TY - JOUR A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - Hanne, Sandra A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Sentence comprehension disorders in aphasia the concept of chance performance revisited JF - Aphasiology : an international, interdisciplinary journal N2 - Background: In behavioural tests of sentence comprehension in aphasia, correct and incorrect responses are often randomly distributed. Such a pattern of chance performance is a typical trait of Broca's aphasia, but can be found in other aphasic syndromes as well. Many researchers have argued that chance behaviour is the result of a guessing strategy, which is adopted in the face of a syntactic breakdown in sentence processing. Aims: Capitalising on new evidence from recent studies investigating online sentence comprehension in aphasia using the visual world paradigm, the aim of this paper is to review the concept of chance performance as a reflection of a syntactic impairment in sentence processing and to re-examine the conventional interpretation of chance performance as a guessing behaviour. Main Contribution: Based on a review of recent evidence from visual world paradigm studies, we argue that the assumption of chance performance equalling guessing is not necessarily compatible with actual real-time parsing procedures in people with aphasia. We propose a reinterpretation of the concept of chance performance by assuming that there are two distinct processing mechanisms underlying sentence comprehension in aphasia. Correct responses are always the result of normal-like parsing mechanisms, even in those cases where the overall performance pattern is at chance. Incorrect responses, on the other hand, are the result of intermittent deficiencies of the parser. Hence the random guessing behaviour that persons with aphasia often display does not necessarily reflect a syntactic breakdown in sentence comprehension and a random selection between alternatives. Instead it should be regarded as a result of temporal deficient parsing procedures in otherwise normal-like comprehension routines. Conclusion: Our conclusion is that the consideration of behavioural offline data alone may not be sufficient to interpret a performance in language tests and subsequently draw theoretical conclusions about language impairments. Rather it is important to call on additional data from online studies that look at language processing in real time in order to gain a comprehensive picture about syntactic comprehension abilities of people with aphasia and possible underlying deficits. KW - Sentence comprehension in aphasia KW - Chance performance KW - Visual world paradigm KW - Eye tracking KW - Online sentence processing Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2012.730603 SN - 0268-7038 VL - 27 IS - 1 SP - 112 EP - 125 PB - Wiley CY - Hove ER - TY - GEN A1 - Boston, Marisa Ferrara A1 - Hale, John T. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Kliegl, Reinhold T1 - Parallel processing and sentence comprehension difficulty N2 - Eye fixation durations during normal reading correlate with processing difficulty but the specific cognitive mechanisms reflected in these measures are not well understood. This study finds support in German readers’ eyefixations for two distinct difficulty metrics: surprisal, which reflects the change in probabilities across syntactic analyses as new words are integrated, and retrieval, which quantifies comprehension difficulty in terms of working memory constraints. We examine the predictions of both metrics using a family of dependency parsers indexed by an upper limit on the number of candidate syntactic analyses they retain at successive words. Surprisal models all fixation measures and regression probability. By contrast, retrieval does not model any measure in serial processing. As more candidate analyses are considered in parallel at each word, retrieval can account for the same measures as surprisal. This pattern suggests an important role for ranked parallelism in theories of sentence comprehension. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - paper 252 Y1 - 2011 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-57159 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Boston, Marisa Ferrara A1 - Hale, John T. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Kliegl, Reinhold T1 - Parallel processing and sentence comprehension difficulty JF - Language and cognitive processes N2 - Eye fixation durations during normal reading correlate with processing difficulty, but the specific cognitive mechanisms reflected in these measures are not well understood. This study finds support in German readers' eye fixations for two distinct difficulty metrics: surprisal, which reflects the change in probabilities across syntactic analyses as new words are integrated; and retrieval, which quantifies comprehension difficulty in terms of working memory constraints. We examine the predictions of both metrics using a family of dependency parsers indexed by an upper limit on the number of candidate syntactic analyses they retain at successive words. Surprisal models all fixation measures and regression probability. By contrast, retrieval does not model any measure in serial processing. As more candidate analyses are considered in parallel at each word, retrieval can account for the same measures as surprisal. This pattern suggests an important role for ranked parallelism in theories of sentence comprehension. KW - Reading KW - Parsing KW - Computer model KW - Corpus Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2010.492228 SN - 0169-0965 VL - 26 IS - 3 SP - 301 EP - 349 PB - Wiley CY - Hove ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Boston, Marisa Ferrara A1 - Hale, John A1 - Kliegl, Reinhold A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Surprising parser actions and reading difficulty Y1 - 2008 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Boston, Marisa Ferrara A1 - Hale, John A1 - Kliegl, Reinhold A1 - Patil, Umesh A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Parsing costs as predictors of reading difficulty : an evaluation using the Potsdam Sentence Corpus Y1 - 2008 UR - http://www.jemr.org/ SN - 1995-8692 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Boston, Marisa Ferrara A1 - Hale, John A1 - Kliegl, Reinhold A1 - Patil, Umesh A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Parsing costs as predictors of reading difficulty: An evaluation using the Potsdam Sentence Corpus N2 - The surprisal of a word on a probabilistic grammar constitutes a promising complexity metric for human sentence comprehension difficulty. Using two different grammar types, surprisal is shown to have an effect on fixation durations and regression probabilities in a sample of German readers’ eye movements, the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. A linear mixed-effects model was used to quantify the effect of surprisal while taking into account unigram and bigram frequency, word length, and empirically-derived word predictability; the so-called “early” and “late” measures of processing difficulty both showed an effect of surprisal. Surprisal is also shown to have a small but statistically non-significant effect on empirically-derived predictability itself. This work thus demonstrates the importance of including parsing costs as a predictor of comprehension difficulty in models of reading, and suggests that a simple identification of syntactic parsing costs with early measures and late measures with durations of post-syntactic events may be difficult to uphold. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - paper 253 Y1 - 2008 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-57139 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Boston, Marisa Ferrara A1 - Halbe, John T. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Kliegl, Reinhold T1 - Parallel processing and entence comprehension difficulty N2 - Eye fixation durations during normal reading correlate with processing difficulty, but the specific cognitive mechanisms reflected in these measures are not well understood. This study finds support in German readers' eye fixations for two distinct difficulty metrics: surprisal, which reflects the change in probabilities across syntactic analyses as new words are integrated; and retrieval, which quantifies comprehension difficulty in terms of working memory constraints. We examine the predictions of both metrics using a family of dependency parsers indexed by an upper limit on the number of candidate syntactic analyses they retain at successive words. Surprisal models all fixation measures and regression probability. By contrast, retrieval does not model any measure in serial processing. As more candidate analyses are considered in parallel at each word, retrieval can account for the same measures as surprisal. This pattern suggests an important role for ranked parallelism in theories of sentence comprehension. Y1 - 2011 UR - http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01690965.2010.492228 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2010.492228 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Beck, Sigrid A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Multiple focus N2 - This paper presents the results of an experimental study on multiple focus configurations, that is, structures containing two nested focus-sensitive operators plus two foci supposed to associate with those operators. There has been controversial discussion in the semantic literature regarding whether or not an interpretation is acceptable that corresponds to this association. While the data are unclear, the issue is of considerable theoretical significance, as it distinguishes between the available theories of focus interpretation. Some theories (e. g. Rooth's 1992) predict such a pattern of association with focus to be impossible, while others (such as Wold's 1996) predict it to be acceptable. The results of our study show the data to be unacceptable rather than acceptable, favouring important aspects of the theory of focus interpretation developed by Rooth. Y1 - 2009 UR - http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/Jos/Ffp001 SN - 0167-5133 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bartek, Brian A1 - Lewis, Richard L. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Smith, Mason R. T1 - In Search of on-line locality effects in sentence comprehension JF - Journal of experimental psychology : Learning, memory, and cognition N2 - Many comprehension theories assert that increasing the distance between elements participating in a linguistic relation (e.g., a verb and a noun phrase argument) increases the difficulty of establishing that relation during on-line comprehension. Such locality effects are expected to increase reading times and are thought to reveal properties and limitations of the short-term memory system that supports comprehension. Despite their theoretical importance and putative ubiquity, however, evidence for on-line locality effects is quite narrow linguistically and methodologically: It is restricted almost exclusively to self-paced reading of complex structures involving a particular class of syntactic relation. We present 4 experiments (2 self-paced reading and 2 eyetracking experiments) that demonstrate locality effects in the course of establishing subject-verb dependencies; locality effects are seen even in materials that can be read quickly and easily. These locality effects are observable in the earliest possible eye-movement measures and are of much shorter duration than previously reported effects. To account for the observed empirical patterns, we outline a processing model of the adaptive control of button pressing and eye movements. This model makes progress toward the goal of eliminating linking assumptions between memory constructs and empirical measures in favor of explicit theories of the coordinated control of motor responses and parsing. KW - locality effects KW - working memory KW - sentence processing Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024194 SN - 0278-7393 VL - 37 IS - 5 SP - 1178 EP - 1198 PB - American Psychological Association CY - Washington ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Baayen, Harald R. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Kliegl, Reinhold A1 - Bates, Douglas T1 - The cave of shadows: Addressing the human factor with generalized additive mixed models JF - Journal of memory and language KW - Generalized additive mixed models KW - Within-experiment adaptation KW - Autocorrelation KW - Experimental time series KW - Confirmatory versus exploratory data analysis KW - Model selection Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2016.11.006 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 94 SP - 206 EP - 234 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER -