Irina Sekerina | College of Staten Island (original) (raw)
Books by Irina Sekerina
Articles by Irina Sekerina
Behavior Research Methods
This article introduces a new corpus of eye movements in silent reading—the Russian Sentence Corp... more This article introduces a new corpus of eye movements in silent reading—the Russian Sentence Corpus (RSC). Russian uses the Cyrillic script, which has not yet been investigated in cross-linguistic eye movement research. As in every language studied so far, we confirmed the expected effects of low-level parameters, such as word length, frequency, and predictability, on the eye movements of skilled Russian readers. These findings allow us to add Slavic languages using Cyrillic script (exemplified by Russian) to the growing number of languages with different orthographies, ranging from the Roman-based European languages to logographic Asian ones, whose basic eye movement benchmarks conform to the universal comparative science of reading (Share, 2008). We additionally report basic descriptive corpus statistics and three exploratory investigations of the effects of Russian morphology on the basic eye movement measures, which illustrate the kinds of questions that researchers can answer using the RSC. The annotated corpus is freely available from its project page at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/x5q2r/.
Glossa: A journal of general linguistics, 2017
Extensive cross-linguistic work has documented that children up to the age of 9–10 make errors wh... more Extensive cross-linguistic work has documented that children up to the age of 9–10 make errors when performing a sentence-picture verification task that pairs spoken sentences with the universal quantifier every and pictures with entities in partial one-to-one correspondence. These errors stem from children's difficulties in restricting the domain of a universal quantifier to the appropriate noun phrase and are referred in the literature as quantifier-spreading (q-spreading). We adapted the task to be performed in conjunction with eye-movement recordings using the Visual World Paradigm. Russian-speaking 5-to-6-year-old children (N = 31) listened to sentences like Kazhdyj alligator lezhit v vanne 'Every alligator is lying in a bathtub' and viewed pictures with three alligators, each in a bathtub, and two extra empty bathtubs. Non-spreader children (N = 12) were adult-like in their accuracy whereas q-spreading ones (N = 19) were only 43% correct in interpreting such sentences compared to the control sentences. Eye movements of q-spreading children revealed that more looks to the extra containers (two empty bathtubs) correlated with higher error rates reflecting the processing pattern of q-spreading. In contrast, more looks to the distractors in control sentences did not lead to errors in interpretation. We argue that q-spreading errors are caused by interference from the extra entities in the visual context, and our results support the processing difficulty account of acquisition of quantification. Interference results in cognitive overload as children have to integrate multiple sources of information, i.e., visual context with salient extra entities and the spoken sentence in which these entities are mentioned in real-time processing.
Special Issue of "Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism" on bilingualism and executive function, ... more Special Issue of "Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism" on bilingualism and executive function, based on the invited talks from the NSF-sponsored Workshop (17-18 May, 2015, CUNY Graduate Center).
https://bef2015.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
This article investigates language variation and change in the grammatical gender system of Norwe... more This article investigates language variation and change in the grammatical gender system of Norwegian, where feminine gender agreement is in the process of disappearing in some Northern Norwegian dialects. Speakers of the Tromsø (N = 46) and Sortland (N = 54) dialects participated in a Visual Word experiment. The task examined whether they used indefinite articles (en, ei, et) predictively to identify nouns during spoken-word recognition, and whether they produced feminine articles in an elicited production task. Results show that all speakers used the neuter indefinite article et as a predictive cue, but no speakers used the feminine ei predictively, regardless of whether they produced it or not. The masculine article en was used predictively only by the speakers who did not produce feminine gender forms. We hypothesize that in dialects where the feminine gender is disappearing, this change in the gender system affects comprehension first, even before speakers stop producing the feminine indefinite article.
The cue-based retrieval theory (Lewis et al., 2006) predicts that interference from similar distr... more The cue-based retrieval theory (Lewis et al., 2006) predicts that interference from similar distractors should create difficulty for argument integration, however this hypothesis has only been examined in the written modality. The current study uses the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) to assess its feasibility to study retrieval interference arising from distractors present in a visual display during spoken language comprehension. The study aims to extend findings from Van Dyke and McElree (2006), which utilized a dual-task paradigm with written sentences in which they manipulated the relationship between extra-sentential distractors and the semantic retrieval cues from a verb, to the spoken modality. Results indicate that retrieval interference effects do occur in the spoken modality, manifesting immediately upon encountering the verbal retrieval cue for inaccurate trials when the distractors are present in the visual field. We also observed indicators of repair processes in trials containing semantic distractors, which were ultimately answered correctly. We conclude that the VWP is a useful tool for investigating retrieval interference effects, including both the online effects of distractors and their after-effects, when repair is initiated. This work paves the way for further studies of retrieval interference in the spoken modality, which is especially significant for examining the phenomenon in pre-reading children, non-reading adults (e.g., people with aphasia), and spoken language bilinguals.
A commentary on Philips & Ehrenhofer, "The role of language processing in language acquisition. "... more A commentary on Philips & Ehrenhofer, "The role of language processing in language acquisition. " LAB 5(4)
Second Language Research, 31(1), 75-104, Dec 29, 2014
It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult secon... more It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult second language learners misinterpret sentences with the universal quantifier every and make quantifierspreading errors that are attributed to a preference for a match in number between two sets of objects. The present Visual World eye-tracking study tested bilingual heritage Russian-English adults and investigated how they interpret of sentences like Every alligator lies in a bathtub in both languages. Participants performed a sentence-picture verification task while their eye movements were recorded. Pictures showed three pairs of alligators in bathtubs and two extra objects: elephants (Control condition), bathtubs (Overexhaustive condition), or alligators (Underexhaustive condition). Monolingual adults performed at ceiling in all conditions. Heritage language (HL) adults made 20% q-spreading errors, but only in the Overexhaustive condition, and when they made an error they spent more time looking at the two extra bathtubs during the Verb region. We attribute q-spreading in HL speakers to cognitive overload caused by the necessity to integrate conflicting sources of information, i.e. the spoken sentences in their weaker, heritage, language and attention-demanding visual context, that differed with respect to referential salience.
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2(3), 304-307., Apr 2012
First Language, 32(1-2), Jan 1, 2012
Children's ability to interpret color adjective noun phrases (e.g., red butterfly) as contrastive... more Children's ability to interpret color adjective noun phrases (e.g., red butterfly) as contrastive was examined in an eyetracking study with 6-year-old Russian children. Pitch accent placement (on the adjective red, or on the noun butterfly) was compared within a visual context containing two red referents (a butterfly and a fox) when only one of them had a contrast member (a purple butterfly) or when both had a contrast member (a purple butterfly and a grey fox). Contrastiveness was enhanced by the Russianspecific 'split constituent' construction (e.g., Red put butterfly . . .) in which a contrastive interpretation of the color term requires pitch accent on the adjective, with the nonsplit sentences serving as control. Regardless of the experimental manipulations, children had to wait until hearing the noun (butterfly) to identify the referent, even in splits. This occurred even under conditions for which the prosody and the visual context allow adult listeners to infer the relevant contrast set and anticipate the referent prior to hearing the noun (accent on the adjective in 1-Contrast scenes). Pitch accent on the adjective did facilitate children's referential processing, but only for the nonsplit constituents. Moreover, visual contexts that encouraged the correct contrast set (1-Contrast) only facilitated referential processing after hearing the noun, even in splits. Further analyses showed that children can anticipate the reference like adults but only when the contrast set is made salient by the preceding supportive discourse, that is, when the inference about the intended contrast set is provided by the preceding utterance.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14(3), Nov 2011
Two eye-tracking experiments in the Visual World paradigm compared how monolingual Russian (Exper... more Two eye-tracking experiments in the Visual World paradigm compared how monolingual Russian (Experiment 1) and heritage Russian-English bilingual (Experiment 2) listeners process contrastiveness online in Russian. Materials were color adjective-noun phrases embedded into the split-constituent construction Krasnuju položite zvezdočku . . . "Red put star . . . " whose inherent contrastiveness results from integration of multiple sources of information, i.e., word order, prosody and visual context. The results showed that while monolinguals rapidly used word order and visual context (but not contrastive prosody) to compute the contrast set even before the noun appeared in speech, heritage Russian bilinguals were very slow and took notice of multiple sources of information only when the lexical identity of the noun made the task superfluous. These results are similar to slowed processing reported in the literature for L2 learners. It is hypothesized that this slowdown in HL processing is due to cascading effects of covert competition between the two languages that starts at the level of spoken word recognition and culminates at the interfaces and, with time, it may become a major contributing force to heritage language attrition.
Aphasiology, 25(2), Jun 1, 2011
Background: In addition to the canonical subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, German also allows... more 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 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 . The trace deletion hypothesis 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 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 sentenceprocessing 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.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 98, Jan 1, 2007
This study explores incremental processing in spoken word recognition in Russian 5-and 6-yearolds... more This study explores incremental processing in spoken word recognition in Russian 5-and 6-yearolds and adults using free-viewing eye-tracking. Participants viewed scenes containing pictures of four familiar objects and clicked on a target embedded in a spoken instruction. In the cohort condition, two object names shared identical three-phoneme onsets. In the noncohort condition, all object names had unique onsets. Coarse-grain analyses of eye movements indicated that adults produced looks to the competitor on significantly more cohort trials than on noncohort trials, whereas children surprisingly failed to demonstrate cohort competition due to widespread exploratory eye movements across conditions. Fine-grain analyses, in contrast, showed a similar time course of eye movements across children and adults, but with cohort competition lingering more than 1 s longer in children. The dissociation between coarse-grain and fine-grain eye movements indicates a need to consider multiple behavioral measures in making developmental comparisons in language processing. Published by Elsevier Inc.
Language Acquisition, 13(3), Sep 1, 2006
Errors involving universal quantification are common in contexts depicting sets of individuals in... more Errors involving universal quantification are common in contexts depicting sets of individuals in partial, one-to-one correspondence. In this article, we explore whether quantifier-spreading errors are more common with distributive quantifiers each and every than with all. In Experiments 1 and 2, 96 children (5-to 9-year-olds) viewed pairs of pictures and selected one corresponding to a sentence containing a universal quantifier (e.g., Every alligator is in a bathtub). Both pictures showed extra objects (e.g., alligators or bathtubs) not in correspondence, with correct sentence interpretation requiring their attention. Children younger than 9 years made numerous errors, with poorer performance in distributive contexts than collective ones. In Experiment 3, 21 native, English-speaking adults, given a similar task with the distributive quantifier every, also made childlike errors. The persistence of quantifier-spreading errors in adults undermines accounts positing immature syntactic structures as the error source. Rather, the errors seemingly reflect inaccurate syntax to semantics mapping, with adults and children alike resorting to processing shortcuts.
Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics, May 1, 2006
Applied Psycholinguistics, 27(1), Jan 2006
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Languages, May 1, 2005
Journal of Child …, Jan 1, 2004
A recently developed method of head-mounted eye-tracking has been employed in two experiments to ... more A recently developed method of head-mounted eye-tracking has been employed in two experiments to investigate differences between adults and children in on-line processing of ambiguous short-distance pronouns in English. Sixteen adults and 16 five-to-seven-year-old children viewed a pair of pictures with two characters and listened to sentences describing the pictures which contained either an unambiguous reflexive (himself) or an ambiguous pronoun (him). They had to choose a picture that corresponds to the sentence. For adults, all three types of analyzed data -responses, reaction times, and eye movements -indicate that pronouns are referentially ambiguous (20% sentence-external referent). Adults were capable of making inferences on-line with respect to less accessible referent, showing a competition between the looks to two potential referents shortly after encountering the pronoun in the sentence. Children's response data reveal that they overwhelmingly prefer the sentence-internal referent for the ambiguous pronoun (93%). However, their eye movement data are qualitatively similar to adults', showing their emerging adult-like awareness of the referential ambiguity in sentences with pronouns. But since children's processing resources are more limited than these of adults , children need more time for accessing the sentence-external referent and are reluctant to revise their initial sentence-internal referent commitment in the absence of information that would require such a revision in globally ambiguous sentences. This supports the hypothesis that children's processing mechanism works like adults' .
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics, Jan 1, 2004
1 Late Closure receives its name from its formulation as a principle about maintaining open and a... more 1 Late Closure receives its name from its formulation as a principle about maintaining open and attaching inside a constituent currently being processed; we focus here on Late Closure's describing the parser's preference for local attachments, elsewhere described as Recency Preference or Right Association (Kimball 1973). 2 Henceforth, we will use "N2 attachment" interchangeably with "low attachment" and "local attachment". Likewise, "N1 attachment", "high attachment" and "non-local attachment" will be interchangeable.
Behavior Research Methods
This article introduces a new corpus of eye movements in silent reading—the Russian Sentence Corp... more This article introduces a new corpus of eye movements in silent reading—the Russian Sentence Corpus (RSC). Russian uses the Cyrillic script, which has not yet been investigated in cross-linguistic eye movement research. As in every language studied so far, we confirmed the expected effects of low-level parameters, such as word length, frequency, and predictability, on the eye movements of skilled Russian readers. These findings allow us to add Slavic languages using Cyrillic script (exemplified by Russian) to the growing number of languages with different orthographies, ranging from the Roman-based European languages to logographic Asian ones, whose basic eye movement benchmarks conform to the universal comparative science of reading (Share, 2008). We additionally report basic descriptive corpus statistics and three exploratory investigations of the effects of Russian morphology on the basic eye movement measures, which illustrate the kinds of questions that researchers can answer using the RSC. The annotated corpus is freely available from its project page at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/x5q2r/.
Glossa: A journal of general linguistics, 2017
Extensive cross-linguistic work has documented that children up to the age of 9–10 make errors wh... more Extensive cross-linguistic work has documented that children up to the age of 9–10 make errors when performing a sentence-picture verification task that pairs spoken sentences with the universal quantifier every and pictures with entities in partial one-to-one correspondence. These errors stem from children's difficulties in restricting the domain of a universal quantifier to the appropriate noun phrase and are referred in the literature as quantifier-spreading (q-spreading). We adapted the task to be performed in conjunction with eye-movement recordings using the Visual World Paradigm. Russian-speaking 5-to-6-year-old children (N = 31) listened to sentences like Kazhdyj alligator lezhit v vanne 'Every alligator is lying in a bathtub' and viewed pictures with three alligators, each in a bathtub, and two extra empty bathtubs. Non-spreader children (N = 12) were adult-like in their accuracy whereas q-spreading ones (N = 19) were only 43% correct in interpreting such sentences compared to the control sentences. Eye movements of q-spreading children revealed that more looks to the extra containers (two empty bathtubs) correlated with higher error rates reflecting the processing pattern of q-spreading. In contrast, more looks to the distractors in control sentences did not lead to errors in interpretation. We argue that q-spreading errors are caused by interference from the extra entities in the visual context, and our results support the processing difficulty account of acquisition of quantification. Interference results in cognitive overload as children have to integrate multiple sources of information, i.e., visual context with salient extra entities and the spoken sentence in which these entities are mentioned in real-time processing.
Special Issue of "Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism" on bilingualism and executive function, ... more Special Issue of "Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism" on bilingualism and executive function, based on the invited talks from the NSF-sponsored Workshop (17-18 May, 2015, CUNY Graduate Center).
https://bef2015.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
This article investigates language variation and change in the grammatical gender system of Norwe... more This article investigates language variation and change in the grammatical gender system of Norwegian, where feminine gender agreement is in the process of disappearing in some Northern Norwegian dialects. Speakers of the Tromsø (N = 46) and Sortland (N = 54) dialects participated in a Visual Word experiment. The task examined whether they used indefinite articles (en, ei, et) predictively to identify nouns during spoken-word recognition, and whether they produced feminine articles in an elicited production task. Results show that all speakers used the neuter indefinite article et as a predictive cue, but no speakers used the feminine ei predictively, regardless of whether they produced it or not. The masculine article en was used predictively only by the speakers who did not produce feminine gender forms. We hypothesize that in dialects where the feminine gender is disappearing, this change in the gender system affects comprehension first, even before speakers stop producing the feminine indefinite article.
The cue-based retrieval theory (Lewis et al., 2006) predicts that interference from similar distr... more The cue-based retrieval theory (Lewis et al., 2006) predicts that interference from similar distractors should create difficulty for argument integration, however this hypothesis has only been examined in the written modality. The current study uses the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) to assess its feasibility to study retrieval interference arising from distractors present in a visual display during spoken language comprehension. The study aims to extend findings from Van Dyke and McElree (2006), which utilized a dual-task paradigm with written sentences in which they manipulated the relationship between extra-sentential distractors and the semantic retrieval cues from a verb, to the spoken modality. Results indicate that retrieval interference effects do occur in the spoken modality, manifesting immediately upon encountering the verbal retrieval cue for inaccurate trials when the distractors are present in the visual field. We also observed indicators of repair processes in trials containing semantic distractors, which were ultimately answered correctly. We conclude that the VWP is a useful tool for investigating retrieval interference effects, including both the online effects of distractors and their after-effects, when repair is initiated. This work paves the way for further studies of retrieval interference in the spoken modality, which is especially significant for examining the phenomenon in pre-reading children, non-reading adults (e.g., people with aphasia), and spoken language bilinguals.
A commentary on Philips & Ehrenhofer, "The role of language processing in language acquisition. "... more A commentary on Philips & Ehrenhofer, "The role of language processing in language acquisition. " LAB 5(4)
Second Language Research, 31(1), 75-104, Dec 29, 2014
It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult secon... more It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult second language learners misinterpret sentences with the universal quantifier every and make quantifierspreading errors that are attributed to a preference for a match in number between two sets of objects. The present Visual World eye-tracking study tested bilingual heritage Russian-English adults and investigated how they interpret of sentences like Every alligator lies in a bathtub in both languages. Participants performed a sentence-picture verification task while their eye movements were recorded. Pictures showed three pairs of alligators in bathtubs and two extra objects: elephants (Control condition), bathtubs (Overexhaustive condition), or alligators (Underexhaustive condition). Monolingual adults performed at ceiling in all conditions. Heritage language (HL) adults made 20% q-spreading errors, but only in the Overexhaustive condition, and when they made an error they spent more time looking at the two extra bathtubs during the Verb region. We attribute q-spreading in HL speakers to cognitive overload caused by the necessity to integrate conflicting sources of information, i.e. the spoken sentences in their weaker, heritage, language and attention-demanding visual context, that differed with respect to referential salience.
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2(3), 304-307., Apr 2012
First Language, 32(1-2), Jan 1, 2012
Children's ability to interpret color adjective noun phrases (e.g., red butterfly) as contrastive... more Children's ability to interpret color adjective noun phrases (e.g., red butterfly) as contrastive was examined in an eyetracking study with 6-year-old Russian children. Pitch accent placement (on the adjective red, or on the noun butterfly) was compared within a visual context containing two red referents (a butterfly and a fox) when only one of them had a contrast member (a purple butterfly) or when both had a contrast member (a purple butterfly and a grey fox). Contrastiveness was enhanced by the Russianspecific 'split constituent' construction (e.g., Red put butterfly . . .) in which a contrastive interpretation of the color term requires pitch accent on the adjective, with the nonsplit sentences serving as control. Regardless of the experimental manipulations, children had to wait until hearing the noun (butterfly) to identify the referent, even in splits. This occurred even under conditions for which the prosody and the visual context allow adult listeners to infer the relevant contrast set and anticipate the referent prior to hearing the noun (accent on the adjective in 1-Contrast scenes). Pitch accent on the adjective did facilitate children's referential processing, but only for the nonsplit constituents. Moreover, visual contexts that encouraged the correct contrast set (1-Contrast) only facilitated referential processing after hearing the noun, even in splits. Further analyses showed that children can anticipate the reference like adults but only when the contrast set is made salient by the preceding supportive discourse, that is, when the inference about the intended contrast set is provided by the preceding utterance.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14(3), Nov 2011
Two eye-tracking experiments in the Visual World paradigm compared how monolingual Russian (Exper... more Two eye-tracking experiments in the Visual World paradigm compared how monolingual Russian (Experiment 1) and heritage Russian-English bilingual (Experiment 2) listeners process contrastiveness online in Russian. Materials were color adjective-noun phrases embedded into the split-constituent construction Krasnuju položite zvezdočku . . . "Red put star . . . " whose inherent contrastiveness results from integration of multiple sources of information, i.e., word order, prosody and visual context. The results showed that while monolinguals rapidly used word order and visual context (but not contrastive prosody) to compute the contrast set even before the noun appeared in speech, heritage Russian bilinguals were very slow and took notice of multiple sources of information only when the lexical identity of the noun made the task superfluous. These results are similar to slowed processing reported in the literature for L2 learners. It is hypothesized that this slowdown in HL processing is due to cascading effects of covert competition between the two languages that starts at the level of spoken word recognition and culminates at the interfaces and, with time, it may become a major contributing force to heritage language attrition.
Aphasiology, 25(2), Jun 1, 2011
Background: In addition to the canonical subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, German also allows... more 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 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 . The trace deletion hypothesis 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 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 sentenceprocessing 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.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 98, Jan 1, 2007
This study explores incremental processing in spoken word recognition in Russian 5-and 6-yearolds... more This study explores incremental processing in spoken word recognition in Russian 5-and 6-yearolds and adults using free-viewing eye-tracking. Participants viewed scenes containing pictures of four familiar objects and clicked on a target embedded in a spoken instruction. In the cohort condition, two object names shared identical three-phoneme onsets. In the noncohort condition, all object names had unique onsets. Coarse-grain analyses of eye movements indicated that adults produced looks to the competitor on significantly more cohort trials than on noncohort trials, whereas children surprisingly failed to demonstrate cohort competition due to widespread exploratory eye movements across conditions. Fine-grain analyses, in contrast, showed a similar time course of eye movements across children and adults, but with cohort competition lingering more than 1 s longer in children. The dissociation between coarse-grain and fine-grain eye movements indicates a need to consider multiple behavioral measures in making developmental comparisons in language processing. Published by Elsevier Inc.
Language Acquisition, 13(3), Sep 1, 2006
Errors involving universal quantification are common in contexts depicting sets of individuals in... more Errors involving universal quantification are common in contexts depicting sets of individuals in partial, one-to-one correspondence. In this article, we explore whether quantifier-spreading errors are more common with distributive quantifiers each and every than with all. In Experiments 1 and 2, 96 children (5-to 9-year-olds) viewed pairs of pictures and selected one corresponding to a sentence containing a universal quantifier (e.g., Every alligator is in a bathtub). Both pictures showed extra objects (e.g., alligators or bathtubs) not in correspondence, with correct sentence interpretation requiring their attention. Children younger than 9 years made numerous errors, with poorer performance in distributive contexts than collective ones. In Experiment 3, 21 native, English-speaking adults, given a similar task with the distributive quantifier every, also made childlike errors. The persistence of quantifier-spreading errors in adults undermines accounts positing immature syntactic structures as the error source. Rather, the errors seemingly reflect inaccurate syntax to semantics mapping, with adults and children alike resorting to processing shortcuts.
Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics, May 1, 2006
Applied Psycholinguistics, 27(1), Jan 2006
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Languages, May 1, 2005
Journal of Child …, Jan 1, 2004
A recently developed method of head-mounted eye-tracking has been employed in two experiments to ... more A recently developed method of head-mounted eye-tracking has been employed in two experiments to investigate differences between adults and children in on-line processing of ambiguous short-distance pronouns in English. Sixteen adults and 16 five-to-seven-year-old children viewed a pair of pictures with two characters and listened to sentences describing the pictures which contained either an unambiguous reflexive (himself) or an ambiguous pronoun (him). They had to choose a picture that corresponds to the sentence. For adults, all three types of analyzed data -responses, reaction times, and eye movements -indicate that pronouns are referentially ambiguous (20% sentence-external referent). Adults were capable of making inferences on-line with respect to less accessible referent, showing a competition between the looks to two potential referents shortly after encountering the pronoun in the sentence. Children's response data reveal that they overwhelmingly prefer the sentence-internal referent for the ambiguous pronoun (93%). However, their eye movement data are qualitatively similar to adults', showing their emerging adult-like awareness of the referential ambiguity in sentences with pronouns. But since children's processing resources are more limited than these of adults , children need more time for accessing the sentence-external referent and are reluctant to revise their initial sentence-internal referent commitment in the absence of information that would require such a revision in globally ambiguous sentences. This supports the hypothesis that children's processing mechanism works like adults' .
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics, Jan 1, 2004
1 Late Closure receives its name from its formulation as a principle about maintaining open and a... more 1 Late Closure receives its name from its formulation as a principle about maintaining open and attaching inside a constituent currently being processed; we focus here on Late Closure's describing the parser's preference for local attachments, elsewhere described as Recency Preference or Right Association (Kimball 1973). 2 Henceforth, we will use "N2 attachment" interchangeably with "low attachment" and "local attachment". Likewise, "N1 attachment", "high attachment" and "non-local attachment" will be interchangeable.
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages, Jan 1, 2002
Children can use both linguistic and non-linguistic information to predict the potential referent... more Children can use both linguistic and non-linguistic information to predict the potential referents in a visual scene, but effects of grammatical agreement in gender and especially in number have yet to be investigated. Here we ask whether agreement in number and gender (subject-predicate and modifier-noun) can cause anticipatory eye movements to the referent that is yet to come in 6-year-old children during spoken language comprehension.
… of the 28th Annual Conference of …, Jan 1, 2006
cognet.mit.edu
Abstract: In this paper, we will show that different types of argument dislocation are based on d... more Abstract: In this paper, we will show that different types of argument dislocation are based on different underlying processes. Using event-related brain potentials, we compared the effects of object-initial Wh-sentences to those of object-initial declaratives in Russian. From a theoretical perspective, these types of dislocation can be dissociated in terms of potential movement operations of the fronted argument. Whereas in Wh-sentences, like (1a), the object is moved from its base position to a position preceding the subject, every possible ...
Материалы ДИАЛОГ'a 2006
В статье описаны два эксперимента с русско-английскими билингвами, проведенных с помощью методики... more В статье описаны два эксперимента с русско-английскими билингвами, проведенных с помощью методики записи движений глаз, посвященных (1) лексической конкуренции между двумя языками при устном распознавания слова и (2) взаимодействию синтаксической и дискурсивной информации при анализе временно многозначных предложений с предложной группой.
Кибрик, А. А., Кобозева, И. М., и Секерина, И. А. (Ред.) Фундаментальные направления в современной американской лингвистике., 1997
Current Developments in Slavic Linguistics. Twenty Years After (based on selected papers from FDSL 11) Current Developments in Slavic Linguistics. Twenty Years After (based on selected papers from FDSL 11)., 2020
A new experimental study of the relative clause attachment ambiguity in Russian using semanticall... more A new experimental study of the relative clause attachment ambiguity in Russian using semantically shallow materials with geometric shapes
Sekerina, I. A., Srpadlin, L., & Valian, V. V. (Eds.)Bilingualism, Executive Function, and Beyond, 2019
The papers in this volume continue the quest to investigate the moderating factors and understand... more The papers in this volume continue the quest to investigate the moderating factors and understand the mechanisms underlying effects (or lack thereof) of bilingualism on cognition in children, adults, and the elderly. They grew out of a 2015 workshop organized by two of us (Irina Sekerina and Virginia Valian) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, funded by NSF’s Developmental and Learning Sciences and Linguistics Programs (grant #1451631).
Eleven papers from that workshop were published in 2016 in a special issue of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 6(5) are reprinted here (Bak; Bialystok; Clahsen & Veríssimo; Friedman; Gathercole et al.; Hofweber, Marinis, & Treffers-Daller (1); Klein; Marton; Sorace; Valian; Watson, Manly, & Zahodne). Nine posters from the workshop were written up and are published here for the first time (Beatty-Martinez & Dussias; Hofweber, Marinis, & Treffers-Daller (2); Kim, Marton, & Obler; Marton & Yerimbetova; Nadig & Gonzalez-Barrero; Poarch & van Hell; Whitford & Luk; Wolleb, Sorace, & Westergaard; Zirstein, Bice, & Kroll).
These 20 chapters are grouped in four parts: Part I Beyond Simple Relations, Part II Language Processing, Part III Cognition and Bilingualism, and Part IV Development, Aging, and Impairment.
in K. É. Kiss and T. Zétényi (Eds.), Linguistic and Cognitive Aspects of Quantification, Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics 47,, 2018
Children make quantifier-spreading errors in contexts involving sets in partial one-to-one corres... more Children make quantifier-spreading errors in contexts involving sets in partial one-to-one correspondence; e.g., Every bunny is in a box is rejected as a description of three bunnies, each in a box, along with two extra boxes. To determine whether a processing pattern of visual attention is associated with the classic q-spreading error as it occurs in real time, eye-movements were recorded while English-speaking children (N=41; mean 8y;9m, range 5;8–12;1) performed a sentence picture verification task, with every modifying either the figure or ground of locative scenes (every bunny vs. every box). On trials designed to elicit the classic error, children performed at chance (53.3% correct). Errors involved greater numbers of fixations to the extra objects/containers, time-locked to regions following the quantified noun phrase. Correct responses were associated with longer reaction times, indicating additional processing required for quantifier restriction; accuracy was uncorrelated with verbal or nonverbal intelligence and only weakly associated with age. The findings underscore the susceptibility of school-age children to make errors given a default expectation for distributive quantifiers like every to refer to sets in one-to-one correspondence and their inattention to sentence structure.
Traditional language acquisition research that employs offline tasks, such as act-out, pointing,... more Traditional language acquisition research that employs offline tasks, such as act-out, pointing, sentence-picture matching, truth-value and grammaticality judgments, has established that children up to the age of 6 make mistakes in the comprehension of anaphoric expressions. With the adaptation of the Visual World Eye-Tracking Paradigm (VWP) for language acquisition, it has become possible to investigate the interpretation of anaphoric expressions in children in real time to gain a better understanding of the development of pronominal reference. This chapter provides an overview of the VWP studies of 3- to 9-year-old children’s comprehension of reflexives and personal pronouns in terms of various linguistic constraints and their interaction. There is a developmental trajectory of such constraints, with morphological (gender) and lexico-semantic (verb transitivity) constraints being acquired first, followed by syntactic constraints (Principles A and B of the Binding Theory). Discourse-level constraints, such as information structure and order-of-mention, develop last and often need to be present in combination for children to apply them online.
Abstract Many studies have investigated the attachment of relative clauses (RCs) modifying comple... more Abstract Many studies have investigated the attachment of relative clauses (RCs) modifying complex noun phrases (NPs). Cross-language differences in how ambiguous RCs are interpreted have been attributed to a number of factors, among which lexical semantics and prosody seem to play a special role. We report data from an experiment conducted in English using semantically shallow sentences that describe
geometric shapes. The spoken sentences contained the ambiguity of interest and were paired with visual displays that contained two scenes. In the disambiguating conditions, only one of the scenes was compatible with the attachment of the RC as high or low. In the ambiguous condition, either scene could be chosen. Sentences were presented to participants with one of two prosodic contours: compatible with high attachment (phrasal break before the RC) or compatible with low attachment (phrasal break after the head noun in the complex NP). Participants’ interpretation preferences were assessed via their choice of the scene which disambiguated the
interpretation of the RC; we additionally recorded participants’ eye movements as they performed the task. We discuss the interplay of prosodic and visual disambiguation in determining the attachment preferences of semantically shallow RCs.
Keywords Relative clause attachment ambiguity · Visual disambiguation ·
Prosodic disambiguation · Eye tracking · English
Brooks, P. J., & Kempe. V. (2014). Encyclopedia of Language Development. , May 2014
E-Learning: New Technology, Applications and Future Trends. , Aug 2013
In Makarova, V. (Ed.). Russian Language Studies in North America. New Perspectives from Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. , 2012
Position paper for the Future of Slavic Linguistics Workshop, Jan 1, 2000
Chapter in Karimi, S. (Ed.) Word Order and Scrambling. , Jan 1, 2003
Languages, 2022
The study offers novel evidence on the grammar and processing of clitic placement in heritage lan... more The study offers novel evidence on the grammar and processing of clitic placement in heritage languages. Building on earlier findings of divergent clitic placement in heritage European Portuguese and Serbian, this study extends this line of inquiry to Bulgarian, a language where clitic placement is subject to strong prosodic constraints. We found that, in heritage Bulgarian, clitic placement is processed and rated differently than in the baseline, and we asked whether such clitic misplacement results from the transfer from the dominant language or follows from language internal
reanalysis. We used a self-paced listening task and an aural acceptability rating task with 13 English-dominant, highly proficient heritage speakers and 22 monolingual speakers of Bulgarian.
Heritage speakers of Bulgarian process and rate the grammatical proclitic and ungrammatical enclitic positions as equally acceptable, and we contend that this pattern is due to language-internal
reanalysis. We suggest that the trigger for such reanalysis is the overgeneralization of the prosodic Strong Start Constraint from the left edge of the clause to any position in the sentence.
The Late Closure principle is tested in psycholinguistic Experiment I with 2x2 factor design: the... more The Late Closure principle is tested in psycholinguistic Experiment I with 2x2 factor design: the length of the RC -long vs. short, and the word order -canonical vs. scrambled. The results indicate that Bulgarian patterns with other Slavic languages to attach 'high' (59% in total). Our Bulgarian data provide some initial support for the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, since there was a significant main effect of the RC length factor: the preference to attach High for long RCs and a balanced choice for short RC. However, the word order seemed not to have any effect on attachment preferences. The high preference of Bulgarians to high attachment in written questionnaire (Experiment I) shifted to a preference to low attachment, regardless of the modality of the linguistic stimuli, auditory (Experiment 2) or written (Experiment 3). This N2 preference, which theoretically follows from application of the Late Closure Principle. could be seen as a consequence of the fact that low (loca...
BUCLD 43 Proceedings, 2019
Тransparency of gender markers facilitates gender acquisition, but few studies investigated it in... more Тransparency of gender markers facilitates gender acquisition, but few studies investigated it in closely related languages, in which transparency can interact with the distributional regularity of these markers. This is the first contrastive study of gender acquisition in Russian and Bulgarian, which have similar gender systems but differ in the distribution of opaque nouns across gender classes. Opacity is present in inanimate nouns in all three genders in Russian but only in FEM in Bulgarian. We argue that transparency facilitates acquisition of gender in both languages, as expected, but in Bulgarian, its facilitatory effect is attenuated due to the distributional asymmetry of opaque nouns. Russian and Bulgarian children (N=22, age range 3;8-6;11) performed an offline elicited gender production task naming an object and its color/size. We found effect of Transparency in both languages, with better production of the transparent MASC and FEM nouns than the opaque ones. This effect was stronger in Russian, with Russian children being more accurate than Bulgarian ones in FEM opaque. We propose that the distributional regularities, i.e., systematicity and pervasiveness of opacity in Russian that cut across all three genders, make children more aware of its role in the input. Conversely, in Bulgarian, irregularly distributed opacity functions as a difficult-to-notice exception that might be acquired on an item-by-item basis.
Journal of Child Language, 2004
A recently developed method of head-mounted eye-tracking has been employed in two experiments to ... more A recently developed method of head-mounted eye-tracking has been employed in two experiments to investigate differences between adults and children in on-line processing of ambiguous short-distance pronouns in English. Sixteen adults and 16 five-to-seven-year-old children viewed a pair of pictures with two characters and listened to sentences describing the pictures which contained either an unambiguous reflexive (himself) or an ambiguous pronoun (him). They had to choose a picture that corresponds to the sentence. For adults, all three types of analyzed data -responses, reaction times, and eye movements -indicate that pronouns are referentially ambiguous (20% sentence-external referent). Adults were capable of making inferences on-line with respect to less accessible referent, showing a competition between the looks to two potential referents shortly after encountering the pronoun in the sentence. Children's response data reveal that they overwhelmingly prefer the sentence-internal referent for the ambiguous pronoun (93%). However, their eye movement data are qualitatively similar to adults', showing their emerging adult-like awareness of the referential ambiguity in sentences with pronouns. But since children's processing resources are more limited than these of adults , children need more time for accessing the sentence-external referent and are reluctant to revise their initial sentence-internal referent commitment in the absence of information that would require such a revision in globally ambiguous sentences. This supports the hypothesis that children's processing mechanism works like adults' .
The Late Closure principle is tested in psycholinguistic Experiment I with 2x2 factor design: the... more The Late Closure principle is tested in psycholinguistic Experiment I with 2x2 factor design: the length of the RC -long vs. short, and the word order -canonical vs. scrambled. The results indicate that Bulgarian patterns with other Slavic languages to attach 'high' (59% in total). Our Bulgarian data provide some initial support for the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, since there was a significant main effect of the RC length factor: the preference to attach High for long RCs and a balanced choice for short RC. However, the word order seemed not to have any effect on attachment preferences. The high preference of Bulgarians to high attachment in written questionnaire (Experiment I) shifted to a preference to low attachment, regardless of the modality of the linguistic stimuli, auditory (Experiment 2) or written (Experiment 3). This N2 preference, which theoretically follows from application of the Late Closure Principle. could be seen as a consequence of the fact that low (loca...
В статье описаны два эксперимента с русско-английскими билингвами, проведенных с помощью методики... more В статье описаны два эксперимента с русско-английскими билингвами, проведенных с помощью методики записи движений глаз, посвященных (1) лексической конкуренции между двумя языками при устном распознавания слова и (2) взаимодействию синтаксической и дискурсивной информации при анализе временно многозначных предложений с предложной группой.
The Late Closure principle is tested in psycholinguistic Experiment I with 2x2 factor design: the... more The Late Closure principle is tested in psycholinguistic Experiment I with 2x2 factor design: the length of the RC -long vs. short, and the word order -canonical vs. scrambled. The results indicate that Bulgarian patterns with other Slavic languages to attach 'high' (59% in total). Our Bulgarian data provide some initial support for the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, since there was a significant main effect of the RC length factor: the preference to attach High for long RCs and a balanced choice for short RC. However, the word order seemed not to have any effect on attachment preferences. The high preference of Bulgarians to high attachment in written questionnaire (Experiment I) shifted to a preference to low attachment, regardless of the modality of the linguistic stimuli, auditory (Experiment 2) or written (Experiment 3). This N2 preference, which theoretically follows from application of the Late Closure Principle. could be seen as a consequence of the fact that low (loca...
Journal of Child Language, 2004
Aphasiology}
Background: In addition to the canonical subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, German also allows... more 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 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 . The trace deletion hypothesis 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 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 sentenceprocessing 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.
This article provides an update on research in Slavic psycholinguistics since 2000 following my f... more This article provides an update on research in Slavic psycholinguistics since 2000 following my first review (Sekerina 2006) published as a position paper for the workshop The Future of Slavic Linguistics in America (SLING2K). The focus remains on formal experimental psycholinguistics understood in the narrow sense, i.e., experimental studies conducted with monolingual healthy adults. I review five dimensions characteristic of Slavic psycholinguistics—populations, methods, domains, theoretical approaches, and specific languages, and summarize the experimental data from Slavic languages published in general non-Slavic psycholinguistic journals and proceedings from the leading two conferences on Slavic linguistics, FASL and FDSL, since 2000. I argue that the current research trends in Slavic psycholinguistics are (1) a shift from adult monolingual participants to special population groups, such as children, people with aphasia, and bilingual learners, (2) a continuing move in the direction of cognitive neuroscience, with more emphasis on online experimental techniques, such as eye-tracking and neuroimaging, and (3) a focus on Slavic-specific phenomena that contribute to the ongoing debates in general psycholinguistics. The current infrastructural trends are (1) development of psycholinguistic databases and resources for Slavic languages and (2) a rise of psycholinguistic research conducted in Eastern European countries and disseminated in Slavic languages.