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 - 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 - 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 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Suckow, Katja A1 - Lewis, Richard L. A1 - Kern, Sabine T1 - Short-term forgetting in sentence comprehension : crosslinguistic evidence from verb-final structures N2 - Seven experiments using self-paced reading and eyetracking suggest that omitting the middle verb in a double centre embedding leads to easier processing in English but leads to greater difficulty in German. One commonly accepted explanation for the English pattern-based on data from offline acceptability ratings and due to Gibson and Thomas (1999)- is that working-memory overload leads the comprehender to forget the prediction of the upcoming verb phrase (VP), which reduces working-memory load. We show that this VP-forgetting hypothesis does an excellent job of explaining the English data, but cannot account for the German results. We argue that the English and German results can be explained by the parser's adaptation to the grammatical properties of the languages; in contrast to English, German subordinate clauses always have the verb in clause-final position, and this property of German may lead the German parser to maintain predictions of upcoming VPs more robustly compared to English. The evidence thus argues against language- independent forgetting effects in online sentence processing; working-memory constraints can be conditioned by countervailing influences deriving from grammatical properties of the language under study. Y1 - 2010 UR - http://www.informaworld.com/0169-0965 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960903310587 SN - 0169-0965 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 - GEN A1 - Patil, Umesh A1 - Kentner, Gerrit A1 - Gollrad, Anja A1 - Kügler, Frank A1 - Féry, Caroline A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Focus, word order and intonation in Hindi N2 - A production study is presented that investigates the effects of word order and information structural context on the prosodic realization of declarative sentences in Hindi. Previous work on Hindi intonation has shown that: (i) non-final content words bear rising pitch accents (Moore 1965, Dyrud 2001, Nair 1999); (ii) focused constituents show greater pitch excursion and longer duration and that post-focal material undergoes pitch range reduction (Moore 1965, Harnsberger 1994, Harnsberger and Judge 1996); and (iii) focused constituents may be followed by a phrase break (Moore 1965). By means of a controlled experiment, we investigated the effect of focus in relation to word order variation using 1200 utterances produced by 20 speakers. Fundamental frequency (F0) and duration of constituents were measured in Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) and Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) sentences in different information structural conditions (wide focus, subject focus and object focus). The analyses indicate that (i) regardless of word order and focus, the constituents are in a strict downstep relationship; (ii) focus is mainly characterized by post-focal pitch range reduction rather than pitch raising of the element in focus; (iii) given expressions that occur pre-focally appear to undergo no reduction; (iv) pitch excursion and duration of the constituents is higher in OSV compared to SOV sentences. A phonological analysis suggests that focus affects pitch scaling and that word order influences prosodic phrasing of the constituents. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - paper 201 Y1 - 2008 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-46118 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 - 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 - 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 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Lewis, Richard L. T1 - Argument-head distance and processing complexity: Explaining both locality and antilocality effects JF - Language : journal of the Linguistic Society of America N2 - Although proximity between arguments and verbs (locality) is a relatively robust determinant of sentence-processing difficulty (Hawkins 1998, 2001, Gibson 2000), increasing argument-verb distance can also facilitate processing (Konieczny 2000). We present two self-paced reading (SPR) experiments involving Hindi that provide further evidence of antilocality, and a third SPR experiment which suggests that similarity-based interference can attenuate this distance-based facilitation. A unified explanation of interference, locality, and antilocality effects is proposed via an independently motivated theory of activation decay and retrieval interference (Anderson et al. 2004).* Y1 - 2006 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2006.0236 SN - 0097-8507 VL - 82 IS - 4 SP - 767 EP - 794 PB - Linguistic Society of America CY - Washington ER -