different expressions retrieve their antecedents in the discourse. According to Accessibility Theory, at least some of these principles must have universal validity; however, up to now no experimental research has been carried out with the aim of comparing directly the interpretation of anaphoric dependencies in two typologically similar null subject languages. In this paper, we report the results of two self-paced reading experiments carried out in Spanish and in Italian. The results show a similar pattern for the resolution of null subjects, as predicted by Accessibility Theory, whereas the resolution of overt pronouns seems to di...
92 citations
TL;DR: Ref referential choice seems to depend on perspective taking in language, which develops with increasing linguistic experience and cognitive capacity, but also on the ability to keep track of the prominence of discourse referents, which is gradually lost with older age.
Abstract: In this study, children, young adults and elderly adults were tested in production and comprehension tasks assessing referential choice. Our aims were (1) to determine whether speakers egocentrically base their referential choice on the preceding linguistic discourse or also take into account the perspective of a hypothetical listener and (2) whether the possible impact of perspective taking on referential choice changes with increasing age, with its associated changes in cognitive capacity. In the production task, participants described picture-based stories featuring two characters of the same gender, making it necessary to use unambiguous forms; in the comprehension task, participants interpreted potentially ambiguous pronouns at the end of similar orally presented stories. Young adults (aged 18–35) were highly sensitive to the informational needs of hypothetical conversational partners in their production and comprehension of referring expressions. In contrast, children (aged 4–7) did not take into account possible conversational partners and tended to use pronouns for all given referents, leading to the production of ambiguous pronouns that are unrecoverable for a listener. This was mirrored in the outcome of the comprehension task, where children were insensitive to the shift of discourse topic marked by the speaker. The elderly adults (aged 69–87) behaved differently from both young adults and children. They showed a clear sensitivity to the other person's perspective in both production and comprehension, but appeared to lack the necessary cognitive capacities to keep track of the prominence of discourse referents, producing more potentially ambiguous pronouns than young adults, though fewer than children. In conclusion then, referential choice seems to depend on perspective taking in language, which develops with increasing linguistic experience and cognitive capacity, but also on the ability to keep track of the prominence of discourse referents, which is gradually lost with older age.
84 citations
TL;DR: This article examined the time course of influence of variables ranging from relatively perceptual (e.g., bigram frequency) to relatively semantic on ERP responses, analysed at the single-item level.
Abstract: Visual word recognition is a process that, both hierarchically and in parallel, draws on different types of information ranging from perceptual to orthographic to semantic. A central question concerns when and how these different types of information come online and interact after a word form is initially perceived. Numerous studies addressing aspects of this question have been conducted with a variety of techniques [e.g., behaviour, eye-tracking, event-related potentials (ERPs)], and divergent theoretical models, suggesting different overall speeds of word processing, have coalesced around clusters of mostly method-specific results. Here, we examine the time course of influence of variables ranging from relatively perceptual (e.g., bigram frequency) to relatively semantic (e.g., the number of lexical associates) on ERP responses, analysed at the single-item level. Our results, in combination with a critical review of the literature, suggest methodological, analytic and theoretical factors that may have led to inconsistency in results of past studies; we will argue that consideration of these factors may lead to a reconciliation between divergent views of the speed of word recognition.
76 citations
TL;DR: This article found that children eventually come to avoid the production of overgeneralisation errors involving the dative (e.g., *I said her “no”), in particular those involving the DO-dative, by obtaining from adults and children judgements of well-formed and over-general datives with 301 different verbs (44 for children).
Abstract: How do children eventually come to avoid the production of overgeneralisation errors, in particular, those involving the dative (e.g., *I said her “no”)? The present study addressed this question by obtaining from adults and children (5–6, 9–10 years) judgements of well-formed and over-general datives with 301 different verbs (44 for children). A significant effect of pre-emption—whereby the use of a verb in the prepositional-object (PO)-dative construction constitutes evidence that double-object (DO)-dative uses are not permitted—was observed for every age group. A significant effect of entrenchment—whereby the use of a verb in any construction constitutes evidence that unattested dative uses are not permitted—was also observed for every age group, with both predictors also accounting for developmental change between ages 5–6 and 9–10 years. Adults demonstrated knowledge of a morphophonological constraint that prohibits Latinate verbs from appearing in the DO-dative construction (e.g., *I suggested her t...
66 citations
TL;DR: The authors compared the distribution of gesture types, and the gestures' size and iconic precision across retellings of the same Road Runner cartoon story in 20 groups of 3 naive participants, and found that speakers gestured less frequently in stories retold to old addressees than New Addressee.
Abstract: Are gesturing and speaking shaped by similar communicative constraints? In an experiment, we teased apart communicative from cognitive constraints upon multiple dimensions of speech-accompanying gestures in spontaneous dialogue. Typically, speakers attenuate old, repeated or predictable information but not new information. Our study distinguished what was new or old for speakers from what was new or old for (and shared with) addressees. In 20 groups of 3 naive participants, speakers retold the same Road Runner cartoon story twice to one addressee and once to another. We compared the distribution of gesture types, and the gestures' size and iconic precision across retellings. Speakers gestured less frequently in stories retold to Old Addressees than New Addressees. Moreover, the gestures they produced in stories retold to Old Addressees were smaller and less precise than those retold to New Addressees, although these were attenuated over time as well. Consistent with our previous findings about speaking, g...
58 citations
TL;DR: The authors suggest that attending to referents with a referential goal in mind results in the obligatory retrieval of previous descriptions, and that these previous descriptions are adapted to current purposes via monitoring and adjustment.
Abstract: When speakers generate referential descriptions, they take their addressees' needs into account through processes of audience design. In this paper we consider audience design as a kind of expert performance, in which skilled behaviour is the result of an interplay between memory and attention. We suggest that attending to referents with a referential goal in mind results in the obligatory retrieval of previous descriptions, and that these previous descriptions are adapted to current purposes via monitoring and adjustment. In an experiment, speakers gained experience describing certain referents with a given addressee, and then later described these referents to either the same or a different addressee. When describing old referents, speakers relied on remembered descriptions, adding detail via monitoring and adjustment to meet an addressee's less-informed perspective. However, speakers were unable to elide information that was no longer relevant, resulting in a high rate of referential overspecification....
50 citations
TL;DR: The data suggest that cumulative structural priming effects do transfer across language production tasks (e.g., from written stem completion to picture description, and from picture description towritten stem completion), but only when both tasks are presented in the same experimental session.
Abstract: We present six experiments that examine cumulative structural priming effects (i.e., structural priming effects that accumulate across many utterances). Of particular interest is whether (1) cumulative priming effects transfer across language production tasks and (2) the transfer of cumulative priming effects across tasks persists over the course of a week. Our data suggest that cumulative structural priming effects do transfer across language production tasks (e.g., from written stem completion to picture description, and from picture description to written stem completion), but only when both tasks are presented in the same experimental session. When cumulative priming effects are established in one task, and the second (changed) task is not presented until a week later, the cumulative priming effects are not observed.
TL;DR: The authors found that implicit causality is related to a broad social judgement task, and it is affected by general knowledge about the participants in the event on closer inspection, neither of these claims have been established.
Abstract: In causal dependent clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (contrast Sally frightens Mary because she … with Sally loves Mary because she …) This “implicit causality” phenomenon is understood to reflect intuitions about who caused the event Researchers have debated whether these intuitions are based on linguistic structure or instead a function of high-level, non-linguistic cognition Two lines of evidence support the latter conclusion: implicit causality is related to a broad social judgement task, and it is affected by general knowledge about the participants in the event On closer inspection, neither of these claims have been established Eight new experiments find that (a) the relationship between implicit causality and the social judgement task is tenuous, and (b) previously employed event-participant manipulations have minimal to no effect on implicit causality These findings support an account on which implicit causality is driven pri
TL;DR: This study tests the hypothesis that three common types of disfluency reflect variance in what strategies are available to the production system for responding to difficulty in language production, and coded participants' speech in a storytelling paradigm for these types.
Abstract: This study tests the hypothesis that three common types of disfluency (fillers, silent pauses, and repeated words) reflect variance in what strategies are available to the production system for responding to difficulty in language production. Participants' speech in a storytelling paradigm was coded for the three disfluency types. Repeats occurred most often when difficult material was already being produced and could be repeated, but fillers and silent pauses occurred most when difficult material was still being planned. Fillers were associated only with conceptual difficulties, consistent with the proposal that they reflect a communicative signal whereas silent pauses and repeats were also related to lexical and phonological difficulties. These differences are discussed in terms of different strategies available to the language production system.
TL;DR: This paper examined the relationship between executive control and the revision of misinterpretations in sentence comprehension, and argued for a role of executive control, which is possibly domain-specific, in the revision process during sentence comprehension.
Abstract: Two individual differences experiments examined the relationship between executive control and the revision of misinterpretations in sentence comprehension. Garden-path sentences were used as they often lead to initial misinterpretations, necessitating revision during comprehension. In addition to garden-path revision, verbal and non-verbal executive controls were assessed by using the verbal and non-verbal version of the Stroop task. Experiment 1 showed that garden-path revision errors in a grammaticality judgement task correlated with verbal Stroop interference errors. Experiment 2 further showed that the time taken to revise the garden-path interpretation correlated with the time taken to resolve verbal Stroop interference, but not with the time taken to resolve non-verbal Stroop interference. Together, the results argue for a role of executive control, which is possibly domain-specific, in the revision of misinterpretations during sentence comprehension.
Abstract: Fil: Fernandez, Gerardo Abel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas. Centro Cientifico Tecnologico Conicet - Bahia Blanca. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingenieria Electrica "Alfredo Desages". Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ingenieria Electrica y de Computadoras. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingenieria Electrica "Alfredo Desages"; Argentina
TL;DR: This paper examined the spontaneous speech and cospeech gestures of eight Turkish-speaking children aged one to three and focused on their caused motion event expressions, finding that the main semantic elements of caused motion such as Action and Path can be encoded in the verb (e.g. sok- ‘put in’) and the arguments of a verb can be easily omitted.
Abstract: Previous research on language development shows that children are tuned early on to the language-specific semantic and syntactic encoding of events in their native language. Here we ask whether language-specificity is also evident in children's early representations in gesture accompanying speech. In a longitudinal study, we examined the spontaneous speech and cospeech gestures of eight Turkish-speaking children aged one to three and focused on their caused motion event expressions. In Turkish, unlike in English, the main semantic elements of caused motion such as Action and Path can be encoded in the verb (e.g. sok- ‘put in’) and the arguments of a verb can be easily omitted. We found that Turkish-speaking children's speech indeed displayed these language-specific features and focused on verbs to encode caused motion. More interestingly, we found that their early gestures also manifested specificity. Children used iconic cospeech gestures (from 19 months onwards) as often as pointing gestures and represe...
TL;DR: The authors investigated the effects of valence and arousal on lexical decision by manipulating both dimensions, while controlling correlated psycholinguistic variables (e.g., word length, frequency, imageability).
Abstract: Behavioural and neurophysiological studies reveal a prioritisation for emotional material during different cognitive tasks. Although emotion comprises two dimensions, i.e., valence and arousal, previous research has mostly focused on the former. This study aimed to investigate the effects of valence and arousal on lexical decision (LD) by manipulating both dimensions, while controlling correlated psycholinguistic variables (e.g., word length, frequency, imageability). Results showed that valence and arousal affect word recognition in an interactive way: LD latencies are slower for positive high-arousal and negative low-arousal words compared to positive low-arousal and negative high-arousal words, in line with an approach-withdrawal tendency model. Furthermore, principal component and regression analyses revealed a unique contribution of a cluster of emotion variables, independent of lexico-semantic variables, to explaining LD latencies. We conclude that emotional valence and arousal both need to be taken...
TL;DR: The use of event-related potentials to investigate whether and when effects of task modulate how visually presented words are processed demonstrates that task demands affect how meaning and sound are generated from written words.
Abstract: Many theories of visual word processing assume obligatory semantic access and phonological recoding whenever a written word is encountered. However, the relative importance of different reading processes depends on task. The current study uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether – and, if so, when and how – effects of task modulate how visually presented words are processed. Participants were presented written words in the context of two tasks, delayed reading aloud and proper name detection. Stimuli varied factorially on lexical frequency and on spelling-to-sound regularity, while controlling for other lexical variables. Effects of both lexical frequency and regularity were modulated by task. Lexical frequency modulated N400 amplitude, but only in the reading aloud task, whereas spelling-to-sound regularity interacted with frequency to modulate the late positive complex, again only in the reading aloud task. Taken together, these results demonstrate that task demands affect how meaning...
TL;DR: It is concluded that islands are not fully reducible to processing considerations and therefore must – at least in part – be of grammatical origin, and online formation of a cataphoric dependency is not affected by island constraints.
Abstract: There is considerable controversy on island constraints on wh-dependencies in the psycholinguistic literature. One major point of contention is whether islands result from processing limitations such as working memory capacity or from domain-specific linguistic knowledge. The current study investigates whether islands can be reduced to processing considerations, by examining processing of another long-distance dependency, cataphora. If wh-dependencies with the licensing element (the verb or preposition) falling inside an island entail an unbearable memory load on the parser, then other dependencies, including cataphora, with a licensing element (the antecedent), falling inside an island, should yield a similar processing difficulty. The results from a self-paced reading experiment demonstrate that online formation of a cataphoric dependency is not affected by island constraints. We conclude that islands are not fully reducible to processing considerations and therefore must – at least in part – be of gram...
TL;DR: The authors investigated the processing of grammatical and stereotypical gender cues in anaphor resolution in German and found evidence for asymmetries in processing feminine and masculine grammatical gender and are discussed with reference to two-stage models of anaphore resolution.
Abstract: Two eye-tracking studies addressed the processing of grammatical and stereotypical gender cues in anaphor resolution in German. The authors investigated pronominal (er ‘he’/sie ‘she’) and noun phrase (dieser Mann ‘this man’/diese Frau ‘this woman’) anaphors in sentences containing stereotypical role nouns as antecedents (Example: Oft hatte der Elektriker gute Einfalle, regelmassig plante er/dieser Mann neue Projekte' Often had the electrician good ideas, regularly planned he/this man new projects'). Participants were native speakers of German (N=40 and N=24 in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). Results show that influences of grammatical gender occur in early stages of processing, whereas the influences of stereotypical gender appear only in later measures. Both effects, however, strongly depend on the type of anaphor. Furthermore, the results provide evidence for asymmetries in processing feminine and masculine grammatical gender and are discussed with reference to two-stage models of anaphor resolution.
TL;DR: This paper showed that the cognitive demands of different presupposition triggers do not primarily depend on whether they optionally or obligatorily lead to process the presupposit. But they also showed that processing the information conveyed by a presupposition can be either optional or mandatory in case of failure.
Abstract: If a speaker utters a sentence p containing a presupposition trigger that activates a presupposition q, and q does not belong to the common ground of presuppositions, it is a case of presupposition failure. If this occurs, speakers are required to repair the failure to make sense of the utterance. According to Glanzberg, two subcategories of being infelicitous may emerge in the case of presupposition failure: one is that strong presuppositions lead to obligatory repair, and the other is that weak presuppositions lead only to an optional repair. Following Glanzberg's suggestion, in this paper we present the results of an experiment supporting the idea that, depending on the kind of trigger, processing the information conveyed by a presupposition can be either optional or mandatory in case of presupposition failure. The conclusion of this paper is that the cognitive demands of different presupposition triggers do not primarily depend on whether they optionally or obligatorily lead to process the presupposit...
TL;DR: An artificial speech stream was created that contained minimal segmentation cues and paired it with two synchronous facial displays in which visual prosody was either informative or uninformative for identifying word boundaries, suggesting that facial cues can help learners solve the early challenges of language acquisition.
Abstract: Speech is typically a multimodal phenomenon, yet few studies have focused on the exclusive contributions of visual cues to language acquisition. To address this gap, we investigated whether visual prosodic information can facilitate speech segmentation. Previous research has demonstrated that language learners can use lexical stress and pitch cues to segment speech and that learners can extract this information from talking faces. Thus, we created an artificial speech stream that contained minimal segmentation cues and paired it with two synchronous facial displays in which visual prosody was either informative or uninformative for identifying word boundaries. Across three familiarisation conditions (audio stream alone, facial streams alone, and paired audiovisual), learning occurred only when the facial displays were informative to word boundaries, suggesting that facial cues can help learners solve the early challenges of language acquisition.
TL;DR: It is shown that an analogical approach with the generalised context model is highly successful in predicting the plural form for any given singular form, as evidenced by its stability across 10 rounds of cross-validation.
Abstract: The noun plural system in Modern Standard Arabic lies at a nexus of critical issues in morphological learnability. The suffixing “sound” plural competes with as many as 31 non-concatenative “broken” plural patterns. Our computational analysis of singular–plural pairs in the Corpus of Contemporary Arabic explores what types of linguistic information are statistically relevant to morphological generalisation for this highly complex system. We show that an analogical approach with the generalised context model is highly successful in predicting the plural form for any given singular form. This model proves to be robust to variation, as evidenced by its stability across 10 rounds of cross-validation. The predictive power is carried almost entirely by the CV template, a representation which specifies a segment's status as a consonant or vowel only, providing further support for the abstraction of prosodic templates in the Arabic morphological system as proposed by McCarthy and Prince.
TL;DR: Speech and gesture were more tightly synchronised than speech with action, suggesting that the two could be uniquely designed to work together for the purpose of communication.
Abstract: Researchers have theorised that speech and gesture are integrated in communication. We ask whether this integrated relationship is indexed by a unique temporal link between speech and gesture. University students performed videotaped tasks that elicited: (1) speech and action descriptions about how to act on objects and (2) speech and gesture descriptions about how to act on objects. Integration was indexed by measuring the onset of speech with actions and speech with gestures (in milliseconds), with smaller differences reflecting a greater degree of synchrony. One hundred per cent of the subjects gestured in the gesture condition and performed actions in the action condition. Speech and gesture were more tightly synchronised than speech with action. The greater synchrony between gesture and speech suggests that the two could be uniquely designed to work together for the purpose of communication.
TL;DR: The results suggest that judicious over-specification can facilitate search in a precisely defined class of problematic conditions (but less so in other cases) even if the hearer has previous knowledge about the domain.
Abstract: This is a pre-final version of the article, whose official publication is expected in the winter of 2013-14.
TL;DR: This article examined the orthographic or phonological/lexical nature of this consonantal bias, and to determine whether vocalic priming can be obtained under different presentation conditions, manipulated the duration of prime presentation.
Abstract: In a recent study using a masked priming lexical decision task, New, Araujo, and Nazzi found priming of targets by primes sharing consonants (jalu-JOLI) but not by primes sharing vowels (vobi-JOLI). To examine the orthographic or phonological/lexical nature of this consonantal bias, and to determine whether vocalic priming can be obtained under different presentation conditions, we manipulated the duration of prime presentation. Experiment 1 examined masked priming effects for consonant- or vowel-related primes with 33 ms prime durations, while Experiments 2 and 3 examined masked priming effects with longer prime processing times (66 ms or 50 + 16 ms). Results replicated the relative advantage of consonant over vocalic priming, and established that the consonant bias was not at the orthographic level but rather at the phonological and lexical levels. Furthermore, primes sharing vowels with the target showed inhibition for longer processing times. The implications of these findings for models of visual word recognition are discussed.
TL;DR: This paper introduces a special issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience dedicated to Production of Referring Expressions: Models and Empirical Data, focusing on models of reference production that make empirically testable predictions, as well as on empirical work that can inform the design of such models.
Abstract: Article Accepted Date: 29 May 2014 Acknowledgements The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Cognitive Science Society for the organisation of the Workshop on Production of Referring Expressions: Bridging the Gap between Cognitive and Computational Approaches to Reference, from which this special issue originated. Funding Emiel Krahmer and Albert Gatt thank The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for VICI grant Bridging the Gap between Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics: The Case of Referring Expressions (grant number 277-70-007).
TL;DR: The authors found that children follow similar syntactic, semantic and discourse constraints as adults, but the observed effects are less stable and appear much later in the eye-movement record than in adults.
Abstract: Studies on young children's online comprehension of pronominal reference suggests that children follow similar syntactic, semantic and discourse constraints as adults. However, the observed effects are less stable and appear much later in the eye-movement record than in adults. It is not clear whether this is because children are cued by a different set of factors than adults; or whether children use the same set of constraints, like subjecthood or first mention, but the delay is caused by the developmental stage in which these cues are not yet fully acquired. We added an information structure cue (focus) and asked whether it affects syntactically more- or less-salient discourse referents (subjects/objects) the same way and shows a similar pattern in adults and children or whether it modulates the reliance on syntactic salience in children. Four-year-old German children and adults listened to stories with focused or unfocused syntactically prominent and non-prominent entities, subjects and objects, while ...
TL;DR: This paper conducted four sentence-picture-matching experiments that primed for the comprehension of object relative clauses in L1 and proficient L2 speakers of German and found that the L2 group showed larger priming effects in comparison to the L1 group.
Abstract: The role of linguistic experience in structural priming is unclear. Although it is explicitly predicted that experience contributes to priming effects on several theoretical accounts, to date the empirical data has been mixed. To investigate this issue, we conducted four sentence-picture-matching experiments that primed for the comprehension of object relative clauses in L1 and proficient L2 speakers of German. It was predicted that an effect of experience would only be observed in instances where priming effects are likely to be weak in experienced L1 speakers. In such circumstances, priming should be stronger in L2 speakers because of their comparative lack of experience using and processing the L2 test structures. The experiments systematically manipulated the primes to decrease lexical and conceptual overlap between primes and targets. The results supported the hypothesis: in two of the four studies, the L2 group showed larger priming effects in comparison to the L1 group. This effect only occurred wh...
TL;DR: Simulation results show that cascading activation could provide a plausible account not only for the presence of co-productions in speech errors but also for their temporal and spatial properties.
Abstract: Recent studies show that speech errors involve the co-production of the phonetic properties of both targets and error outcomes. Based on the spatial and temporal properties of these co-productions, Pouplier and Goldstein argued that they are influenced by speech production mechanisms that detect and suppress errorful articulations. In this commentary, we provide simulation data supporting an alternative account based on cascading activation. Novel simulation results in the Gradient Symbol Processing framework show that in speech errors target and error phonological representations are gradiently co-activated. Using the TADA system, we show how these types of co-activation patterns could give rise to the articulatory patterns observed by Pouplier and Goldstein. These results show that cascading activation could provide a plausible account not only for the presence of co-productions in speech errors but also for their temporal and spatial properties.