TY - JOUR
A1 - Stone, Kate
A1 - Verissimo, Joao
A1 - Schad, Daniel J.
A1 - Oltrogge, Elise
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
A1 - Lago, Sol
T1 - The interaction of grammatically distinct agreement dependencies in predictive processing
JF - Language, cognition and neuroscience
N2 - Previous research has found that comprehenders sometimes predict information that is grammatically unlicensed by sentence constraints. An open question is why such grammatically unlicensed predictions occur. We examined the possibility that unlicensed predictions arise in situations of information conflict, for instance when comprehenders try to predict upcoming words while simultaneously building dependencies with previously encountered elements in memory.
German possessive pronouns are a good testing ground for this hypothesis because they encode two grammatically distinct agreement dependencies: a retrospective one between the possessive and its previously mentioned referent, and a prospective one between the possessive and its following nominal head. In two visual world eye-tracking experiments, we estimated the onset of predictive effects in participants' fixations.
The results showed that the retrospective dependency affected resolution of the prospective dependency by shifting the onset of predictive effects.
We attribute this effect to an interaction between predictive and memory retrieval processes.
KW - sentence processing
KW - visual world eye-tracking
KW - prediction
KW - gender
KW - agreement
KW - German
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2021.1921816
SN - 2327-3798
SN - 2327-3801
VL - 36
IS - 9
SP - 1159
EP - 1179
PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY - Abingdon
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Schmandt, Silvana
A1 - Nazzi, Thierry
A1 - New, Boris
T1 - Consonant, vowel and lexical neighbourhood processing during word recognition: new evidence using the sandwich priming technique
JF - Language, cognition and neuroscience
N2 - Studies on French adults using a written lexical decision task with masked priming, in which targets were more primed by consonant- (jalu-JOLI) than vowel-related (vobi-JOLI) primes, support the proposal that consonants have more weight than vowels in lexical processing.
This study examines the phonological and/or lexical nature of this consonant bias
(C-bias), using a sandwich priming task in which a brief presentation of the target
(pre-prime) precedes the prime-target sequence, a manipulation blocking lexical neighbourhood effects.
Results from three experiments (varying pre-prime/prime durations) show consistent
C-priming and no significant V-priming at earlier and later processing stages (50 or 66 ms primes).
Yet, a joint analysis reveals a small V-priming, while confirming a significant consonant advantage.
This demonstrates the contribution of the phonological level to the C-bias.
Second, differences in performance comparing the classic versus sandwich priming task also establish a contribution of lexical neighbourhood inhibition effects to the C-bias.
KW - consonants and vowels
KW - phonological and lexical processing
KW - visual word recognition
KW - consonant bias
KW - sandwich priming paradigm
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2022.2046115
SN - 2327-3798
SN - 2327-3801
VL - 37
IS - 9
SP - 1115
EP - 1130
PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY - Abingdon
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Wiese, Heike
A1 - Alexiadou, Artemis
A1 - Allen, Shanley
A1 - Bunk, Oliver
A1 - Gagarina, Natalia
A1 - Iefremenko, Kateryna
A1 - Martynova, Maria
A1 - Pashkova, Tatiana
A1 - Rizou, Vicky
A1 - Schroeder, Christoph
A1 - Shadrova, Anna
A1 - Szucsich, Luka
A1 - Tracy, Rosemarie
A1 - Tsehaye, Wintai
A1 - Zerbian, Sabine
A1 - Zuban, Yulia
T1 - Heritage speakers as part of the native language continuum
JF - Frontiers in psychology
N2 - We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds.
We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas.
(1) We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics.
(2) We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker.
(3) In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language.
Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the native-speaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars.
Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for non-canonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike.
KW - heritage speakers
KW - registers
KW - participles
KW - word order
KW - bare NPs
KW - boundary tone
KW - referent introduction
KW - relative clause formation
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717973
SN - 1664-1078
VL - 12
PB - Frontiers Media
CY - Lausanne
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Conrad, Markus
A1 - Ullrich, Susann
A1 - Schmidtke, David S.
A1 - Kotz, Sonja A.
T1 - ERPs reveal an iconic relation between sublexical phonology and affective meaning
JF - Cognition : international journal of cognitive science
N2 - Classical linguistic theory assumes that formal aspects, like sound, are not internally related to the meaning of words. However, recent research suggests language might code affective meaning such as threat and alert sublexically. Positing affective phonological iconicity as a systematic organization principle of the German lexicon, we calculated sublexical affective values for sub-syllabic phonological word segments from a large-scale affective lexical German database by averaging valence and arousal ratings of all words any phonological segment appears in. We tested word stimuli with either consistent or inconsistent mappings between lexical affective meaning and sublexical affective values (negative-valence/high-arousal vs. neutral-valence/lowarousal) in an EEG visual-lexical-decision task. A mismatch between sublexical and lexical affective values elicited an increased N400 response. These results reveal that systematic affective phonological iconicity - extracted from the lexicon - impacts the extraction of lexical word meaning during reading.
KW - Sound symbolism
KW - Visual word recognition
KW - Phonological iconicity
KW - Affective meaning
KW - N400
KW - ERPs
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105182
SN - 0010-0277
SN - 1873-7838
VL - 226
PB - Elsevier
CY - Amsterdam
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Scheffler, Tatjana
A1 - Brandt, Lasse
A1 - de la Fuente, Marie
A1 - Nenchev, Ivan
T1 - Stimulus data and experimental design for a self-paced reading study on emoji-word substitutions
JF - Data in Brief
N2 - This data paper presents the experimental design and stimuli from an online self-paced reading study on the processing of emojis substituting lexically ambiguous nouns. We recorded reading times for the target ambiguous nouns and for emojis depicting either the intended target referent or a contextually inappropriate homophonous noun. Furthermore, we recorded comprehension accuracy, demographics and a self-assessment of the participants' emoji usage frequency. The data includes all stimuli used, the raw data, the full JavaScript code for the online experiment, as well as Python and R code for the data analysis. We believe that our dataset may give important insights related to the comprehension mechanisms involved in the cognitive processing of emojis. For interpretation and discussion of the experiment, please see the original article entitled "The processing of emoji-word substitutions: A self-paced-reading study".
KW - Emojis
KW - Self-paced reading
KW - Lexical ambiguity
KW - Homonymy
KW - Processing
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2022.108399
SN - 2352-3409
VL - 43
PB - Elsevier
CY - Amsterdam
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Bade, Nadine
A1 - Picat, Leo
A1 - Chung, WooJin
A1 - Mascarenhas, Salvador
T1 - Alternatives and attention in language and reasoning: A reply to Mascarenhas & Picat (2019)
JF - Semantics and Pragmatics
N2 - In this paper, we employ an experimental paradigm using insights from the psychology of reasoning to investigate the question whether certain modals generate and draw attention to alternatives. The article extends and builds on the methodology and findings of Mascarenhas & Picat (2019). Based on experimental results, they argue that the English epistemic modal might raises alternatives. We apply the same methodology to the English modal allowed to to test different hypotheses regarding the involvement of alternatives in deontic modality. We find commonalities and differences between the two modals we tested. We discuss theoretical consequences for existing semantic analyses of these modals, and argue that reasoning tasks can serve as a diagnostic tool to discover which natural language expressions involve alternatives.
KW - reasoning
KW - modals
KW - alternatives
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.15.2
SN - 1937-8912
VL - 15
PB - Linguistic Society of America
CY - Washington
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Bürki, Audrey
A1 - Alario, F-Xavier
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - When words collide: Bayesian meta-analyses of distractor and target properties in the picture-word interference paradigm
JF - Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
N2 - In the picture-word interference paradigm, participants name pictures while ignoring a written or spoken distractor word. Naming times to the pictures are slowed down by the presence of the distractor word. The present study investigates in detail the impact of distractor and target word properties on picture naming times, building on the seminal study by Miozzo and Caramazza. We report the results of several Bayesian meta-analyses based on 26 datasets. These analyses provide estimates of effect sizes and their precision for several variables and their interactions. They show the reliability of the distractor frequency effect on picture naming latencies (latencies decrease as the frequency of the distractor increases) and demonstrate for the first time the impact of distractor length, with longer naming latencies for trials with longer distractors. Moreover, distractor frequency interacts with target word frequency to predict picture naming latencies. The methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
KW - Picture-word interference
KW - Bayesian meta-analysis
KW - distractor frequency
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218221114644
SN - 1747-0218
SN - 1747-0226
VL - 76
IS - 6
SP - 1410
EP - 1430
PB - Sage Publications
CY - London
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Liu, Liquan
A1 - Götz, Antonia
A1 - Lorette, Pernelle
A1 - Tyler, Michael D.
T1 - How tone, intonation and emotion shape the development of infants' fundamental frequency perception
JF - Frontiers in psychology
N2 - Fundamental frequency (integral(0)), perceived as pitch, is the first and arguably most salient auditory component humans are exposed to since the beginning of life.
It carries multiple linguistic (e.g., word meaning) and paralinguistic (e.g., speakers' emotion) functions in speech and communication.
The mappings between these functions and integral(0) features vary within a language and differ cross-linguistically. For instance, a rising pitch can be perceived as a question in English but a lexical tone in Mandarin. Such variations mean that infants must learn the specific mappings based on their respective linguistic and social environments.
To date, canonical theoretical frameworks and most empirical studies do not view or consider the multi-functionality of integral(0), but typically focus on individual functions. More importantly, despite the eventual mastery of integral(0) in communication, it is unclear how infants learn to decompose and recognize these overlapping functions carried by integral(0). In this paper, we review the symbioses and synergies of the lexical, intonational, and emotional functions that can be carried by integral(0) and are being acquired throughout infancy.
On the basis of our review, we put forward the Learnability Hypothesis that infants decompose and acquire multiple integral(0) functions through native/environmental experiences. Under this hypothesis, we propose representative cases such as the synergy scenario, where infants use visual cues to disambiguate and decompose the different integral(0) functions. Further, viable ways to test the scenarios derived from this hypothesis are suggested across auditory and visual modalities.
Discovering how infants learn to master the diverse functions carried by integral(0) can increase our understanding of linguistic systems, auditory processing and communication functions.
KW - lexical tone
KW - intonation, Prosody
KW - phonological theory
KW - sensory processing
KW - cognitive processing
KW - cross-linguistic transfer
KW - emotional tone
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.906848
SN - 1664-1078
VL - 13
PB - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY - Lausanne
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Schad, Daniel
A1 - Nicenboim, Bruno
A1 - Bürkner, Paul-Christian
A1 - Betancourt, Michael
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - Workflow techniques for the robust use of bayes factors
JF - Psychological methods
N2 - Inferences about hypotheses are ubiquitous in the cognitive sciences. Bayes factors provide one general way to compare different hypotheses by their compatibility with the observed data. Those quantifications can then also be used to choose between hypotheses. While Bayes factors provide an immediate approach to hypothesis testing, they are highly sensitive to details of the data/model assumptions and it's unclear whether the details of the computational implementation (such as bridge sampling) are unbiased for complex analyses. Hem, we study how Bayes factors misbehave under different conditions. This includes a study of errors in the estimation of Bayes factors; the first-ever use of simulation-based calibration to test the accuracy and bias of Bayes factor estimates using bridge sampling; a study of the stability of Bayes factors against different MCMC draws and sampling variation in the data; and a look at the variability of decisions based on Bayes factors using a utility function. We outline a Bayes factor workflow that researchers can use to study whether Bayes factors are robust for their individual analysis. Reproducible code is available from haps://osf.io/y354c/.
Translational Abstract
In psychology and related areas, scientific hypotheses are commonly tested by asking questions like "is [some] effect present or absent." Such hypothesis testing is most often carried out using frequentist null hypothesis significance testing (NIIST). The NHST procedure is very simple: It usually returns a p-value, which is then used to make binary decisions like "the effect is present/abscnt." For example, it is common to see studies in the media that draw simplistic conclusions like "coffee causes cancer," or "coffee reduces the chances of geuing cancer." However, a powerful and more nuanced alternative approach exists: Bayes factors. Bayes factors have many advantages over NHST. However, for the complex statistical models that arc commonly used for data analysis today, computing Bayes factors is not at all a simple matter. In this article, we discuss the main complexities associated with computing Bayes factors. This is the first article to provide a detailed workflow for understanding and computing Bayes factors in complex statistical models. The article provides a statistically more nuanced way to think about hypothesis testing than the overly simplistic tendency to declare effects as being "present" or "absent".
KW - Bayes factors
KW - Bayesian model comparison
KW - prior
KW - posterior
KW - simulation-based calibration
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000472
SN - 1082-989X
SN - 1939-1463
VL - 28
IS - 6
SP - 1404
EP - 1426
PB - American Psychological Association
CY - Washington
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Cuperus, Pauline
A1 - de Kok, Dörte
A1 - de Aguiar, Vania
A1 - Nickels, Lyndsey
T1 - Understanding user needs for digital aphasia therapy
BT - experiences and preferences of speech and language therapists
JF - Aphasiology : an international, interdisciplinary journal
N2 - Background:
Aphasia therapy software applications (apps) can help achieve recommendations regarding aphasia treatment intensity and duration.
However, we currently know very little about speech and language therapists' (SLTs) preferences with regards to these apps.
This may be problematic, as clinician acceptance of novel treatments and technology are a key factor for successful translation from research evidence to practice.
Aim:
This research aimed to increase our understanding of clinicians' experiences with aphasia therapy apps and their perceived barriers and facilitators to the use of aphasia apps. Furthermore, we wanted to explore the influence of some demographic factors (age, country, and SLT availability in the client's hometown) on SLTs' attitudes towards these apps.
Method & Procedures:
35 Dutch and 29 Australian SLTs completed an online survey. The survey contained 9 closed-ended questions and 3 open-ended questions. Responses to the closed-ended questions were summarised through the use of descriptive statistics. The responses to the open questions were analysed and coded into recurring themes that were derived from the data. Logistic regression analyses were performed to explore the relationship between the demographic variables and the responses to the closed-ended questions.
Outcomes & results:
Participants were overwhelmingly positive about aphasia therapy apps and saw the potential for their clients to use apps independently. As facilitators of app use, participants reported accessibility and inclusion of different language modalities, while high costs, absence of a compatible device, and clients' potential computer illiteracy were listed as barriers. None of the analysed demographic factors consistently influenced differences in participants' attitudes towards aphasia therapy apps.
Conclusions:
The positive, extensive and insightful feedback from speech and language therapists is both useful and encouraging for app developers and aphasia researchers, and should facilitate the development of appropriate, high-quality therapy apps.
KW - telemedicine
KW - mobile applications
KW - user research
KW - speech and language therapy
KW - clinician feedback
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2022.2066622
SN - 0268-7038
SN - 1464-5041
VL - 37
IS - 7
SP - 1016
EP - 1038
PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY - London
ER -