@article{HeffnerFuhrmeisterLuthraetal.2022, author = {Heffner, Christopher C. and Fuhrmeister, Pamela and Luthra, Sahil and Mechtenberg, Hannah and Saltzman, David and Myers, Emily B.}, title = {Reliability and validity for perceptual flexibility in speech}, series = {Brain and language : a journal of clinical, experimental and theoretical research}, volume = {226}, journal = {Brain and language : a journal of clinical, experimental and theoretical research}, publisher = {Elsevier}, address = {Amsterdam [u.a.]}, issn = {0093-934X}, doi = {10.1016/j.bandl.2021.105070}, pages = {11}, year = {2022}, abstract = {The study of perceptual flexibility in speech depends on a variety of tasks that feature a large degree of variability between participants. Of critical interest is whether measures are consistent within an individual or across stimulus contexts. This is particularly key for individual difference designs that are deployed to examine the neural basis or clinical consequences of perceptual flexibility. In the present set of experiments, we assess the split-half reliability and construct validity of five measures of perceptual flexibility: three of learning in a native language context (e.g., understanding someone with a foreign accent) and two of learning in a non-native context (e.g., learning to categorize non-native speech sounds). We find that most of these tasks show an appreciable level of split-half reliability, although construct validity was sometimes weak. This provides good evidence for reliability for these tasks, while highlighting possible upper limits on expected effect sizes involving each measure.}, language = {en} } @article{Fuhrmeister2021, author = {Fuhrmeister, Pamela}, title = {Examining group differences in between-participant variability in non-native speech sound learning}, series = {Attention, perception, \& psychophysics : AP\&P ; a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.}, volume = {83}, journal = {Attention, perception, \& psychophysics : AP\&P ; a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.}, number = {5}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {New York}, issn = {1943-3921}, doi = {10.3758/s13414-021-02311-3}, pages = {1935 -- 1941}, year = {2021}, abstract = {Many studies on non-native speech sound learning report a large amount of between-participant variability. This variability allows us to ask interesting questions about non-native speech sound learning, such as whether certain training paradigms give rise to more or less between-participant variability. This study presents a reanalysis of Fuhrmeister and Myers (Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 82(4), 2049-2065, 2020) and tests whether different types of phonetic training lead to group differences in between-participant variability. The original study trained participants on a non-native speech sound contrast in two different phonological (vowel) contexts and tested for differences in means between a group that received blocked training (one vowel context at a time) and interleaved training (vowel contexts were randomized). No statistically significant differences in means were found between the two groups in the original study on a discrimination test (a same-different judgment). However, the current reanalysis tested group differences in between-participant variability and found greater variability in the blocked training group immediately after training because this group had a larger proportion of participants with higher-than-average scores. After a period of offline consolidation, this group difference in variability decreased substantially. This suggests that the type and difficulty of phonetic training (blocked vs. interleaved) may initially give rise to differences in between-participant variability, but offline consolidation may attenuate that variability and have an equalizing effect across participants. This reanalysis supports the view that examining between-participant variability in addition to means when analyzing data can give us a more complete picture of the effects being tested.}, language = {en} } @article{FuhrmeisterBuerkiFoschini2022, author = {Fuhrmeister, Pamela and B{\"u}rki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris}, title = {Distributional properties of semantic interference in picture naming}, series = {Psychonomic bulletin \& review : a journal of the Psychonomic Society}, volume = {29}, journal = {Psychonomic bulletin \& review : a journal of the Psychonomic Society}, number = {2}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {New York}, issn = {1069-9384}, doi = {10.3758/s13423-021-02016-6}, pages = {635 -- 647}, year = {2022}, abstract = {Studies of word production often make use of picture-naming tasks, including the picture-word-interference task. In this task, participants name pictures with superimposed distractor words. They typically need more time to name pictures when the distractor word is semantically related to the picture than when it is unrelated (the semantic interference effect). The present study examines the distributional properties of this effect in a series of Bayesian meta-analyses. Meta-analytic estimates of the semantic interference effect first show that the effect is present throughout the reaction time distribution and that it increases throughout the distribution. Second, we find a correlation between a participant's mean semantic interference effect and the change in the effect in the tail of the reaction time distribution, which has been argued to reflect the involvement of selective inhibition in the naming task. Finally, we show with simulated data that this correlation emerges even when no inhibition is used to generate the data, which suggests that inhibition is not needed to explain this relationship.}, language = {en} } @article{HiltonTwomeyWestermann2019, author = {Hilton, Matt and Twomey, Katherine Elizabeth and Westermann, Gert}, title = {Taking their eye off the ball}, series = {Journal of experimental child psychology}, volume = {183}, journal = {Journal of experimental child psychology}, publisher = {Elsevier}, address = {New York}, issn = {0022-0965}, doi = {10.1016/j.jecp.2019.01.023}, pages = {134 -- 145}, year = {2019}, abstract = {The current study tests the hypothesis that shy children's reduced word learning is partly due to an effect of shyness on attention during object labeling. A sample of 20- and 26-month-old children (N = 32) took part in a looking-while-listening task in which they saw sets of familiar and novel objects while hearing familiar or novel labels. Overall, children increased attention to familiar objects when hearing their labels, and they divided their attention equally between the target and competitors when hearing novel labels. Critically, shyness reduced attention to the target object regardless of whether the heard label was novel or familiar. When children's retention of the novel word-object mappings was tested after a delay, it was found that children who showed increased attention to novel objects during labeling showed better retention. Taken together, these findings suggest that shyer children perform less well than their less shy peers on measures of word learning because their attention to the target object is dampened. Thus, this work presents evidence that shyness modulates the low-level processes of visual attention that unfold during word learning.}, language = {en} } @article{PatilHanneBurchertetal.2016, author = {Patil, Umesh and Hanne, Sandra and Burchert, Frank and De Bleser, Ria and Vasishth, Shravan}, title = {A Computational Evaluation of Sentence Processing Deficits in Aphasia}, series = {Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society}, volume = {40}, journal = {Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society}, publisher = {Wiley-Blackwell}, address = {Hoboken}, issn = {0364-0213}, doi = {10.1111/cogs.12250}, pages = {5 -- 50}, year = {2016}, abstract = {Individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia experience difficulty when processing reversible non-canonical sentences. Different accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. The Trace Deletion account (Grodzinsky, 1995, 2000, 2006) attributes this deficit to an impairment in syntactic representations, whereas others (e.g., Caplan, Waters, Dede, Michaud, \& Reddy, 2007; Haarmann, Just, \& Carpenter, 1997) propose that the underlying structural representations are unimpaired, but sentence comprehension is affected by processing deficits, such as slow lexical activation, reduction in memory resources, slowed processing and/or intermittent deficiency, among others. We test the claims of two processing accounts, slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, and two versions of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH), in a computational framework for sentence processing (Lewis \& Vasishth, 2005) implemented in ACT-R (Anderson, Byrne, Douglass, Lebiere, \& Qin, 2004). The assumption of slowed processing is operationalized as slow procedural memory, so that each processing action is performed slower than normal, and intermittent deficiency as extra noise in the procedural memory, so that the parsing steps are more noisy than normal. We operationalize the TDH as an absence of trace information in the parse tree. To test the predictions of the models implementing these theories, we use the data from a German sentence—picture matching study reported in Hanne, Sekerina, Vasishth, Burchert, and De Bleser (2011). The data consist of offline (sentence-picture matching accuracies and response times) and online (eye fixation proportions) measures. From among the models considered, the model assuming that both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency are present emerges as the best model of sentence processing difficulty in aphasia. The modeling of individual differences suggests that, if we assume that patients have both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, they have them in differing degrees.}, language = {en} } @article{vonderMalsburgKlieglVasishth2015, author = {von der Malsburg, Titus Raban and Kliegl, Reinhold and Vasishth, Shravan}, title = {Determinants of Scanpath Regularity in Reading}, series = {Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society}, volume = {39}, journal = {Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society}, number = {7}, publisher = {Wiley-Blackwell}, address = {Hoboken}, issn = {0364-0213}, doi = {10.1111/cogs.12208}, pages = {1675 -- 1703}, year = {2015}, abstract = {Scanpaths have played an important role in classic research on reading behavior. Nevertheless, they have largely been neglected in later research perhaps due to a lack of suitable analytical tools. Recently, von der Malsburg and Vasishth (2011) proposed a new measure for quantifying differences between scanpaths and demonstrated that this measure can recover effects that were missed with the traditional eyetracking measures. However, the sentences used in that study were difficult to process and scanpath effects accordingly strong. The purpose of the present study was to test the validity, sensitivity, and scope of applicability of the scanpath measure, using simple sentences that are typically read from left to right. We derived predictions for the regularity of scanpaths from the literature on oculomotor control, sentence processing, and cognitive aging and tested these predictions using the scanpath measure and a large database of eye movements. All predictions were confirmed: Sentences with short words and syntactically more difficult sentences elicited more irregular scanpaths. Also, older readers produced more irregular scanpaths than younger readers. In addition, we found an effect that was not reported earlier: Syntax had a smaller influence on the eye movements of older readers than on those of young readers. We discuss this interaction of syntactic parsing cost with age in terms of shifts in processing strategies and a decline of executive control as readers age. Overall, our results demonstrate the validity and sensitivity of the scanpath measure and thus establish it as a productive and versatile tool for reading research.}, language = {en} } @article{vonderMalsburgVasishth2011, author = {von der Malsburg, Titus Raban and Vasishth, Shravan}, title = {What is the scanpath signature of syntactic reanalysis?}, series = {Journal of memory and language}, volume = {65}, journal = {Journal of memory and language}, number = {2}, publisher = {Elsevier}, address = {San Diego}, issn = {0749-596X}, doi = {10.1016/j.jml.2011.02.004}, pages = {109 -- 127}, year = {2011}, abstract = {Which repair strategy does the language system deploy when it gets garden-pathed, and what can regressive eye movements in reading tell us about reanalysis strategies? Several influential eye-tracking studies on syntactic reanalysis (Frazier \& Rayner, 1982; Meseguer, Carreiras, \& Clifton, 2002; Mitchell, Shen, Green, \& Hodgson, 2008) have addressed this question by examining scanpaths, i.e., sequential patterns of eye fixations. However, in the absence of a suitable method for analyzing scanpaths, these studies relied on simplified dependent measures that are arguably ambiguous and hard to interpret. We address the theoretical question of repair strategy by developing a new method that quantifies scanpath similarity. Our method reveals several distinct fixation strategies associated with reanalysis that went undetected in a previously published data set (Meseguer et al., 2002). One prevalent pattern suggests re-parsing of the sentence, a strategy that has been discussed in the literature (Frazier \& Rayner, 1982); however, readers differed tremendously in how they orchestrated the various fixation strategies. Our results suggest that the human parsing system non-deterministically adopts different strategies when confronted with the disambiguating material in garden-path sentences.}, language = {en} } @article{vonderMalsburgVasishth2013, author = {von der Malsburg, Titus Raban and Vasishth, Shravan}, title = {Scanpaths reveal syntactic underspecification and reanalysis strategies}, series = {Language and cognitive processes}, volume = {28}, journal = {Language and cognitive processes}, number = {10}, publisher = {Wiley}, address = {Hove}, issn = {0169-0965}, doi = {10.1080/01690965.2012.728232}, pages = {1545 -- 1578}, year = {2013}, abstract = {What theories best characterise the parsing processes triggered upon encountering ambiguity, and what effects do these processes have on eye movement patterns in reading? The present eye-tracking study, which investigated processing of attachment ambiguities of an adjunct in Spanish, suggests that readers sometimes underspecify attachment to save memory resources, consistent with the good-enough account of parsing. Our results confirm a surprising prediction of the good-enough account: high-capacity readers commit to an attachment decision more often than low-capacity participants, leading to more errors and a greater need to reanalyse in garden-path sentences. These results emerged only when we separated functionally different types of regressive eye movements using a scanpath analysis; conventional eye-tracking measures alone would have led to different conclusions. The scanpath analysis also showed that rereading was the dominant strategy for recovering from garden-pathing. Our results may also have broader implications for models of reading processes: reanalysis effects in eye movements occurred late, which suggests that the coupling of oculo-motor control and the parser may not be as tight as assumed in current computational models of eye movement control in reading.}, language = {en} }