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Institute
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.
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.
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.
When participants in an experiment have to name pictures while ignoring distractor words superimposed on the picture or presented auditorily (i.e., picture-word interference paradigm), they take more time when the word to be named (or target) and distractor words are from the same semantic category (e.g., cat-dog). This experimental effect is known as the semantic interference effect, and is probably one of the most studied in the language production literature. The functional origin of the effect and the exact conditions in which it occurs are however still debated. Since Lupker (1979) reported the effect in the first response time experiment about 40 years ago, more than 300 similar experiments have been conducted. The semantic interference effect was replicated in many experiments, but several studies also reported the absence of an effect in a subset of experimental conditions. The aim of the present study is to provide a comprehensive theoretical review of the existing evidence to date and several Bayesian meta-analyses and meta-regressions to determine the size of the effect and explore the experimental conditions in which the effect surfaces. The results are discussed in the light of current debates about the functional origin of the semantic interference effect and its implications for our understanding of the language production system.
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.
Dynamical models make specific assumptions about cognitive processes that generate human behavior. In data assimilation, these models are tested against timeordered data. Recent progress on Bayesian data assimilation demonstrates that this approach combines the strengths of statistical modeling of individual differences with the those of dynamical cognitive models.
We explore the interaction between oculomotor control and language comprehension on the sentence level using two well-tested computational accounts of parsing difficulty. Previous work (Boston, Hale, Vasishth, & Kliegl, 2011) has shown that surprisal (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and cue-based memory retrieval (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) are significant and complementary predictors of reading time in an eyetracking corpus. It remains an open question how the sentence processor interacts with oculomotor control. Using a simple linking hypothesis proposed in Reichle, Warren, and McConnell (2009), we integrated both measures with the eye movement model EMMA (Salvucci, 2001) inside the cognitive architecture ACT-R (Anderson et al., 2004). We built a reading model that could initiate short Time Out regressions (Mitchell, Shen, Green, & Hodgson, 2008) that compensate for slow postlexical processing. This simple interaction enabled the model to predict the re-reading of words based on parsing difficulty. The model was evaluated in different configurations on the prediction of frequency effects on the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. The extension of EMMA with postlexical processing improved its predictions and reproduced re-reading rates and durations with a reasonable fit to the data. This demonstration, based on simple and independently motivated assumptions, serves as a foundational step toward a precise investigation of the interaction between high-level language processing and eye movement control.
An English double-embedded relative clause from which the middle verb is omitted can often be processed more easily than its grammatical counterpart, a phenomenon known as the grammaticality illusion. This effect has been found to be reversed in German, suggesting that the illusion is language specific rather than a consequence of universal working memory constraints. We present results from three self-paced reading experiments which show that Dutch native speakers also do not show the grammaticality illusion in Dutch, whereas both German and Dutch native speakers do show the illusion when reading English sentences. These findings provide evidence against working memory constraints as an explanation for the observed effect in English. We propose an alternative account based on the statistical patterns of the languages involved. In support of this alternative, a single recurrent neural network model that is trained on both Dutch and English sentences is shown to predict the cross-linguistic difference in the grammaticality effect.
Comprehension of non-canonical sentences can be difficult for individuals with aphasia (IWA). It is still unclear to which extent morphological cues like case marking or verb inflection may influence IWA's performance or even help to override deficits in sentence comprehension. Until now, studies have mainly used offline methods to draw inferences about syntactic deficits and, so far, only a few studies have looked at online syntactic processing in aphasia. We investigated sentence processing in German-speaking IWA by combining an offline (sentence-picture matching) and an online (eye-tracking in the visual-world paradigm) method. Our goal was to determine whether IWA are capable of using inflectional morphology (number-agreement markers on verbs and case markers in noun phrases) as a cue to sentence interpretation. We report results of two visual-world experiments using German reversible SVO and OVS sentences. In each study, there were eight IWA and 20 age-matched controls. Experiment 1 targeted the role of unambiguous case morphology, while Experiment 2 looked at processing of number-agreement cues at the verb in caseambiguous sentences. IWA showed deficits in using both types of morphological markers as a cue to non-canonical sentence interpretation and the results indicate that in aphasia, processing of case-marking cues is more vulnerable as compared to verbagreement morphology. We ascribe this finding to the higher cue reliability of agreement cues, which renders them more resistant against impairments in aphasia. However, the online data revealed that IWA are in principle capable of successfully computing morphological cues, but the integration of morphological information is delayed as compared to age-matched controls. Furthermore, we found striking differences between controls and IWA regarding subject-before-object parsing predictions. While in case-unambiguous sentences IWA showed evidence for early subjectbefore-object parsing commitments, they exhibited no straightforward subject-first prediction in case-ambiguous sentences, although controls did so for ambiguous structures. IWA delayed their parsing decisions in case-ambiguous sentences until unambiguous morphological information, such as a subject-verbnumber-agreement cue, was available. We attribute the results for IWA to deficits in predictive processes based on morphosyntactic cues during sentence comprehension. The results indicate that IWA adopt a wait-and-see strategy and initiate prediction of upcoming syntactic structure only when unambiguous case or agreement cues are available. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.