TY - JOUR
A1 - Mertzen, Daniela
A1 - Lago, Sol
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - The benefits of preregistration for hypothesis-driven bilingualism research
JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition
N2 - Preregistration is an open science practice that requires the specification of research hypotheses and analysis plans before the data are inspected. Here, we discuss the benefits of preregistration for hypothesis-driven, confirmatory bilingualism research. Using examples from psycholinguistics and bilingualism, we illustrate how non-peer reviewed preregistrations can serve to implement a clean distinction between hypothesis testing and data exploration. This distinction helps researchers avoid casting post-hoc hypotheses and analyses as confirmatory ones. We argue that, in keeping with current best practices in the experimental sciences, preregistration, along with sharing data and code, should be an integral part of hypothesis-driven bilingualism research.
KW - preregistration
KW - open science
KW - bilingualism
KW - psycholinguistics
KW - confirmatory analysis
KW - exploratory analysis
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728921000031
SN - 1366-7289
SN - 1469-1841
VL - 24
IS - 5
SP - 807
EP - 812
PB - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY - Cambridge
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann
A1 - Mertzen, Daniela
A1 - Van Dyke, Julie A.
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - Interference patterns in subject-verb agreement and reflexives revisited
BT - a large-sample study
JF - Journal of memory and language
N2 - Cue-based retrieval theories in sentence processing predict two classes of interference effect: (i) Inhibitory interference is predicted when multiple items match a retrieval cue: cue-overloading leads to an overall slowdown in reading time; and (ii) Facilitatory interference arises when a retrieval target as well as a distractor only partially match the retrieval cues; this partial matching leads to an overall speedup in retrieval time. Inhibitory interference effects are widely observed, but facilitatory interference apparently has an exception: reflexives have been claimed to show no facilitatory interference effects. Because the claim is based on underpowered studies, we conducted a large-sample experiment that investigated both facilitatory and inhibitory interference. In contrast to previous studies, we find facilitatory interference effects in reflexives. We also present a quantitative evaluation of the cue-based retrieval model of Engelmann, Jager, and Vasishth (2019).
KW - Sentence processing
KW - Cue-based retrieval
KW - Similarity-based interference
KW - Reflexives
KW - Agreement
KW - Bayesian data analysis
KW - Replication
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104063
SN - 0749-596X
SN - 1096-0821
VL - 111
PB - Elsevier
CY - San Diego
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Avetisyan, Serine
A1 - Lago, Sol
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - Does case marking affect agreement attraction in comprehension?
JF - Journal of memory and language
N2 - Previous studies have suggested that distinctive case marking on noun phrases reduces attraction effects in production, i.e., the tendency to produce a verb that agrees with a nonsubject noun. An important open question is whether attraction effects are modulated by case information in sentence comprehension. To address this question, we conducted three attraction experiments in Armenian, a language with a rich and productive case system. The experiments showed clear attraction effects, and they also revealed an overall role of case marking such that participants showed faster response and reading times when the nouns in the sentence had different case. However, we found little indication that distinctive case marking modulated attraction effects. We present a theoretical proposal of how case and number information may be used differentially during agreement licensing in comprehension. More generally, this work sheds light on the nature of the retrieval cues deployed when completing morphosyntactic dependencies.
KW - subject-verb agreement
KW - attraction
KW - Case
KW - Eastern Armenian
KW - cue-based
KW - retrieval
KW - comprehension
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104087
SN - 0749-596X
SN - 1096-0821
VL - 112
PB - Elsevier
CY - San Diego
ER -
TY - GEN
A1 - Stone, Kate
A1 - Nicenboim, Bruno
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
A1 - Rösler, Frank
T1 - Understanding the effects of constraint and predictability in ERP
T2 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2 - Intuitively, strongly constraining contexts should lead to stronger probabilistic representations of sentences in memory. Encountering unexpected words could therefore be expected to trigger costlier shifts in these representations than expected words. However, psycholinguistic measures commonly used to study probabilistic processing, such as the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, are sensitive to word predictability but not to contextual constraint. Some research suggests that constraint-related processing cost may be measurable via an ERP positivity following the N400, known as the anterior post-N400 positivity (PNP). The PNP is argued to reflect update of a sentence representation and to be distinct from the posterior P600, which reflects conflict detection and reanalysis. However, constraint-related PNP findings are inconsistent. We sought to conceptually replicate Federmeier et al. (2007) and Kuperberg et al. (2020), who observed that the PNP, but not the N400 or the P600, was affected by constraint at unexpected but plausible words. Using a pre-registered design and statistical approach maximising power, we demonstrated a dissociated effect of predictability and constraint: strong evidence for predictability but not constraint in the N400 window, and strong evidence for constraint but not predictability in the later window. However, the constraint effect was consistent with a P600 and not a PNP, suggesting increased conflict between a strong representation and unexpected input rather than greater update of the representation. We conclude that either a simple strong/weak constraint design is not always sufficient to elicit the PNP, or that previous PNP constraint findings could be an artifact of smaller sample size.
T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 829
KW - N400
KW - anterior PNP
KW - posterior P600
KW - probabilistic processing
KW - constraint
KW - predictability
KW - entropy
Y1 - 2023
U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-587594
SN - 1866-8364
IS - 829
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Stone, Kate
A1 - Nicenboim, Bruno
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
A1 - Rösler, Frank
T1 - Understanding the effects of constraint and predictability in ERP
JF - Neurobiology of language
N2 - Intuitively, strongly constraining contexts should lead to stronger probabilistic representations of sentences in memory. Encountering unexpected words could therefore be expected to trigger costlier shifts in these representations than expected words. However, psycholinguistic measures commonly used to study probabilistic processing, such as the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, are sensitive to word predictability but not to contextual constraint. Some research suggests that constraint-related processing cost may be measurable via an ERP positivity following the N400, known as the anterior post-N400 positivity (PNP). The PNP is argued to reflect update of a sentence representation and to be distinct from the posterior P600, which reflects conflict detection and reanalysis. However, constraint-related PNP findings are inconsistent. We sought to conceptually replicate Federmeier et al. (2007) and Kuperberg et al. (2020), who observed that the PNP, but not the N400 or the P600, was affected by constraint at unexpected but plausible words. Using a pre-registered design and statistical approach maximising power, we demonstrated a dissociated effect of predictability and constraint: strong evidence for predictability but not constraint in the N400 window, and strong evidence for constraint but not predictability in the later window. However, the constraint effect was consistent with a P600 and not a PNP, suggesting increased conflict between a strong representation and unexpected input rather than greater update of the representation. We conclude that either a simple strong/weak constraint design is not always sufficient to elicit the PNP, or that previous PNP constraint findings could be an artifact of smaller sample size.
KW - N400
KW - anterior PNP
KW - posterior P600
KW - probabilistic processing
KW - constraint
KW - predictability
KW - entropy
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00094
SN - 2641-4368
VL - 4
IS - 2
SP - 221
EP - 256
PB - MIT Press
CY - Cambridge, MA, USA
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Paape, Dario
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban
T1 - Quadruplex negatio invertit?
BT - the on-line processing of depth charge sentences
JF - Journal of semantics
N2 - So-called "depth charge" sentences (No head injury is too trivial to be ignored) are interpreted by the vast majority of speakers to mean the opposite of what their compositional semantics would dictate. The semantic inversion that is observed for sentences of this type is the strongest and most persistent linguistic illusion known to the field (Wason & Reich, 1979). However, it has recently been argued that the preferred interpretation arises not because of a prevailing failure of the processing system, but rather because the non-compositional meaning is grammaticalized in the form of a stored construction (Cook & Stevenson, 2010; Fortuin, 2014). In a series of five experiments, we investigate whether the depth charge effect is better explained by processing failure due to memory overload (the overloading hypothesis) or by the existence of an underlying grammaticalized construction with two available meanings (the ambiguity hypothesis). To our knowledge, our experiments are the first to explore the on-line processing profile of depth charge sentences. Overall, the data are consistent with specific variants of the ambiguity and overloading hypotheses while providing evidence against other variants. As an extension of the overloading hypothesis, we suggest two heuristic processes that may ultimately yield the incorrect reading when compositional processing is suspended for strategic reasons.
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffaa009
SN - 0167-5133
SN - 1477-4593
VL - 37
IS - 4
SP - 509
EP - 555
PB - Oxford Univ. Press
CY - Oxford
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Stone, Kate
A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - The effect of decay and lexical uncertainty on processing long-distance dependencies in reading
JF - PeerJ
N2 - To make sense of a sentence, a reader must keep track of dependent relationships between words, such as between a verb and its particle (e.g. turn the music down). In languages such as German, verb-particle dependencies often span long distances, with the particle only appearing at the end of the clause. This means that it may be necessary to process a large amount of intervening sentence material before the full verb of the sentence is known. To facilitate processing, previous studies have shown that readers can preactivate the lexical information of neighbouring upcoming words, but less is known about whether such preactivation can be sustained over longer distances. We asked the question, do readers preactivate lexical information about long-distance verb particles? In one self-paced reading and one eye tracking experiment, we delayed the appearance of an obligatory verb particle that varied only in the predictability of its lexical identity. We additionally manipulated the length of the delay in order to test two contrasting accounts of dependency processing: that increased distance between dependent elements may sharpen expectation of the distant word and facilitate its processing (an antilocality effect), or that it may slow processing via temporal activation decay (a locality effect). We isolated decay by delaying the particle with a neutral noun modifier containing no information about the identity of the upcoming particle, and no known sources of interference or working memory load. Under the assumption that readers would preactivate the lexical representations of plausible verb particles, we hypothesised that a smaller number of plausible particles would lead to stronger preactivation of each particle, and thus higher predictability of the target. This in turn should have made predictable target particles more resistant to the effects of decay than less predictable target particles. The eye tracking experiment provided evidence that higher predictability did facilitate reading times, but found evidence against any effect of decay or its interaction with predictability. The self-paced reading study provided evidence against any effect of predictability or temporal decay, or their interaction. In sum, we provide evidence from eye movements that readers preactivate long-distance lexical content and that adding neutral sentence information does not induce detectable decay of this activation. The findings are consistent with accounts suggesting that delaying dependency resolution may only affect processing if the intervening information either confirms expectations or adds to working memory load, and that temporal activation decay alone may not be a major predictor of processing time.
KW - reading
KW - comprehension
KW - temporal decay
KW - preactivation
KW - long distance
KW - dependencies
KW - entropy
KW - psycholinguistics
KW - locality
KW - antilocality
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10438
SN - 2167-8359
VL - 8
PB - PeerJ Inc.
CY - London
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - Using approximate Bayesian computation for estimating parameters in the cue-based retrieval model of sentence processing
JF - MethodsX
N2 - A commonly used approach to parameter estimation in computational models is the so-called grid search procedure: the entire parameter space is searched in small steps to determine the parameter value that provides the best fit to the observed data. This approach has several disadvantages: first, it can be computationally very expensive; second, one optimal point value of the parameter is reported as the best fit value; we cannot quantify our uncertainty about the parameter estimate. In the main journal article that this methods article accompanies (Jager et al., 2020, Interference patterns in subject-verb agreement and reflexives revisited: A large-sample study, Journal of Memory and Language), we carried out parameter estimation using Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC), which is a Bayesian approach that allows us to quantify our uncertainty about the parameter's values given data. This customization has the further advantage that it allows us to generate both prior and posterior predictive distributions of reading times from the cue-based retrieval model of Lewis and Vasishth, 2005.
Instead of the conventional method of using grid search, we use Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) for parameter estimation in the [4] model.
The ABC method of parameter estimation has the advantage that the uncertainty of the parameter can be quantified.
KW - Bayesian parameter estimation
KW - Prior and posterior predictive
KW - distributions
KW - Psycholinguistics
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2020.100850
SN - 2215-0161
VL - 7
PB - Elsevier
CY - Amsterdam
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Engbert, Ralf
A1 - Rabe, Maximilian Michael
A1 - Schwetlick, Lisa
A1 - Seelig, Stefan A.
A1 - Reich, Sebastian
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - Data assimilation in dynamical cognitive science
JF - Trends in cognitive sciences
N2 - Dynamical models make specific assumptions about cognitive processes that generate human behavior. In data assimilation, these models are tested against timeordered data. Recent progress on Bayesian data assimilation demonstrates that this approach combines the strengths of statistical modeling of individual differences with the those of dynamical cognitive models.
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2021.11.006
SN - 1364-6613
SN - 1879-307X
VL - 26
IS - 2
SP - 99
EP - 102
PB - Elsevier
CY - Amsterdam
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Bürki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris
A1 - Elbuy, Shereen
A1 - Madec, Sylvain
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - What did we learn from forty years of research on semantic interference?
BT - a Bayesian meta-analysis
JF - Journal of memory and language
N2 - When participants in an experiment have to name pictures while ignoring distractor words superimposed on the picture or presented auditorily (i.e., picture-word interference paradigm), they take more time when the word to be named (or target) and distractor words are from the same semantic category (e.g., cat-dog). This experimental effect is known as the semantic interference effect, and is probably one of the most studied in the language production literature. The functional origin of the effect and the exact conditions in which it occurs are however still debated. Since Lupker (1979) reported the effect in the first response time experiment about 40 years ago, more than 300 similar experiments have been conducted. The semantic interference effect was replicated in many experiments, but several studies also reported the absence of an effect in a subset of experimental conditions. The aim of the present study is to provide a comprehensive theoretical review of the existing evidence to date and several Bayesian meta-analyses and meta-regressions to determine the size of the effect and explore the experimental conditions in which the effect surfaces. The results are discussed in the light of current debates about the functional origin of the semantic interference effect and its implications for our understanding of the language production system.
KW - Bayesian random effects meta-analysis
KW - picture-word interference
KW - semantic interference
KW - language production
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104125
SN - 0749-596X
SN - 1096-0821
VL - 114
PB - Elsevier
CY - San Diego
ER -