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Scripts that store knowledge of everyday events are fundamentally important for managing daily routines. Content event knowledge (i.e., knowledge about which events belong to a script) and temporal event knowledge (i.e., knowledge about the chronological order of events in a script) constitute qualitatively different forms of knowledge. However, there is limited information about each distinct process and the time course involved in accessing content and temporal event knowledge. Therefore, we analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to either correctly presented event sequences or event sequences that contained a content or temporal error. We found an N400, which was followed by a posteriorly distributed P600 in response to content errors in event sequences. By contrast, we did not find an N400 but an anteriorly distributed P600 in response to temporal errors in event sequences. Thus, the N400 seems to be elicited as a response to a general mismatch between an event and the established event model. We assume that the expectancy violation of content event knowledge, as indicated by the N400, induces the collapse of the established event model, a process indicated by the posterior P600. The expectancy violation of temporal event knowledge is assumed to induce an attempt to reorganize the event model in working memory, a process indicated by the frontal P600. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Intonation Units Revisited
(2016)
Intonation units have been notoriously difficult to identify in natural talk. Problems include fuzzy boundaries, lack of exhaustivity, and the potential circularity involved when studying their interface with other language-organizational dimensions. This volume advocates a way to resolve such problems: the cesura approach. Cesuras, or breaks in the flow of talk, are created by discontinuities in the prosodic-phonetic parameters of speech that cluster to various extents at certain points in time. Using conversation-analytic and interactional-linguistic methodology, the volume identifies the parameters creating cesuras in talk-in-interaction and proposes ways to notate them depending on the researcher s goal. It also offers a way to study the role of cesuras at the prosody-syntax interface non-circularly, which leads to new insights concerning language variation and change. The volume will thus be of major import to anyone working with natural spoken language, its chunks, its various dimensions, and its variation and change."
This study presents new insights into null subjects, topic drop and the interpretation of topic-dropped elements. Besides providing an empirical data survey, it offers explanations to well-known problems, e.g. syncretisms in the context of null-subject licensing or the marginality of dropping an element which carries oblique case. The book constitutes a valuable source for both empirically and theoretically interested (generative) linguists.
Referential Choice
(2016)
We report a study of referential choice in discourse production, understood as the choice between various types of referential devices, such as pronouns and full noun phrases. Our goal is to predict referential choice, and to explore to what extent such prediction is possible. Our approach to referential choice includes a cognitively informed theoretical component, corpus analysis, machine learning methods and experimentation with human participants. Machine learning algorithms make use of 25 factors, including referent’s properties (such as animacy and protagonism), the distance between a referential expression and its antecedent, the antecedent’s syntactic role, and so on. Having found the predictions of our algorithm to coincide with the original almost 90% of the time, we hypothesized that fully accurate prediction is not possible because, in many situations, more than one referential option is available. This hypothesis was supported by an experimental study, in which participants answered questions about either the original text in the corpus, or about a text modified in accordance with the algorithm’s prediction. Proportions of correct answers to these questions, as well as participants’ rating of the questions’ difficulty, suggested that divergences between the algorithm’s prediction and the original referential device in the corpus occur overwhelmingly in situations where the referential choice is not categorical.
In an eye-tracking study we tested the hypothesis that comprehension is facilitated by a match between the order of the verb and its arguments in a sentence and the order of the actual sensorimotor interaction with these objects (for example, in the phrase put the bag into the box, the order of the arguments corresponds to the order of motor actions: take the bag, put it into the box) could facilitate comprehension of such constructions. We tested 40 native Russian speakers in a visual world sentence-picture matching task. In prepositional constructions, there was no difference between conditions that matched or mismatched sensorimotor stereotypes, whereas in instrumental constructions, sensorimotor stereotypes facilitated comprehension.
This book offers a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Different chapters examine the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors’ introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on topic, prosody, and implicature. Part II covers a range of current issues in the field, including focus, quantification, and sign languages, while Part III is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including processes involved in its acquisition and comprehension. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world’s language families
This study explores (mis)interpretation of biclausal wh-questions by French-speaking adults and children, aiming to investigate cross-linguistic differences in sentence revision mechanisms. Following previous work in Japanese the ambiguity of wh-questions was manipulated: In ambiguous questions, the fronted wh-phrase could be associated with the first, main-clause verb or the second, embedded-clause verb, while in garden-path questions, an inserted filled-gap prepositional phrase (PP) blocked main-clause attachment. Importantly, French differs from Japanese in that the filled gap arises after the first verb-that is, after the wh-phrase has been interpreted within the main clause. Two story-based comprehension experiments were conducted to probe the effect of word order on revision performance. Adults and children frequently provided main-clause interpretations of ambiguous questions. In filled-gap questions, children displayed relatively acute sensitivity to the filled-gap in wh-argument questions (Experiment 2), but not in wh-adjunct questions (Experiment 1); adults showed surprisingly low sensitivity to it, frequently misinterpreting adjunct and argument questions. Acceptability ratings (Experiment 3) showed that adults systematically prefer in situ questions over wh-fronting questions. We conclude that timing of the error signal influences revision, and that whereas French-speaking children prioritize syntactic cues, adults prioritize distributional information about the optionality of wh-fronting in French.
Much research on language control in bilinguals has relied on the interpretation of the costs of switching between two languages. Of the two types of costs that are linked to language control, switching costs are assumed to be transient in nature and modulated by trial-specific manipulations (e.g., by preparation time), while mixing costs are supposed to be more stable and less affected by trial-specific manipulations. The present study investigated the effect of preparation time on switching and mixing costs, revealing that both types of costs can be influenced by trial-specific manipulations.
This study investigates the characteristics of narrative-speech production and the use of verbs in Turkish agrammatic speakers (n = 10) compared to non-brain-damaged controls (n = 10). To elicit narrative-speech samples, personal interviews and storytelling tasks were conducted. Turkish has a large and regular verb inflection paradigm where verbs are inflected for evidentiality (i.e. direct versus indirect evidence available to the speaker). Particularly, we explored the general characteristics of the speech samples (e.g. utterance length) and the uses of lexical, finite and non-finite verbs and direct and indirect evidentials. The results show that speech rate is slow, verbs per utterance are lower than normal and the verb diversity is reduced in the agrammatic speakers. Verb inflection is relatively intact; however, a trade-off pattern between inflection for direct evidentials and verb diversity is found. The implications of the data are discussed in connection with narrative-speech production studies on other languages.
In this article we discuss methods for investigating grammatical processing in bilinguals. We will present a methodological approach that relies on: (i) linguistic theory (in our case, morphology) for the construction of experimental materials; (ii) a design that allows for direct (within-experiment, within-participant, and within-item) comparisons of the critical conditions; and (iii) data analysis techniques that make both linear and non-linear gradient effects visible. We review recent studies of masked morphological priming in bilinguals in which the application of these methodological principles revealed highly selective interactions of age of acquisition (and the native/non-native contrast) with the linguistic distinction between inflection and derivation. We believe that such considerations are not only relevant for grammatical processing experiments, but also for studying bilingualism, and its potential cognitive advantages, more generally.
Accessing morphosyntax in L1 and L2 word recognition A priming study of inflected German adjectives
(2016)
In fusional languages, inflectional affixes may encode multiple morphosyntactic features such as case, number, and gender. To determine how these features are accessed during both native (L1) and non-native (L2) word recognition, the present study compares the results from a masked visual priming experiment testing inflected adjectives of German to those of a previous overt (cross-modal) priming experiment on the same phenomenon. While for the L1 group both experiments produced converging results, a group of highly-proficient Russian L2 learners of German showed native-like modulations of repetition priming effects under overt, but not under masked priming conditions. These results indicate that not only affixes but also their morphosyntactic features are accessible during initial form-based lexical access, albeit only for L1 and not for L2 processing. We argue that this contrast is in line with other findings suggesting that non-native language processing is less influenced by structural information than the L1.
We study biased Maker-Breaker positional games between two players, one of whom is playing randomly against an opponent with an optimal strategy. In this paper we consider the scenario when Maker plays randomly and Breaker is "clever", and determine the sharp threshold bias of classical graph games, such as connectivity, Hamiltonicity, and minimum degree-k. We treat the other case, that is when Breaker plays randomly, in a separate paper. The traditional, deterministic version of these games, with two optimal players playing, are known to obey the so-called probabilistic intuition. That is, the threshold bias of these games is asymptotically equal to the threshold bias of their random counterpart, where players just take edges uniformly at random. We find, that despite this remarkably precise agreement of the results of the deterministic and the random games, playing randomly against an optimal opponent is not a good idea: the threshold bias tilts significantly more towards the random player. An important qualitative aspect of the probabilistic intuition carries through nevertheless: the bottleneck for Maker to occupy a connected graph is still the ability to avoid isolated vertices in her graph. (C) 2016Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
This article first outlines different ways of how psycholinguists have dealt with linguistic diversity and illustrates these approaches with three familiar cases from research on language processing, language acquisition, and language disorders. The second part focuses on the role of morphology and morphological variability across languages for psycholinguistic research. The specific phenomena to be examined are to do with stem-formation morphology and inflectional classes; they illustrate how experimental research that is informed by linguistic typology can lead to new insights.
Beyond the observation that both speakers and listeners rapidly inspect the visual targets of referring expressions, it has been argued that such gaze may constitute part of the communicative signal. In this study, we investigate whether a speaker may, in principle, exploit listener gaze to improve communicative success. In the context of a virtual environment where listeners follow computer-generated instructions, we provide two kinds of support for this claim. First, we show that listener gaze provides a reliable real-time index of understanding even in dynamic and complex environments, and on a per-utterance basis. Second, we show that a language generation system that uses listener gaze to provide rapid feedback improves overall task performance in comparison with two systems that do not use gaze. Aside from demonstrating the utility of listener gaze insituated communication, our findings open the door to new methods for developing and evaluating multi-modal models of situated interaction.
This paper examines the availability of single-conjunct agreement in number and gender in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Reported are the results of an experiment in which coordinated singulars are included, as well as disjunction and negative-concord conjunction, next to the typically examined conjoined plurals. The research shows that, contra the general assumptions in the literature (Marusic, Nevins, and Saksida 2007, Marusic, Nevins, and Badecker 2015, Boskovic 2009) but in line with earlier research (Moskovljevic 1983, Bojovic 2003), single-conjunct agreement does occur with coordinated singulars, especially in gender, even if less frequently. This paper shows that (i) first-conjunct agreement in gender preverbally and even last-conjunct agreement postverbally are produced above error level, and that the availability of collective interpretations for the coordinated subject influences the acceptability of the different agreement patterns available, and (ii) number and gender agreement do not have to target the same constituent. The findings shed light on the relation between the features of number and gender with regard to the issues of their bundling and simultaneous agreement, where the experimental results suggest that, while number tends to agree in a pattern that fits either semantic agreement or agreement with the entire conjunction, gender prefers to target single members of coordination, the first or the last. We speculate that a degree of "attraction" obtains, whereby number may attract gender to agree with the entire conjunction or gender may attract number to agree with a single conjunct. The results are used to compare two analyses offered in the literature-Marusic, Nevins, and Saksida 2007/Marusic, Nevins, and Badecker 2015 and Boskovic 2009-showing that our empirical findings are problematic for both, but give a certain advantage to Marusic and his co-authors.