Alamargot, Fayol, O'Brien Ramirez, Pagán, Larocque, & Caporossi. (2010). Pregraphic control during subject-verb agreement: first evidence from eye and pen movements. Special Interest Group on Writing. Heidelberg, Germany. (original) (raw)

Concerning the automaticity of syntactic processing

Psychophysiology, 1999

In a within-subjects design, event-related potentials were compared for two types of sentence-final syntactic errors: Incorrect verb inflection and incorrect word category~phrase structure!. In a grammatical judgment task, these errors triggered robust N400 and P600 components. To assess the degree of automaticity of the underlying linguistic processes, the N400 and P600 effects were measured in a task for which the participants judged whether a word in a sentence was printed in upper case. In this physical judgment task, the N400 and P600 following verb inflection errors were greatly attenuated or absent, whereas those elicited by word category violation were only slightly diminished in amplitude. The data suggest that word category information is processed more automatically than inflectional information. The P600 appears to reflect a relatively controlled language-related process.

Processing Temporal Constraints and Some Implications for the Investigation of Second Language Sentence Processing and Acquisition. Commentary on Baggio

Language Learning, 2008

Baggio presents the results of an event-related potential (ERP) study in which he examines the processing consequences of reading tense violations such as * Afgelopen zondag lakt Vincent de kozijnen van zijn landhuis (* "Last Sunday Vincent paints the window-frames of his country house"). The violation is arguably caused by a mismatch between the semantics of the temporal adverb in the topic position Afgelopen zondag, which refers to the past time, and the present tense semantic feature as expressed by the morphological marking on the verb lakt "paints." Baggio reports that sentences with this type of tense violation elicited a left-anterior negativity (LAN) between 200 and 400 ms following the onset of the critical word (lakt), which was followed by a positive shift at about 700 ms (a so-called P600 effect), in comparison to conditions where there was no such temporal mismatch (Afgelopen zondag-lakte). Baggio's formal semantic analysis of tense and temporal adverbs underlies his view of the parsing of such violations and his functional account of these ERP data. Essentially, tenses are considered to be integrity constraints, which serve as instructions to the processing system to update the discourse model in order to locate the situation that is being talked about in (past/present/future) time. The LAN effect is argued to reflect the disruption in the system's attempt to satisfy the sentence's constraints. Baggio also finds a negative-going waveform between about 400 and 700 ms following the onset of the final word in the tense violation condition, which he identifies as a sentence-final negativity (SFN). He argues that this SFN reflects the system's readjustment of the sentence's

Pauses Reflecting the Processing of Syntactic Units in Monolingual Text Production and Translation

HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business

This study explores how the process of translating relates to other types of writing processes by comparing pause lengths preceding syntactic units (words, phrases and clauses) in two types of writing task, a monolingual text production and a translation. It also discusses the grounds for interpreting pause length as a reflection of the cognitive demands of the writing process. The data was collected from 18 professional translators using the Translog keystroke logging software (Jakobsen/Schou 1999). Each subject wrote two texts: an expository text in Finnish and a translation from English into Finnish (Immonen 2006: 316-319). Firstly, phrase boundary pauses were categorised according to type, function and length of phrase. All three features correlate with pause length. On average, predicate phrases are preceded by short pauses, adpositional phrases by long pauses, and pauses preceding noun phrases grow with the length of the phrase. These fi ndings suggest that the processing of the...

Effects of semantic variables on the subject-verb agreement processes in writing

British Journal of Psychology, 1998

Two experiments are reported in which participants were orally presented with French sentences that they were required to write down. In a single-task condition, only single sentences were presented and the written recall concerned only these sentences. In a dual-task condition, a second task was added: to memorize an additional list of words or to do mental addition while writing down the sentences. The experimental sentences were all of the type 'Prep. + N1 +verb + subject' (e.g. Dans les trains passe le contrBleur, Along the trains comes the inspector) in which the preverbal noun constituted either a plausible or an implausible subject for the verb following. Results showed that: (a) number agreement was more likely to be correct when the preverbal noun was implausible as the subject of the sentence, (b) but when they had to transcribe sentences with an implausible preverbal noun, the participants' performance at a concurrent task was poorer. These two findings indicate that the plausibility of the subject role of the preverbal noun provides information that can be used to control the procedures which underlie the construction of the agreement. Number is one of a small set of basic conceptual categories that must be called upon during language production to create agreement between different grammatical elements in a sentence: e.g. between subject and verb in English as in most languages, but in French and other languages, also between article and noun, noun and adjective and, in some constructions, between grammatical object and past participle. In most cases, the agreement between two grammatical units seems to be accomplished without any difficulty. However, occasionally this operation fails in both speaking and writing, giving rise to erroneous agreements as in: 'The interpretation of these findings are surprising', or in oral French: 'L'avion, grBce au * Requests for reprints.

Interword and intraword pause threshold in writing

Frontiers in Psychology, 2014

Writing words in real life involves setting objectives, imagining a recipient, translating ideas into linguistic forms, managing grapho-motor gestures, etc. Understanding writing requires observation of the processes as they occur in real time. Analysis of pauses is one of the preferred methods for accessing the dynamics of writing and is based on the idea that pauses are behavioral correlates of cognitive processes. However, there is a need to clarify what we are observing when studying pause phenomena, as we will argue in the first section. This taken into account, the study of pause phenomena can be considered following two approaches. A first approach, driven by temporality, would define a threshold and observe where pauses, e.g., scriptural inactivity occurs. A second approach, linguistically driven, would define structural units and look for scriptural inactivity at the boundaries of these units or within these units. Taking a temporally driven approach, we present two methods which aim at the automatic identification of scriptural inactivity which is most likely not attributable to grapho-motor management in texts written by children and adolescents using digitizing tablets in association with Eye and Pen © (Chesnet and Alamargot, 2005). The first method is purely statistical and is based on the idea that the distribution of pauses exhibits different Gaussian components each of them corresponding to a different type of pause. After having reviewed the limits of this statistical method, we present a second method based on writing dynamics which attempts to identify breaking points in the writing dynamics rather than relying only on pause duration. This second method needs to be refined to overcome the fact that calculation is impossible when there is insufficient data which is often the case when working with young scriptors.

English-Language Sentence Processing: Digital Tools and Psycholinguistic Perspective

International Humanitarian University Herald. Philology, 2020

The central interpretation of verbs depends on the construction and structuring of the perceptual space. The participants sensed the objects and phenomena described. Further, they correlated their perception with the surrounding reality. Then, they comprehended the information mentioned in the English-language sentences. At the final stage of their perception, they created their experience background and considered the process of knowledge formation and structuring. Verbalization of their ideas in certain sentences is under consideration. Therefore, tense is a link between a verb form and a period of time, which has to be described. On the one hand, there is a time-tense reference. Tense and time are related concepts. Grammatical categories represent related links in human speech and their perception of the surrounding. The main challenges of the speakers occur when the description of reality happens in terms of present and past tense verb forms. Temporal parameters are the basic tools determining the future formation of the sentence. Temporal categories of the verb relate to the concept of time as a given reality or a known moment. Psycholinguists use self-paced sentence reading task to analyze the readers' response to different linguistic structures. The participant presses the button once he sees a word on the screen or one word at a time. When difficulties occur, the participant presses the button slower. Short reading times refer to preferences, but longer periods relate to the dispreferred meanings. Being limited by grammar, the learners of the English language may be unable to fully analyze the material they need to understand/consider, analyze. Cognitive mechanisms should be involved to make the learning process more effective and efficient. There is a need for an instant link occurring between language and thinking. Language is not an abstract phenomenon, and thoughtless learning of rules will hardly result in positive outcomes for learners.