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Looking times and gaze behavior indicate that infants can predict the goal state of an observed simple action event (e.g., object-directed grasping) already in the first year of life. The present paper mainly focuses on infants' predictive gaze-shifts toward the goal of an ongoing action. For this, infants need to generate a forward model of the to-be-obtained goal state and to disengage their gaze from the moving agent at a time when information about the action event is still incomplete. By about 6 months of age, infants show goal-predictive gaze-shifts, but mainly for familiar actions that they can perform themselves (e.g., grasping) and for familiar agents (e.g., a human hand). Therefore, some theoretical models have highlighted close relations between infants' ability for action-goal prediction and their motor development and/or emerging action experience. Recent research indicates that infants can also predict action goals of familiar simple actions performed by non-human agents (e.g., object-directed grasping by a mechanical claw) when these agents display agency cues, such as self-propelled movement, equifinality of goal approach, or production of a salient action effect. This paper provides a review on relevant findings and theoretical models, and proposes that the impacts of action experience and of agency cues can be explained from an action-event perspective. In particular, infants' goal-predictive gaze-shifts are seen as resulting from an interplay between bottom-up processing of perceptual information and top-down influences exerted by event schemata that store information about previously executed or observed actions.
Aging in speech production is a multidimensional process. Biological, cognitive, social, and communicative factors can change over time, stay relatively stable, or may even compensate for each other. In this longitudinal work, we focus on stability and change at the laryngeal and supralaryngeal levels in the discourse particle euh produced by 10 older French-speaking females at two times, 10 years apart. Recognizing the multiple discourse roles of euh, we divided out occurrences according to utterance position. We quantified the frequency of euh, and evaluated acoustic changes in formants, fundamental frequency, and voice quality across time and utterance position. Results showed that euh frequency was stable with age. The only acoustic measure that revealed an age effect was harmonics-to-noise ratio, showing less noise at older ages. Other measures mostly varied with utterance position, sometimes in interaction with age. Some voice quality changes could reflect laryngeal adjustments that provide for airflow conservation utterance-finally. The data suggest that aging effects may be evident in some prosodic positions (e.g., utterance-final position), but not others (utterance-initial position). Thus, it is essential to consider the interactions among these factors in future work and not assume that vocal aging is evident throughout the signal.
Lee and Schwarz (L&S) suggest that separation is the grounded procedure underlying cleansing effects in different psychological domains. Here, we interpret L&S's account from a hierarchical view of cognition that considers the influence of physical properties and sensorimotor constraints on mental representations. This approach allows theoretical integration and generalization of L&S's account to the domain of formal quantitative reasoning.
Substantial research has examined cognition in aging bilinguals. However, less work has investigated the effects of aging on language itself in bilingualism. In this article I comprehensively review prior research on this topic, and interpret the evidence in light of current theories of aging and theories of bilingualism. First, aging indeed appears to affect bilinguals' language performance, though there is considerable variability in the trajectory across adulthood (declines, age-invariance, and improvements) and in the extent to which these trajectories resemble those found in monolinguals. I argue that these age effects are likely explained by the key opposing forces of increasing experience and cognitive declines in aging. Second, consistent with some theoretical work on bilingual language processing, the grammatical processing mechanisms do not seem to change between younger and older bilingual adults, even after decades of immersion. I conclude by discussing how future research can further advance the field.
Previous studies (Hyona, Yan, & Vainio, 2018; Yan et al., 2014) have demonstrated that in morphologically rich languages a word's morphological status is processed parafoveally to be used in modulating saccadic programming in reading. In the present parafoveal preview study conducted in Finnish, we examined the exact nature of this effect by comparing reading of morphologically complex words (a stem + two suffixes) to that of monomorphemic words. In the preview-change condition, the final 3-4 letters were replaced with other letters making the target word a pseudoword; for suffixed words, the word stem remained intact but the suffix information was unavailable; for monomorphemic words, only part of the stem was parafoveally available. Three alternative predictions were put forth. According to the first alternative, the morphological effect in initial fixation location is due to parafoveally perceiving the suffix as a highly frequent letter cluster and then adjusting the saccade program to land closer to the word beginning for suffixed than monomorphemic words. The second alternative, the processing difficulty hypothesis, assumes a morphological complexity effect: suffixed words are more complex than monomorphemic words. Therefore, the attentional window is narrower and the saccade is shorter. The third alternative posits that the effect reflects parafoveal access to the word's stem. The results for the initial fixation location and fixation durations were consistent with the parafoveal stem-access view.
How to embrace variation and accept uncertainty in linguistic and psycholinguistic data analysis
(2021)
The use of statistical inference in linguistics and related areas like psychology typically involves a binary decision: either reject or accept some null hypothesis using statistical significance testing. When statistical power is low, this frequentist data-analytic approach breaks down: null results are uninformative, and effect size estimates associated with significant results are overestimated. Using an example from psycholinguistics, several alternative approaches are demonstrated for reporting inconsistencies between the data and a theoretical prediction. The key here is to focus on committing to a falsifiable prediction, on quantifying uncertainty statistically, and learning to accept the fact that - in almost all practical data analysis situations - we can only draw uncertain conclusions from data, regardless of whether we manage to obtain statistical significance or not. A focus on uncertainty quantification is likely to lead to fewer excessively bold claims that, on closer investigation, may turn out to be not supported by the data.
The interpretation of negated antonyms is characterised by a polarity asymmetry: the negation of a positive polarity antonym (X is not interesting) is more likely to be strengthened to convey its opposite ('X is uninteresting') than the negation of a negative polarity antonym (X is not uninteresting to convey that 'X is interesting') is. A classical explanation of this asymmetry relies on face-management. Since the predication of a negative polarity antonym (X is uninteresting) is potentially face-threatening in most contexts, the negation of the corresponding positive polarity antonym (X is not interesting) is more likely to be interpreted as an indirect strategy to minimise face-threat while getting the message across. We present two experimental studies in which we test the predictions of this explanation. In contrast with it, our results show that adjectival polarity, but not face-threatening potential, appears to be responsible for the asymmetric interpretation of negated antonyms.
Comparisons of equality with German so ... wie, and the relationship between degrees and properties
(2021)
We present a compositionally transparent, unified semantic analysis of two kinds of so ... wie-equative constructions in German, namely degree equatives and property equatives in the domain of individuals or events. Unlike in English and many other European languages (Haspelmath & Buchholz 1998, Rett 2013), both equative types in German feature the parameter marker so, suggesting a unified analysis. We show that the parallel formal expression of German degree and property equatives is accompanied by a parallel syntactic distribution (in predicative, attributive, and adverbial position), and by identical semantic properties: Both equative types allow for scope ambiguities, show negative island effects out of context, and license the negative polarity item uberhaupt 'at all' in the complement clause. As the same properties are also shared by German comparatives, we adopt the influential quantificational analysis of comparatives in von Stechow (1984ab), Heim (1985, 2001, 2007), and Beck (2011), and treat both German equative types in a uniform manner as expressing universal quantification over sets of degrees or over sets of properties (of individuals or events). Conceptually, the uniform marking of degree-related and property-related meanings is expected given that the abstract semantic category degree (type ) can be reconstructed in terms of equivalence classes, i.e., ontologically simpler sets of individuals (type ) or events (type ). These are found in any language, showing that whether or not a language makes explicit reference to degrees (by means of gradable adjectives, degree question words, degree-only equatives) does not follow on general conceptual or semantic grounds, but is determined by the grammar of that language.
We present computational modeling results based on a self-paced reading study investigating number attraction effects in Eastern Armenian. We implement three novel computational models of agreement attraction in a Bayesian framework and compare their predictive fit to the data using k-fold cross-validation. We find that our data are better accounted for by an encoding-based model of agreement attraction, compared to a retrieval-based model. A novel methodological contribution of our study is the use of comprehension questions with open-ended responses, so that both misinterpretation of the number feature of the subject phrase and misassignment of the thematic subject role of the verb can be investigated at the same time. We find evidence for both types of misinterpretation in our study, sometimes in the same trial. However, the specific error patterns in our data are not fully consistent with any previously proposed model.
Apples and oranges
(2021)
Despite scarce empirical evidence, introducing new vocabulary in semantic categories has long been standard in second language teaching. We examined the effect of learning context on encoding, immediate recall and integration of new vocabulary into semantic memory by contrasting categorically related (novel names for familiar concepts blocked by semantic category) and unrelated (mixed semantic categories) learning contexts. Two learning sessions were conducted 24 hours apart, with each participant exposed to both contexts. Subsequently, a test phase examined picture naming, translation and picture-word interference tasks. Compared to the unrelated context, the categorically related context resulted in poorer naming accuracy in the learning phase, slower response latencies at the immediate recall tasks and greater semantic interference in the picture-word interference task (picture naming in L1 with semantically related novel word distractors). We develop a theoretical account of word learning that attributes observed differences to episodic rather than semantic memory.