TY - JOUR A1 - Laurinavichyute, Anna A1 - Yadav, Himanshu A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Share the code, not just the data BT - a case study of the reproducibility of articles published in the Journal of Memory and Language under the open data policy JF - Journal of memory and language N2 - In 2019 the Journal of Memory and Language instituted an open data and code policy; this policy requires that, as a rule, code and data be released at the latest upon publication. How effective is this policy? We compared 59 papers published before, and 59 papers published after, the policy took effect. After the policy was in place, the rate of data sharing increased by more than 50%. We further looked at whether papers published under the open data policy were reproducible, in the sense that the published results should be possible to regenerate given the data, and given the code, when code was provided. For 8 out of the 59 papers, data sets were inaccessible. The reproducibility rate ranged from 34% to 56%, depending on the reproducibility criteria. The strongest predictor of whether an attempt to reproduce would be successful is the presence of the analysis code: it increases the probability of reproducing reported results by almost 40%. We propose two simple steps that can increase the reproducibility of published papers: share the analysis code, and attempt to reproduce one's own analysis using only the shared materials. KW - Open data KW - Reproducible statistical analyses KW - Reproducibility KW - Open KW - science KW - Meta-research KW - Journal policy Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2022.104332 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 125 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 - Paape, Dario A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Estimating the true cost of garden pathing: BT - a computational model of latent cognitive processes JF - Cognitive science N2 - What is the processing cost of being garden-pathed by a temporary syntactic ambiguity? We argue that comparing average reading times in garden-path versus non-garden-path sentences is not enough to answer this question. Trial-level contaminants such as inattention, the fact that garden pathing may occur non-deterministically in the ambiguous condition, and "triage" (rejecting the sentence without reanalysis; Fodor & Inoue, 2000) lead to systematic underestimates of the true cost of garden pathing. Furthermore, the "pure" garden-path effect due to encountering an unexpected word needs to be separated from the additional cost of syntactic reanalysis. To get more realistic estimates for the individual processing costs of garden pathing and syntactic reanalysis, we implement a novel computational model that includes trial-level contaminants as probabilistically occurring latent cognitive processes. The model shows a good predictive fit to existing reading time and judgment data. Furthermore, the latent-process approach captures differences between noun phrase/zero complement (NP/Z) garden-path sentences and semantically biased reduced relative clause (RRC) garden-path sentences: The NP/Z garden path occurs nearly deterministically but can be mostly eliminated by adding a comma. By contrast, the RRC garden path occurs with a lower probability, but disambiguation via semantic plausibility is not always effective. KW - garden-path effect KW - syntactic reanalysis KW - multinomial processing tree KW - latent processes KW - mixture modeling Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13186 SN - 0364-0213 SN - 1551-6709 VL - 46 IS - 8 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Malden, Mass. 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 - Pregla, Dorothea A1 - Lissón Hernández, Paula J. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - Stadie, Nicole T1 - Variability in sentence comprehension in aphasia in German JF - Brain & language : a journal of the neurobiology of language N2 - An important aspect of aphasia is the observation of behavioral variability between and within individual participants. Our study addresses variability in sentence comprehension in German, by testing 21 individuals with aphasia and a control group and involving (a) several constructions (declarative sentences, relative clauses and control structures with an overt pronoun or PRO), (b) three response tasks (object manipulation, sentence-picture matching with/without self-paced listening), and (c) two test phases (to investigate test-retest performance). With this systematic, large-scale study we gained insights into variability in sentence comprehension. We found that the size of syntactic effects varied both in aphasia and in control participants. Whereas variability in control participants led to systematic changes, variability in individuals with aphasia was unsystematic across test phases or response tasks. The persistent occurrence of canonicity and interference effects across response tasks and test phases, however, shows that the performance is systematically influenced by syntactic complexity. KW - Aphasia KW - Sentence Comprehension KW - Variability KW - Test-retest reliability KW - Task demands KW - Canonicity and interference effects KW - Object manipulation KW - Sentence-picture matching KW - Self-paced listening KW - Adaptation Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bl.2021.105008 SN - 0093-934X SN - 1090-2155 VL - 222 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Metzner, Paul-Philipp A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Rösler, Frank T1 - Brain Responses to World Knowledge Violations: A Comparison of Stimulus- and Fixation-triggered Event-related Potentials and Neural Oscillations JF - Journal of cognitive neuroscience N2 - Recent research has shown that brain potentials time-locked to fixations in natural reading can be similar to brain potentials recorded during rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). We attempted two replications of Hagoort, Hald, Bastiaansen, and Petersson [Hagoort, P., Hald, L., Bastiaansen, M., & Petersson, K. M. Integration of word meaning and world knowledge in language comprehension. Science, 304, 438-441, 2004] to determine whether this correspondence also holds for oscillatory brain responses. Hagoort et al. reported an N400 effect and synchronization in the theta and gamma range following world knowledge violations. Our first experiment (n = 32) used RSVP and replicated both the N400 effect in the ERPs and the power increase in the theta range in the time-frequency domain. In the second experiment (n = 49), participants read the same materials freely while their eye movements and their EEG were monitored. First fixation durations, gaze durations, and regression rates were increased, and the ERP showed an N400 effect. An analysis of time-frequency representations showed synchronization in the delta range (1-3 Hz) and desynchronization in the upper alpha range (11-13 Hz) but no theta or gamma effects. The results suggest that oscillatory EEG changes elicited by world knowledge violations are different in natural reading and RSVP. This may reflect differences in how representations are constructed and retrieved from memory in the two presentation modes. Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00731 SN - 0898-929X SN - 1530-8898 VL - 27 IS - 5 SP - 1017 EP - 1028 PB - MIT Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Nicenboim, Bruno A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Rösler, Frank T1 - Are words pre-activated probabilistically during sentence comprehension? BT - evidence from new data and a Bayesian random-effects meta-analysis using publicly available data JF - Neuropsychologia : an international journal in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience N2 - Several studies (e.g., Wicha et al., 2003b; DeLong et al., 2005) have shown that readers use information from the sentential context to predict nouns (or some of their features), and that predictability effects can be inferred from the EEG signal in determiners or adjectives appearing before the predicted noun. While these findings provide evidence for the pre-activation proposal, recent replication attempts together with inconsistencies in the results from the literature cast doubt on the robustness of this phenomenon. Our study presents the first attempt to use the effect of gender on predictability in German to study the pre-activation hypothesis, capitalizing on the fact that all German nouns have a gender and that their preceding determiners can show an unambiguous gender marking when the noun phrase has accusative case. Despite having a relatively large sample size (of 120 subjects), both our preregistered and exploratory analyses failed to yield conclusive evidence for or against an effect of pre-activation. The sign of the effect is, however, in the expected direction: the more unexpected the gender of the determiner, the larger the negativity. The recent, inconclusive replication attempts by Nieuwland et al. (2018) and others also show effects with signs in the expected direction. We conducted a Bayesian random-ef-fects meta-analysis using our data and the publicly available data from these recent replication attempts. Our meta-analysis shows a relatively clear but very small effect that is consistent with the pre-activation account and demonstrates a very important advantage of the Bayesian data analysis methodology: we can incrementally accumulate evidence to obtain increasingly precise estimates of the effect of interest. KW - ERP KW - pre-activation KW - predictions KW - grammatical gender KW - Bayesian meta-analysis Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107427 SN - 0028-3932 SN - 1873-3514 VL - 142 PB - Elsevier Science CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Stone, Kate A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban T1 - Does entropy modulate the prediction of German long-distance verb particles? JF - PLOS ONE N2 - In this paper we examine the effect of uncertainty on readers' predictions about meaning. In particular, we were interested in how uncertainty might influence the likelihood of committing to a specific sentence meaning. We conducted two event-related potential (ERP) experiments using particle verbs such as turn down and manipulated uncertainty by constraining the context such that readers could be either highly certain about the identity of a distant verb particle, such as turn the bed [...] down, or less certain due to competing particles, such as turn the music [...] up/down. The study was conducted in German, where verb particles appear clause-finally and may be separated from the verb by a large amount of material. We hypothesised that this separation would encourage readers to predict the particle, and that high certainty would make prediction of a specific particle more likely than lower certainty. If a specific particle was predicted, this would reflect a strong commitment to sentence meaning that should incur a higher processing cost if the prediction is wrong. If a specific particle was less likely to be predicted, commitment should be weaker and the processing cost of a wrong prediction lower. If true, this could suggest that uncertainty discourages predictions via an unacceptable cost-benefit ratio. However, given the clear predictions made by the literature, it was surprisingly unclear whether the uncertainty manipulation affected the two ERP components studied, the N400 and the PNP. Bayes factor analyses showed that evidence for our a priori hypothesised effect sizes was inconclusive, although there was decisive evidence against a priori hypothesised effect sizes larger than 1 mu Vfor the N400 and larger than 3 mu V for the PNP. We attribute the inconclusive finding to the properties of verb-particle dependencies that differ from the verb-noun dependencies in which the N400 and PNP are often studied. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267813 SN - 1932-6203 VL - 17 IS - 8 PB - PLOS CY - San Francisco, California, US ER - 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 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban A1 - Engelmann, Felix T1 - What eye movements can tell us about sentence comprehension JF - Wiley interdisciplinary reviews : Cognitive Science N2 - Eye movement data have proven to be very useful for investigating human sentence processing. Eyetracking research has addressed a wide range of questions, such as recovery mechanisms following garden-pathing, the timing of processes driving comprehension, the role of anticipation and expectation in parsing, the role of semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic information, and so on. However, there are some limitations regarding the inferences that can be made on the basis of eye movements. One relates to the nontrivial interaction between parsing and the eye movement control system which complicates the interpretation of eye movement data. Detailed computational models that integrate parsing with eye movement control theories have the potential to unpack the complexity of eye movement data and can therefore aid in the interpretation of eye movements. Another limitation is the difficulty of capturing spatiotemporal patterns in eye movements using the traditional word-based eyetracking measures. Recent research has demonstrated the relevance of these patterns and has shown how they can be analyzed. In this review, we focus on reading, and present examples demonstrating how eye movement data reveal what events unfold when the parser runs into difficulty, and how the parsing system interacts with eye movement control. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:125134. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1209 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1209 SN - 1939-5078 VL - 4 IS - 2 SP - 125 EP - 134 PB - Wiley CY - San Fransisco ER - TY - JOUR A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Scanpaths reveal syntactic underspecification and reanalysis strategies JF - Language and cognitive processes N2 - 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. KW - Reading KW - Eye movements KW - Scanpaths KW - Parsing KW - Reanalysis KW - Individual differences KW - Working memory KW - Underspecification Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2012.728232 SN - 0169-0965 SN - 1464-0732 VL - 28 IS - 10 SP - 1545 EP - 1578 PB - Wiley CY - Hove ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Chen, Zhong A1 - Li, Qiang A1 - Guo, Gueilan T1 - Processing chinese relative clauses - evidence for the subject-relative advantage JF - PLoS one N2 - A general fact about language is that subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. Recently, several self-paced reading studies have presented surprising evidence that object relatives in Chinese are easier to process than subject relatives. We carried out three self-paced reading experiments that attempted to replicate these results. Two of our three studies found a subject-relative preference, and the third study found an object-relative advantage. Using a random effects bayesian meta-analysis of fifteen studies (including our own), we show that the overall current evidence for the subject-relative advantage is quite strong (approximate posterior probability of a subject-relative advantage given the data: 78-80%). We argue that retrieval/integration based accounts would have difficulty explaining all three experimental results. These findings are important because they narrow the theoretical space by limiting the role of an important class of explanation-retrieval/integration cost-at least for relative clause processing in Chinese. Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0077006 SN - 1932-6203 VL - 8 IS - 10 PB - PLoS CY - San Fransisco 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 - BOOK A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Broe, Michael T1 - The foundations of statistics: a simulation-based approach Y1 - 2011 SN - 978-3-642-16312-8 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16313-5 PB - Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg CY - Berlin, Heidelberg ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hanne, Sandra A1 - Sekerina, Irina A. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - Chance in agrammatic sentence comprehension what does it really mean? Evidence from eye movements of German agrammatic aphasic patients JF - Aphasiology : an international, interdisciplinary journal N2 - Background: In addition to the canonical subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, German also allows for non-canonical order (OVS), and the case-marking system supports thematic role interpretation. Previous eye-tracking studies (Kamide et al., 2003; Knoeferle, 2007) have shown that unambiguous case information in non-canonical sentences is processed incrementally. For individuals with agrammatic aphasia, comprehension of non-canonical sentences is at chance level (Burchert et al., 2003). The trace deletion hypothesis (Grodzinsky 1995, 2000) claims that this is due to structural impairments in syntactic representations, which force the individual with aphasia (IWA) to apply a guessing strategy. However, recent studies investigating online sentence processing in aphasia (Caplan et al., 2007; Dickey et al., 2007) found that divergences exist in IWAs' sentence-processing routines depending on whether they comprehended non-canonical sentences correctly or not, pointing rather to a processing deficit explanation. Aims: The aim of the current study was to investigate agrammatic IWAs' online and offline sentence comprehension simultaneously in order to reveal what online sentence-processing strategies they rely on and how these differ from controls' processing routines. We further asked whether IWAs' offline chance performance for non-canonical sentences does indeed result from guessing. Methods Procedures: We used the visual-world paradigm and measured eye movements (as an index of online sentence processing) of controls (N = 8) and individuals with aphasia (N = 7) during a sentence-picture matching task. Additional offline measures were accuracy and reaction times. Outcomes Results: While the offline accuracy results corresponded to the pattern predicted by the TDH, IWAs' eye movements revealed systematic differences depending on the response accuracy. Conclusions: These findings constitute evidence against attributing IWAs' chance performance for non-canonical structures to mere guessing. Instead, our results support processing deficit explanations and characterise the agrammatic parser as deterministic and inefficient: it is slowed down, affected by intermittent deficiencies in performing syntactic operations, and fails to compute reanalysis even when one is detected. KW - Eye movements KW - Non-canonical sentences KW - Agrammatic aphasia KW - Broca's aphasia KW - Chance performance KW - Online and offline processing KW - Sentence comprehension disorders KW - German syntax Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2010.489256 SN - 0268-7038 VL - 25 IS - 2 SP - 221 EP - 244 PB - Wiley CY - Hove ER - 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 - JOUR A1 - McCurdy, Kate A1 - Kentner, Gerrit A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Implicit prosody and contextual bias in silent reading JF - Journal of Eye Movement Research N2 - Eye-movement research on implicit prosody has found effects of lexical stress on syntactic ambiguity resolution, suggesting that metrical well-formedness constraints interact with syntactic category assignment. Building on these findings, the present eyetracking study investigates whether contextual bias can modulate the effects of metrical structure on syntactic ambiguity resolution in silent reading. Contextual bias and potential stress-clash in the ambiguous region were crossed in a 2 x 2 design. Participants read biased context sentences followed by temporarily ambiguous test sentences. In the three-word ambiguous region, main effects of lexical stress were dominant, while early effects of context were absent. Potential stress clash yielded a significant increase in first-pass regressions and re-reading probability across the three words. In the disambiguating region, the disambiguating word itself showed increased processing difficulty (lower skipping and increased re-reading probability) when the disambiguation engendered a stress clash configuration, while the word immediately following showed main effects of context in those same measures. Taken together, effects of lexical stress upon eye movements were swift and pervasive across first-pass and second-pass measures, while effects of context were relatively delayed. These results indicate a strong role for implicit meter in guiding parsing, one that appears insensitive to higher-level constraints. Our findings are problematic for two classes of models, the two-stage garden-path model and the constraint-based competition-integration model, but can be explained by a variation on the two-stage model, the unrestricted race model. KW - silent prosody KW - stress-clash KW - implicit meter KW - context KW - reanalysis KW - gardenpath model KW - competition-integration model KW - unrestricted race model KW - re-reading probability KW - skipping rate Y1 - 2013 SN - 1995-8692 VL - 6 IS - 2 PB - International Group for Eye Movement Research CY - Bern 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 - Drenhaus, Heiner A1 - Zimmermann, Malte A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Exhaustiveness effects in clefts are not truth-functional JF - Journal of neurolinguistics : an international journal for the study of brain function in language behavior and experience N2 - While it is widely acknowledged in the formal semantic literature that both the truth-functional focus particle only and it-clefts convey exhaustiveness, the nature and source of exhaustiveness effects with it-clefts remain contested. We describe a questionnaire study (n = 80) and an event-related brain potentials (ERP) study (n = 16) that investigated the violation of exhaustiveness in German only-foci versus it-clefts. The offline study showed that a violation of exhaustivity with only is less acceptable than the violation with it-clefts, suggesting a difference in the nature of exhaustivity interpretation in the two environments. The ERP-results confirm that this difference can be seen in online processing as well: a violation of exhaustiveness in only-foci elicited a centro-posterior positivity (600-800ms), whereas a violation in it-clefts induced a globally distributed N400 pattern (400-600ms). The positivity can be interpreted as a reanalysis process and more generally as a process of context updating. The N400 effect in it-clefts is interpreted as indexing a cancelation process that is functionally distinct from the only case. The ERP study is, to our knowledge, the first evidence from an online experimental paradigm which shows that the violation of exhaustiveness involves different underlying processes in the two structural environments. KW - ERP KW - It- clefts KW - Only-foci KW - Information structure KW - German Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2010.10.004 SN - 0911-6044 VL - 24 IS - 3 SP - 320 EP - 337 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - What is the scanpath signature of syntactic reanalysis? JF - Journal of memory and language N2 - 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. KW - Reading KW - Syntactic reanalysis KW - Eye movements KW - Parsing KW - Individual differences KW - Scanpaths Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2011.02.004 SN - 0749-596X VL - 65 IS - 2 SP - 109 EP - 127 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER -