Hossein Karimi - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Hossein Karimi

If a pause occurs in the middle of a sentence, is it attributable to prosodic structure, planning... more If a pause occurs in the middle of a sentence, is it attributable to prosodic structure, planning problems, or both? And if both prosodic representation and performance constraints conspire to cause a speaker to divide a sentence into two units, can the durational effects that result be parsed into those two different
sources? In this chapter, we argue that prosody and performance are theoretically and empirically distinct,
and that durational effects may arise from two distinct sources: from the implementation of a grammatical representation, and from performance limitations. A range of empirical evidence is presented to support this distinction. Studies investigating the effects of working memory, inhibitory control, and lexical
difficulty indicate that individuals with less cognitive capacity are more likely to produce sentence-internal breaks, and these are not conditioned by characteristics of a prosodic representation. This finding suggests that performance units are not necessarily prosodic units, and that an adequate theory of sentence production must incorporate mechanisms for implementing prosodic structure as well as strategies for
managing processing load during speech.

The amount of information attached to a noun phrase (henceforth, NP) has been shown to enhance ac... more The amount of information attached to a noun
phrase (henceforth, NP) has been shown to enhance accessibility and increase pronominal reference in language production. However, both the effect of information quantity on the comprehension of ambiguous pronouns and the time course of any informativity effect have been left unexplored. In two eyetracking experiments, we investigated how additional information on the part of NP referents influenced the resolution of following ambiguous pronouns. The results of the first experiment revealed an informativity effect, with more looks to the informationally richer referent than to the competitor. However, the effect of additional information emerged late in time when the referent was the object of the verb. The second experiment replicated the results of the first and also showed that, consistent with the online results, an ambiguous pronoun is interpreted as referring to the informationally richer NP in an offline, explicit pronoun resolution task. The results lend support to theories of language processing that assume that explicit information increases the accessibility of the associated concept, in contrast to approaches that assume that accessibility is associated with givenness.

We review previous research showing that representations formed during language processing are so... more We review previous research showing that representations formed during language processing are sometimes
just “good enough” for the task at hand and propose the “online cognitive equilibrium” hypothesis
as the driving force behind the formation of good-enough representations in language processing. Based
on this view, we assume that the language comprehension system by default prefers to achieve as early as
possible and remain as long as possible in a state of cognitive equilibrium where linguistic representations
are successfully incorporated with existing knowledge structures (i.e., schemata) so that a meaningful
and coherent overall representation is formed, and uncertainty is resolved or at least minimized.
We also argue that the online equilibrium hypothesis is consistent with current theories of language
processing, which maintain that linguistic representations are formed through a complex interplay
between simple heuristics and deep syntactic algorithms and also theories that hold that linguistic representations
are often incomplete and lacking in detail. We also propose a model of language processing
that makes use of both heuristic and algorithmic processing, is sensitive to online cognitive equilibrium,
and, we argue, is capable of explaining the formation of underspecified representations. We review previous
findings providing evidence for underspecification in relation to this hypothesis and the associated
language processing model and argue that most of these findings are compatible with them.

The length of a noun phrase has been shown to influence choices such as syntactic role assignment... more The length of a noun phrase has been shown to influence choices such as syntactic role assignment (e.g., whether the noun phrase is realized as the subject or the object), but does length also affect the choice between different forms of referring expressions? Three experiments investigated the effect of antecedent length on the choice between pronouns (e.g., he) and repeated nouns (e.g., the actor) using a sentence-continuation paradigm. Experiments 1 and 2 found an effect of antecedent length on written continuations: Participants used more pronouns (relative to repeated nouns) when the antecedent was longer compared with when it was shorter. Experiment 3 used a spoken continuation task and replicated the effect of antecedent length on the choice of referring expressions. Taken together, the results suggest that longer antecedents increase the likelihood of pronominal reference. The results support theories arguing that length enhances the accessibility of the associated entity through richer semantic encoding.

Previous research has shown that interacting with natural environments vs. more urban or built en... more Previous research has shown that interacting with natural environments vs. more urban or built environments can have salubrious psychological effects, such as improvements in attention and memory. Even viewing pictures of nature vs. pictures of built environments can produce similar effects. A major question is: What is it about natural environments that produces these benefits? Problematically, there are many differing qualities between natural and urban environments, making it difficult to narrow down the dimensions of nature that may lead to these benefits. In this study, we set out to uncover visual features that related to individuals’ perceptions of naturalness in images. We quantified naturalness in two ways: first, implicitly using a multidimensional scaling analysis and second, explicitly with direct naturalness ratings. Features that seemed most related to perceptions of naturalness were related to the density of contrast changes in the scene, the
density of straight lines in the scene, the average color saturation in the scene and the average hue diversity in the scene. We then trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict whether a scene was perceived as being natural or not based
on these low-level visual features and we could do so with 81% accuracy. As such we were able to reliably predict subjective perceptions of naturalness with objective low-level visual features. Our results can be used in future studies to determine if these features, which are related to naturalness, may also lead to the benefits attained from interacting with nature.

Previous research has shown that viewing images of nature scenes can have a beneficial effect on ... more Previous research has shown that viewing images of nature scenes can have a beneficial effect on memory, attention, and mood. In this study, we aimed to determine whether the preference of natural versus man-made scenes is driven by bottom–up processing of the low-level visual features of nature. We used participants’ ratings of perceived naturalness as well as esthetic preference for 307 images with varied natural and urban content. We then quantified 10 low-level image features for each image (a combination of spatial and color properties). These features were used to predict esthetic preference in the images, as well as to decompose perceived naturalness to its predictable (modeled by the low-level visual features) and non-modeled aspects. Interactions of these separate aspects of naturalness with the time it took to make a preference judgment showed that naturalness based on low-level features related more to preference when the judgment was faster (bottom–up). On the other hand, perceived naturalness that was not modeled by low-level features was related more to preference when the judgment was slower. A quadratic discriminant classification analysis showed how relevant each aspect of naturalness (modeled and non-modeled) was to predicting preference ratings, as well as the image features on their own. Finally, we compared the effect of color-related and structure-related modeled naturalness, and the remaining unmodeled naturalness in predicting esthetic preference. In summary, bottom–up (color and spatial) properties of natural images captured by our features and the non-modeled naturalness are important to esthetic judgments of natural and man-made scenes, with each predicting unique variance.