Visual World Paradigm Research Papers (original) (raw)

2025, Research Methods in Applied Linguistics

This study investigated the validity of web-based psycholinguistic tasks for assessing automatized explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge in young second language (L2) learners. Specifically, it examined whether a time-pressured grammaticality judgment task and a self-paced reading task administered online produce results comparable to those obtained in an in-person setting. In addition, the influence of the Big Five personality traits on task participation and performance was explored. A total of 192 Japanese first-year middle school students were assigned to either a School group (in-class setting) or a Home group (online setting). The results revealed that accuracy performance on both tasks was generally comparable across settings, supporting the feasibility of remote task administration. However, reaction-time-based measures were more sensitive to testing conditions. In the grammaticality judgment task, the expected reaction-time effect (faster responses to grammatical items) was observed in the School group but not in the Home group. Similarly, the Home group produced faster and more variable reading times in the self-paced reading task, and the expected slowdown for grammatical errors was not observed, raising concerns about the validity of online reading-time data. Personality traits, particularly neuroticism, conscientiousness, and agreeableness, were associated with task participation and reaction-time variability, highlighting the role of individual differences in online task behavior. These findings demonstrate the need for caution when using reaction-time measures in unsupervised web-based experiments with young L2 learners and offer practical recommendations for enhancing data quality in remote L2 assessment.

2025, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

The visual world paradigm (VWP) studies of spoken word recognition rely on a linking hypothesis that connects lexical activation to the probability of looking at the referent of a word. The standard hypothesis is that fixation probabilities track activation levels transformed via the Luce Choice Rule. Under this assumption, given enough power, any difference between positive activations should be detectable using VWP. We argue that looking at a referent of a word is a decision, made when the word's activation exceeds a context-specific threshold. Subthreshold activations do not drive saccades, and differences among such activations are undetectable in VWP. Evidence is provided by VWP experiments on Japanese. Bayesian analyses indicate a relatively high threshold: saccades to cohort competitors do not exceed those to unrelated distractors unless the cohort competitor shares the initial CVC with the target. We argue that threshold setting constitutes an understudied source of variability in VWP data.

2025, Cognitive Science

Two experiments explored the effects of changes in distance and location on the accessibility of event-related information during language comprehension. In Experiment 1, listeners viewed visual scenes depicting a location containing several objects, while they listened to narratives describing an agent either staying in that initial location, or moving to a new one (either close or far away), and then thinking about one of the depicted objects. We found that eye movements to these objects were modulated (reduced) by changes in location, rather than distance. In Experiment 2, listeners viewed scenes depicting two rooms, while they listened to narratives describing an object moving either between the rooms, or within one room. When the object was mentioned following the event, we found fewer eye movements to it when the movement occurred between rooms. We discuss these results in relation to the Event Horizon model.

2025

2025, Journal of Eye tracking, Visual …

In this study we evaluate processing costs of different types of anaphoric expressions during reading. We consider three types of anaphoric expressions in Subject sentential position: a null pronoun (pro), and two gaps produced by syntactic movement: a WHvariable and a NP copy. Given that coreferential pro exhibits more referential weight than wh-and NP-gaps, and grounded on theories of referential processing based on relations of hierarchy and accessibility of the antecedent, we raise the hypothesis that the more dependent on its antecedent the anaphoric null constituent is, and the more minimal is the distance in terms of hierarchical structure between the anaphoric null element and its antecedent, the lower are the cognitive costs in processing. To test our hypothesis, we registered the eye movements with R6-HS ASL system of 20 Portuguese adult native speakers. Text regions including the selected anaphoric expressions were delimited and tagged. We analyzed the reading time of each region taking into account the number and duration of eye fixations per region; we used the reading time by character in milliseconds in order to compare values between regions of different length. We found a significant advantage in the reading time of the gaps arising from movement over the reading time of pro.

2025, Brain Research

For a linking hypothesis in the visual world paradigm to clearly accommodate existing findings and make unambiguous predictions, it needs to be computationally implemented in a fashion that transparently draws the causal connection between the activations of internal representations and the measured output of saccades and reaching movements. Quantitatively implemented linking hypotheses provide an opportunity to not only demonstrate an existence proof of that causal connection but also to test the fidelity of the measuring methods themselves. When a system of interest is measured one way (e.g., ballistic dichotomous outputs) or another way (e.g., smooth graded outputs), the apparent results can differ substantially. What is needed is one linking hypothesis that can produce both types of outputs. The localist attractor network simulation of spoken word recognition demonstrated here recreates eye and mouse movements that capture key findings in the visual world paradigm, and especially relies on one particularly powerful theoretical construct: feedback from the actionperception cycle. Visual feedback from the eye position enhancing the cognitive prominence of the fixated object allows the simulation to fit a wider range of findings, and points to predictions for new experiments. When that feedback is absent, the linking hypothesis simulation no longer fits human data as well. Future experiments, and improvements of this network simulation, are discussed. ☆ This article is part of a special issue entitled: '30 Years Visual World Paradigm: The State of the Art' published in Brain Research.

2025, Brain Research

2025

Speech is a variable signal. In the temporal domain, speech has shown itself to be highly elastic. This elasticity is caused e.g. by differences in speaking rates. At faster rates, speech segments shorten, while at slower durations they lengthen. This durational variability presents a problem for perceivers. Consider thus a speech cue such as voice-onset-time (VOT). VOT is the time from the opening of the mouth for a stop to the onset of the voicing in the following vowel. In monosyllables such as ‘ba’ and ‘pa’, the VOT is short (20–30 ms) in the former, and long (50–60 ms) in the latter syllable. However, the duration of VOT is also influenced by the speaking rate, so that no absolute boundaries in terms of the duration of VOT can be found to distinguish between ‘b’ and ‘p’. One theory holds that listeners “take account of” speaking rate in perception, and thus adjust for different speaking rates (exhibiting what is usually termed perceptual normalization). Before a short vowel, th...

2024, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics

In this visual-world paradigm we investigated the processing and interpretation of two overt subject anaphoric expressions in Greek, a null-subject language with a relatively free word-order, in relation to specific linguistic properties and whether these differ across adulthood. Specifically, we explored whether changes in anaphoric type (o ídhios vs. aftós) and syntactic complexity (SVO vs. OVS word-orders) had similar effects in how reference was processed and finally resolved by young and elderly adults. We analysed (a) fixation duration in subject and object antecedent pictures to examine online processing and (b) offline responses in comprehension questions to investigate final interpretation, i.e., ambiguity resolution. Our offline results revealed that pronominal resolution patterned across age groups: A clear subject preference of o ídhios (‘the same’) was drawn from results irrespective of the word-order used, suggesting that this expression is preferentially linked to an ...

2024

An understanding of language processing in humans is critical if realistic computerised systems are to be produced to perform various language operations. The examination of aphasia in individuals has provided a large amount of information on the organisation of language processing, with particular reference to the regions in the brain where processing occurs and the ability to regain language functionality despite damage to the brain. Given the importance played by aphasic studies an approach that can distinguish between aphasic forms was devised by using a Kohonen self-organising network to classify sentences from the CAP (Comparative Aphasia Project) Corpus. We demonstrate that the different distributions of words in aphasics types may lead to grammatical systems which inhabit different areas in self-organising maps.

2024

This paper attempts to identify certain neurobiological constraints of natural language processing and examines the behavior of recurrent networks for the task of classifying aphasic subjects. The specific question posed here is: Can we train a neural network to distinguish between Broca aphasics, Wernicke aphasics and a control group of normal subjects on the basis of syntactic knowledge? This approach could aid diagnosis/classification of potential language disorders in the brain and it also addresses computational modeling of language acquisition.

2024

2024, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/10569139/proceeding

Broad research in both human-computer interaction and psychology has revealed that visual attention is frequently drawn to either salient or inherently appealing stimuli. In this eye-tracking study with 40 university students, we examined how banner features in email signatures affect viewer attention and engagement, focusing on the most effective features for capturing visual attention. In the laboratory experiment, participants were instructed to read short emails with a banner in the lower section. In the second stage of the study, banners varied in specific design features: color (pastel vs neon), brightness (bright vs dark), the presence of a call-to-action button, animation (dynamic vs static), and the inclusion or exclusion of a human face. We monitored the participants' visual attention to these banners and collected their click preferences and preference ratings using a five-point Likert scale. The study's results showed that banners with pastel colors, lower brightness, animation, call-to-action buttons, and including a human face received more attention and higher preference, except for dynamic animation. These outcomes suggest that incorporating these specific features in email banners can effectively enhance recipient attention and engagement, with implications that could be extended to encompass broader aspects of digital communication and user interface design.

2024, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics

2024

Age-related differences in referential efficiency depend on both contextual demands and cognitive abilities, highlighting the role of individual differences in reference development across the lifespan. Moreover, those with better cognitive skills were redundant in efficient ways, suggesting that speakers' choices reflect a pressure to facilitate the listener’s processing, rather than simply to be brief.

2024, Frontiers in Psychology

The use of orthographic and phonological information in spoken word recognition was studied in a visual world task where L1 Finnish learners of L2 French (n = 64) and L1 French native speakers (n = 24) were asked to match spoken word forms with printed words while their eye movements were recorded. In Experiment 1, French target words were contrasted with competitors having a longer ( vs. ) or a shorter word initial phonological overlap ( vs. ) and an identical orthographic overlap. In Experiment 2, target words were contrasted with competitors of either longer ( vs. ) or shorter word initial orthographic overlap ( vs. ) and of an identical phonological overlap. A general phonological effect was observed in the L2 listener group but not in the L1 control group. No general orthographic effects were observed in the L2 or L1 groups, but a significant effect of proficiency was observed for orthographic overlap over time: higher proficiency L2 listeners used also orthographic information in the matching task in a time-window from 400 to 700 ms, whereas no such effect was observed for lower proficiency listeners. These results suggest that the activation of orthographic information in L2 spoken word recognition depends on proficiency in L2.

2024, Language and Cognition

One typical use of negation is to refer to exceptions. In a visual display showing several similar items (majority) and one exception, referring to the exception by negating the majority should therefore be pragmatically felicitous. We investigated whether comprehenders are sensitive to these pragmatic aspects when processing negative sentences and having to identify the according items in the visual display. In Experiment 1, participants read affirmative and negative sentences referring to either the exception or the majority object in strongly biased displays. Additionally, unbiased displays were implemented, showing equal numbers of objects of each type. Identification times of the correct referent were shorter with the biased display independent of sentence polarity. Also, picking the exceptional item in the biased display was faster than picking a majority item, independent of sentence polarity. Thus, participants did not specifically profit from pragmatically felicitous conditions when processing negation. Critically, in the biased displays, the exceptional object was highly salient, which might have initially drawn the participant's attention to this object, resulting in a general speed-up. Therefore, in Experiment 2, we used a biased display with reduced saliency of the exceptional object. Again negation did not result in a specific speed-up due to pragmatically correct negation use. Thus, negation does not seem to facilitate the identification of an exceptional object.

2024, The Reading Matrix : an International Online Journal

In the present study, we examine sentence reading in low-proficiency Spanish learners using an eye-tracking methodology. This method reveals the real-time, uninterrupted process of reading comprehension, and can therefore shed light on L2 learners’ functional proficiency. We created sentence pairs that were identical except for one word. The contrasting words in the sentence pairs differed in processing difficulty; in this case, the more difficult word had a lower frequency of occurrence. The effect of frequency on reading typically manifests as longer reading times, particularly when readers first encounter the critical word. The relative difficulty created by a low-frequency word is usually localized to the word itself. Results show a significant difficulty effect for both the learner group and control group. However, they also show that although the effect was localized in the control group, it was not localized in the learners: difficulty “spilled over” into the subsequent regio...

2024

Drawing on insights from recent work on phonetic adaptation, we examined how listeners interpret prosodic cues to two opposing pragmatic meanings of the phrase "It looks like an X" (e.g., "It looks like a zebra (and it is one)" and "It LOOKS like a zebra (but its actually not)". After establishing that different prosodic contours map onto these meanings (Experiment 1), we demonstrated that prosodic interpretation is shifted by inclusion of another alternative (Experiment 2); the reliability a speaker's use of prosody to signal pragmatic alternatives (Experiment 3); and most importantly by the distribution of cue values along a continua (Experiment 4). We conclude that listeners derive linguistically meaningful categories from highly variable prosodic cues through rational inference about assumptions that are shared in the conversational context and adaptation to distributional characteristics of prosodic cues.

2024, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although nouns are frequently used to refer to just a single category member, nouns name entire object categories. Thus, categorizing items is a prerequisite for deciding which particular item is an intended referent. We investigated the categorization process by examining the listeners use of contextually-bound referential domain restrictions during initial reference resolution pitted against a powerful determinant of category membership: visual similarity. Anaphoric one picks out a single item from its antecedent category, so how people determine its referent reveals how they have categorized the items. We examined participants interpretation of another one in a computerized referent selection task while being eye-tracked. Items to be selected varied by their visual similarity and referential domain membership to the antecedent of another one. The eye-movement data reveals that referential domain has a strong effect on object categorization in the earliest moments of reference resolution, modulating the effect of visual similarity.

2024

Indonesia). 1 The codes for participants with aphasia are slightly adapted in this dissertation to enable the readers identify the participants who participated in all four experimental studies (Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5). The participants who participated in all four studies are designated with A plus a number (e.g., A1, A2) and the ones who did not with P plus a number (eg., P6, P7), the same as the codes in the published articles. Therefore, the same A-codes refer to the same participants, while the same P-codes may refer to different people across the chapters. Chapter 1 Introductory remarks This chapter discusses the general background and concepts that are needed to understand the chapters that follow. Specific information is provided in the experimental chapters, to avoid too much overlap. 1.1 Agrammatic aphasia: a general view Aphasia is a language problem that may happen after the occurrence of a Cerebro Vascular Accident (CVA), commonly called 'stroke', a trauma, or other diseases. The location of the damage is typically in the left side of the brain (left lateralization) in most right-handed individuals and some left-handed and ambidextrous individuals. Investigations into the linguistic characteristics of aphasia have been carried out for more than a century in the field of aphasiology. These studies have looked mostly into aphasic speakers of languages that belong to the Indo-European language family, such as English, German, Dutch, Italian, and French, which means there are potential limitations to their generalizability. Cross-linguistic investigations into the nature and characteristics of agrammatism and aphasia are very important and needed. Paradis (2001) stated that "the form of the error may depend on the type of aphasia, though potential errors are constrained by the structural characteristics of each language." (pp. 2-3). In the case of agrammatism, little is known about it in languages that belong to the Austronesian language family, while the The comprehension of aspectual adverbs and lexical adverbs of time in Standard Indonesian agrammatic aphasia reference. The results showed that time reference comprehension deficits in agrammatism are not restricted to languages that use verb inflection and are not restricted to grammatical morphology. It is argued that this is due to a problem with integrating grammatical and semantic-conceptual information. Relevance for treatment is discussed.

2024, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting

Being able to locate the list of ingredients on a food product label can be important for consumers’ health and safety. However, the arrangements of components on food labels could make it difficult to find the ingredients. This study examines whether the relative physical placement of the list of ingredients affects the time it takes for users to locate it. The location of the list of ingredients was varied on a food product label. The results suggest that the list of ingredients is found faster when it is located in the upper portions of a food label and closer to the nutrition facts panel than other locations on the label. Implications for improving food label safety are discussed.

2024, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present two visual world studies indicating that local syntactic coherences interact with binding constraints (Chomsky, 1981) of both reflexives and pronouns. Gazes to depicted referents or events suggest that when sentences containing a local coherence with a pronoun or reflexive are presented, locally coherent antecedents become activated. Our results strengthen the assumption that local syntactic coherences are interpreted and extend the effect to online anaphora resolution and complementary binding constraints.

2024

Recent experimental investigations of presupposition behaviour have focused primarily on two attributes: information packaging (henceforth, IP), and projection (henceforth, P). Work in the IP direction (eg Xue and Onea 2011, Amaral, Cummins and Katsos 2011) has focused on the way in which presuppositional content is informationally backgrounded or not-at-issue (cf. Roberts 1996). Backgrounded information is held not to update the conversational record (Lewis 1979), and consequently cannot straightforwardly be challenged or refuted ...

2024, ExLing Conferences

Listeners rely on highly variable, non-discrete acoustic information to understand spoken messages. The present 'visual world' eye tracking study investigated whether the amount of acoustic cue variation affected Cantonese listeners' perception of speech contrasts. Participants saw pictures of word pairs which were identical except for initial consonants (unaspirated versus aspirated). Auditory stimuli were continua of increasing VOT presented in bimodal distributions. The amount of acoustic variation varied between conditions: high-variance versus low-variance. Generalised Additive Modelling analyses showed, in the low-variance condition, eye movements reflected cue values: there was differential fixation behaviour for category means, boundaries and peripheries. In contrast, in the high-variance condition, the acoustic cue had little effect: fixation behaviour was similar across the different acoustic cue values. This demonstrates listeners' high sensitivity to the discriminative value of acoustic cues. How much cue dimensions are utilised depends on their variance.

2024, The Reading Matrix : an International Online Journal

2024, Neuropsychologia

Recent findings point to a role for hippocampus in the moment-by-moment processing of language, including the use and generation of semantic features in certain contexts. What role the hippocampus might play in the processing of semantic relations in spoken language comprehension, however, is unknown. Here we test patients with bilateral hippocampal damage and dense amnesia in order to examine the necessity of hippocampus for lexico-semantic mapping processes in spoken language understanding. In two visual-world eye-tracking experiments, we monitor eye movements to images that are semantically related to spoken words and sentences. We find no impairment in amnesia, relative to matched healthy comparison participants. These findings suggest, at least for close semantic links and simple language comprehension tasks, a lack of necessity for hippocampus in lexico-semantic mapping between spoken words and simple pictures.

2024

Implicit priming in aphasia CAC 2009 Submission Background: Current models of spoken language production postulate that the linguistic system is composed of a network of lexical and semantic nodes that automatically spread activation to each other as part of linguistic processing. A cardinal feature of spreading activation models is that activtation spreads automatically to related nodes and, accordingly, this process is considered to be implicit, in that it occurs outside of conscious awareness or control. Intact implicit processing is thought to underlie the automatic, fluent, rapid use of language in typical adults. Implicit processing is also a component of learning and, therefore, is likely to be an important function of all rehabilitation approaches undertaken to remediate language deficits following stroke (i.e., aphasia). Previous research has raised the question of whether automatic activation of the linguistic system is preserved or impaired in aphasia. Prather and colleagues (Prather, Zurif, Stern and Rosen, 1992; Prather, Zurif, Love and Brownell, 1997) examined implicit priming effects in individuals with aphasia and found that individuals with nonfluent aphasia were found to show priming at longer prime-target intervals than typical adults, which was interpreted to mean that these individuals had typical patterns of automatic spreading activation once it began, but that it was slow to begin. On the other hand, individuals with fluent aphasia were found to prime at both short and long intervals, which was interpreted to mean that these individuals showed typical initiation of automatic spreading activation, but that it did not damp over time as it does in the typical system. These findings are significant because, if there is a deficit in the spread of automatic activation in individuals with aphasia, this may account for some of their language deficits, and/or may influence their response to treatment. The current investigation addressed the time-course of automatic spreading activation in aphasia using a lexical decision task with each target item preceded by a masked prime. Priming was assessed at eleven different prime-target intervals.

2024, Aphasiology

Background: Several studies on agrammatic aphasia have suggested a selective deficit in the production and processing of temporal reference to the past. To account for this pattern of performance, the PAst DIscourse LIinking Hypothesis was formulated (PADILIH). The PADILIH assumes an impairment of discourselinking operations in agrammatic aphasia, which manifests in greater difficulty with reference to the past than to the present and future, which do not rely on D-linking. Aims: The first goal of the present study was to examine the validity of the PADILIH, drawing evidence from a morphologically rich Semitic language; Moroccan Arabic (MA). The second goal was to examine whether different experimental manipulations will yield different patterns of performance; hence, suggesting an interaction between task demands and accuracy. Methods & Procedures: Five MA agrammatic participants and five non-brain-damaged participants (NBDs) took part in the present study. Production, processing, and comprehension of temporal reference were tested using a number of experimental tasks. For production, a picture description, and a transformational sentence completion were used. For processing, a grammaticality-judgment task was used. For comprehension, a sentence-picture matching task was used. Outcomes & Results: NBDs performed at ceiling across all the tasks used. For agrammatic participants, different tasks revealed different patterns of performance. Both findings of the transformational sentence completion and the grammaticality-judgment tasks support the predictions of the PADILIH, in the sense that, at the group level, past reference was more compromised than present and future reference. Picture description data, however, suggested a tendency to supply more verbs in the past form. Comprehension data suggested asymmetries between the present and the future. Conclusion: Sentence completion and grammaticality-judgment data provide cross-linguistic support for the PADILIH. To explain the findings of the picture description task, it was proposed that the high number of verbs supplied in the past reflects an economy-ofeffort strategy whereby patients omitted present and future markers to avoid cognitive overload. To account for the findings of the comprehension task, it was suggested that the fact that the action denoted by the verb is not overtly displayed in pictures referring to past and future contexts, but rather inferred from the contextual clues, might have given rise to a future deficit as well. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

2024, Frontiers in Psychology

We investigated the effects of everyday language exposure on the prediction of orthographic and phonological forms of a highly predictable word during listening comprehension. Native Japanese speakers in Tokyo (Experiment 1) and Berlin (Experiment 2) listened to sentences that contained a predictable word and viewed four objects. The critical object represented the target word (e.g., /sakana/;fish), an orthographic competitor (e.g., /tuno/;horn), a phonological competitor (e.g., /sakura/;cherry blossom), or an unrelated word (e.g., /hon/;book). The three other objects were distractors. The Tokyo group fixated the target and the orthographic competitor over the unrelated objects before the target word was mentioned, suggesting that they pre-activated the orthographic form of the target word. The Berlin group showed a weaker bias toward the target than the Tokyo group, and they showed a tendency to fixate the orthographic competitor only when the orthographic similarity was very high....

Suzuki, Y., Jeong, H., Cui, H., Okamoto, K., Kawashima, R., & Sugiura, M. (2023). fMRI reveals the dynamic interface between explicit and implicit knowledge recruited during elicited imitation task. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, 2(2)

2024

Development of valid tasks that tap into implicit knowledge is a prerequisite for understanding the interface between explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge in second language (L2) acquisition. However, the extent to which elicited imitation tasks (EITs) draw on implicit or/and explicit knowledge has been a subject of controversy, due in part to the limitations of behavioral methods. To overcome this drawback, in this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural circuits underlying explicit and implicit knowledge (i.e., declarative and procedural memory) during the listening and speaking phases of an EIT performed by advanced L2 speakers of Japanese living in Japan. While the behavioral data suggest that the EIT primarily draws on automatized (speeded-up) explicit knowledge, the neuroimaging data revealed learners' dynamic use of explicit and implicit knowledge during its comprehension and production phases. Higher explicit knowledge scores (derived from a metalinguistic knowledge task) were associated with greater declarative memory (left hippocampus) activation during the speaking EIT phase, indicating a prominent role of explicit knowledge in production. During the listening phase, however, higher explicit knowledge scores predicted lower activation in declarative memory (left hippocampus) and higher activation in procedural memory (left inferior frontal gyrus), suggesting that explicit knowledge plays both inhibitory and facilitative role in the use of implicit knowledge for comprehension. Taken together, these findings suggest that advanced L2 speakers utilize their explicit and implicit knowledge efficiently and dynamically-characterized as a hallmark of automaticity-for comprehension and production during the EIT.

2024

Research shows that language processing mechanisms are permeable to the speaker's accent, but virtually no data exists on non-literal language. Our online rating study investigated whether accent-based biases could hinder making inferences from ironic speech. Ninety-six participants listened to dialogues between native and foreign-accented English speakers and rated them on several scales. We found that the ironic intent in the accented speech was missed significantly more often than in the native speech for all irony types. Importantly, participants' individual differences significantly affected the ratings and interacted with both accent and irony-type. More conservative participants were worse at detecting irony than their liberal peers but this effect was stronger for accented speech and a rarer irony type. In contrast, high empathy facilitated irony detection. The results demonstrate that interpersonal variation in personality and moral values affects language comprehen...

2024, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When people read the sentence "The babysitter put on a TV show for the kids because he needed to use the washroom, " the male identity prompted by the pronoun clashes with the stereotypical expectation of babysitters as female, rendering the pronoun "he" more difficult to process than "she" would be. We ask whether participants' HEXACO PI-R personality traits, Political Ideology, and Disgust Sensitivity (DS-R) modulate their reactions to pronouns Congruent versus Incongruent with stereotyped role nouns. 80 English-speaking participants read 40 sentences with female/male stereotypes and were asked to rate each item a Likert scale (1-6) from "Completely Inappropriate" to "Completely Appropriate. " Initial analysis indicates that Openness correlates with higher ratings of Appropriateness for Incongruent stereotypes, and Introversion correlates with low Appropriateness ratings of Incongruent, Female stereotypes. We also expect a correlation between high Conservativeness, Disgust Sensitivity and low ratings of Appropriateness for Incongruent stereotypes.

2024, Journal of Child Language

In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds’ real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to SVO or OVS sentences containing active accusative verbs (küssen “to kiss”) in Experiment 1 (N = 72), or dative object-experiencer verbs (gefallen “to like”) in Experiment 2 (N = 64). This was followed by the personal pronoun er or the demonstrative pronoun der. Interpretive preferences for er were most robust when high prominence cues (first mention, subject, proto-agent) were aligned onto the same entity; and the same applied to der for low prominence cues (second mention, object, proto-patient). These preferences were reduced in conditions where cues were misaligned, and there was evidence that each cue independently influenced performance. Crucially, individual variation in age predicted adult-like ...

2024

Recent research suggests that an individual's disgust sensitivity affects language comprehension and correlates with political attitudes. Importantly, disgust sensitivity is not a stable measure and can be manipulated dynamically. We investigated the effect of the ongoing pandemic on language processing in a word rating and lexical decision study. Each participant was first exposed to either headlines portraying CoViD-19 as a serious disease or those downplaying it. The results showed an interaction between person-based factors, inherent word characteristics, and the participants' responses. After reading headlines emphasizing the threat of CoViD-19, easily disgusted participants considered the least disgusting words more disgusting. Further, political views played a role. More liberal participants rated the words lower for disgust in the downplayed condition but higher in the severe condition than their more conservative peers. The results of this study shed new light on ho...

2023, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Introduction. In order to parse speech in real time, listeners ought to use any informative cues available. Here we investigate the role of segmental duration. On the one hand, previous work has shown that listeners are sensitive to variations in duration, changing their inferences about lexical/syntactic structure when durations are manipulated [1-3]. On the other hand, some production studies have found statistically significant differences in the mean durations of analogous segments across different lexical/syntactic structures [1,4-6]. However, a difference in means does not necessarily mean that the distributions of these durations make individual token durations sufficiently informative to be useful. The goal of the present work is to use production data to quantify how informative segmental duration is about syntactic/lexical structure. To this end, we used a Bayesian classifier to model how well a listener could guess the syntactic structure of a temporarily ambiguous sentence in a simulated gating task from natural variation in segmental durations. Data. We analyzed voice recordings of 8 native English speakers. Each spoke 28 temporarily ambiguous active/passive sentence pairs (Fig. 1), differing only in the choice of verb stem and agent/patient. All sentence pairs were syntactically ambiguous up until the verbal inflection. After excluding 9 tokens due to speaker error, there were a total of 439 recorded sentences. We handcoded the durations of the onset, nucleus, and coda of the three syllables leading up to the disambiguating verbal inflection (corresponding to the noun, auxiliary, and verb stem). Model. Our model is based on an ideal listener model, where it is assumed that listeners have implicit knowledge of segmental duration distributions for active and passive sentences. Given these distributions, the model can infer the posterior probability that a particular token belongs to one distribution or the other. We then used an incremental Bayesian belief update model that accumulates evidence from each segment of a particular sentence as it unfolds. This cumulative posterior, combined with a decision rule, is how we modeled listeners' behavior in a gating task with sentences truncated just before the disambiguating verbal inflection. Procedure. We first estimated active and passive segment durational distributions based on the mean and variance of our training data. We then calculated the posterior probability for all testing data tokens using Bayes' rule (Fig. 2a). We modeled the accumulation of evidence over segments as the cumulative posterior probability, calculated as the cumulative sum of the log-likelihood ratios of segments in each sentence (Fig. 2b). To model behavior in the gating task, we used a winner-take-all decision rule, where the model always guesses the structure with the highest posterior probability (Fig. 2c). To obtain an unbiased estimate of classifier accuracy, we used leave-one-speaker-out cross-validation: holding out one speaker's data for testing while training on the balance of data, and repeating this process for each speaker. Results. Our classifier output can be seen in Figure 2a, where each blue point represents the posterior of a single token. While for most segments the posteriors are clustered around 0.5indicating that they provide little evidence one way or another-the verb stem vowel (e.g., the 'i' in kiss) stands out visually as it carries the largest difference in active/passive distributions. Figure 2b shows the trajectory of evidence accumulation for each sentence in the dataset. The average cumulative posterior probability of each sentence's true structure (Fig. 2b, red line) rises above chance level by permutation test (the red ribbon) at the onset of the verb stem (e.g., the 'k' in kiss) culminating in 0.67 probability by the end of the verb stem, just before the sentence is disambiguated morphosyntactically. Lastly, our modeled winner-take-all accuracy of 74% (Fig. 2c) is in qualitative agreement with previously recorded behavioral results, where participants averaged between 62 and 83% accuracy in gating tasks with analogous sentences truncated before the verbal inflection [4,5]. Conclusion. Our results indicate that there is indeed sufficient information contained in the duration of individual segment tokens so as to be useful to listeners in real-time sentence processing. Whether duration serves as a direct cue to upcoming syntactic structure or indirectly influences such an inference via phonological or morphological levels remains an open question. Also, further work is needed to determine whether listeners use these durational cues to generate predictions about upcoming sentence structure online.

2023, Journal of cognitive psychology

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2023

A question of central importance at the interface of the grammar and the language processing system is how grammatical constraints are deployed during sentence processing. This paper focuses on how the grammatical constraints of the syntactic Binding Theory (BT)-the structural constraints on reflexives and pronouns-apply during online processing. Our study is presented against a background literature proposing a variety of models for the application of the BT during processing. The Initial Filter approach (Nicol and Swinney 1989) suggests that the BT constraints constrain from the very beginning of processing which potential antecedents people consider during processing; the Defeasible Filter approach (Sturt 2003) posits that initially people consider only potential antecedents consistent with the BT, but may at a later stage of processing consider antecedents not sanctioned by the BT; and the Multiple Constraints approach (Badecker and Straub 2002) claims, instead, that the constraints of the BT apply alongside other processing constraints throughout processing. Using a novel visual world eye-tracking method which manipulates the gender of potential antecedents visually, we find clear evidence that listeners consider gender-matching potential antecedent NPs for reflexives and pronouns that match in gender regardless of whether they are licensed structurally by the BT, consistent with the Multiple Constraints view. We also consider how our results also bear on the formulations of the BT, favoring an approach that recognizes that the constraints of the BT apply differently for reflexives and pronouns, in particular appearing to be less robust for the latter. Many thanks to editor Christopher Piñón and an anonymous reviewer for comments that helped to improve the paper. We also thank the research assistants who helped collect the data:

2023, Nepalese linguistics

This research article presents experimental psycholinguistic study on high and low proficient Nepali-English bilingual adults. Language comprehension was measured using lexical decision tasks and language production was measured using verbal fluency task. Executive control was measured using bilingual Stroop task in mouse tracking paradigm. The results show high proficient bilinguals show the bilingual advantage in language comprehension, language production and executive control tasks.

2023, Journal of Neurolinguistics

2023, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics

2023, Advances in Cognitive Psychology

This correlational study investigated the relationship between cognitive aptitudes and online and offline processing of L2 syntactic structures. As a measure of online processing, the study used a self-paced reading task. To tap into offline L2 knowledge, it employed an untimed grammaticality judgment task (GJT). The main analyses focused on the correct placement of relative pronouns. The supplementary analyses were carried out on a range of other structures used as fillers in the GJT. In terms of cognitive aptitudes, the study considered the role of explicit learning aptitude and working memory in the processing of L2. Explicit aptitude was operationalized as an ability to infer rules of a new language and measured by the LLAMA F task, and working memory was measured by a digit span task. Moreover, the design included a measure of general L2 proficiency. The results showed that L2 learners' scores in the GJT were positively related to their explicit language aptitude. However, this type of relationship was observed only for ungrammatical items. In contrast, working memory was not a significant predictor of the performance on the GJT. As regards online processing, no links were found between the predictor variables and participants' sensitivity to errors in the self-paced reading task. Taken together, the results corroborate the role of explicit learning abilities in offline processing of L2 grammar. Additionally, supplementary analyses suggest that this relationship may hold even when general L2 proficiency is controlled for.

2023, Cognition

Spoken words and signs both consist of structured sub-lexical units. While phonemes unfold in time in the case of the spoken signal, visual sub-lexical units such as location and handshape are produced simultaneously in signs. In the current study we investigate the role of sub-lexical units in lexical access in spoken Spanish and in Spanish Sign Language (LSE) in hearing early bimodal bilinguals and in hearing second language (L2) learners of LSE, both native speakers of Spanish, using the visual world paradigm. Experiment 1 investigated phonological competition in spoken Spanish from words sharing onset or rhyme. Experiment 2 investigated 2 competition in LSE from signs sharing handshape or location. For Spanish, the results confirm previous findings for word recognition: onset competition comes first and is more salient than rhyme competition. For sign recognition, native bimodal bilinguals (native speakers of spoken and signed languages) showed earlier competition from location than handshape, and overall stronger competition from handshape compared to location. Hearing bimodal bilinguals who learned LSE as a second language also experienced competition from both signed parameters. However, they showed later effects for location competitors and weaker effects for handshape competitors than native signers. Our results demonstrate that the temporal dynamics of spoken words and signs impact the time course of lexical co-activation. Furthermore, age of acquisition of the signed language modulates sub-lexical processing of signs, and may reflect enhanced abilities of native signers to use early phonological cues in transition movements to constrain sign recognition.

2023, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

In the domain of language research, the simultaneous presentation of a visual scene and its auditory description (i.e., the visual world paradigm) has been used to reveal the timing of mental mechanisms. Here we apply this rationale to the domain of numerical cognition in order to explore the differences between fast and slow arithmetic performance, and to further study the role of spatial-numerical associations during mental arithmetic. We presented 30 healthy adults simultaneously with visual displays containing four numbers and with auditory addition and subtraction problems. Analysis of eye movements revealed that participants look spontaneously at the numbers they currently process (operands, solution). Faster performance was characterized by shorter latencies prior to fixating the relevant numbers and fewer revisits to the first operand while computing the solution. These signatures of superior task performance were more pronounced for addition and visual numbers arranged in a...

2023, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

This study aimed at comparing the time course of the activation of function and manipulation knowledge during object identification. The influence of visual similarity and context information was also assessed. In 3 eye-tracking experiments, conducted with the Visual-World-Paradigm, participants heard the name of an object and had to identify it among four pictures. The target object (e.g., "shopping cart") could be presented along with objects related by (a) function (e.g., "basket"), (b) manipulation (e.g., "lawnmower"), (c) context (e.g., "cash register"), (d) visual similarity (e.g., "toaster"), and (e) completely unrelated objects. Growth curve analyses were used to assess competition effects among semantically (a, b and c), visually related (d) and unrelated competitors (e). Results showed that manipulation-and functionrelated, but not context-related objects received more fixations than the unrelated ones, with a temporal advantage for the manipulation-related objects (Experiment 1). However, the visually similar objects faded the semantic competition effects, especially for function-related objects (Experiment 2). Finally, no temporal differences appeared when manipulation-and functionrelated objects were shown within the same visual array (Experiment 3). These results support the idea that both function and manipulation are relevant features of object semantic representations, but in the absence of other semantic competitors the activation of manipulation features appears prioritized during object identification.

2023, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

Studies measuring inhibitory control in the visual modality have shown a bilingual advantage in both children and adults. However, there is a lack of developmental research on inhibitory control in the auditory modality. This study compared the comprehension of active and passive English sentences in 7–10 years old bilingual and monolingual children. The task was to identify the agent of a sentence in the presence of verbal interference. The target sentence was cued by the gender of the speaker. Children were instructed to focus on the sentence in the target voice and ignore the distractor sentence. Results indicate that bilinguals are more accurate than monolinguals in comprehending syntactically complex sentences in the presence of linguistic noise. This supports previous findings with adult participants (Filippi, Leech, Thomas, Green & Dick, 2012). We therefore conclude that the bilingual advantage in interference control begins early in life and is maintained throughout developm...

2023

In auditory word recognition, multiple word candidates are assumed to be activated before one candidate is selected. Sentence context is supposed to increase the activation of the appropriate word candidate, even before it is selected. Results from one particular cross-modal semantic priming study (Zwitserlood 1989) are often advanced as positive evidence for both claims. Other priming studies, however, report inconsistent results regarding multiple activation and the role of context. The present study was set up to test the validity of the cross-modal priming task for the study of early stages of word recognition. This was done by replicating the original study by Zwitserlood, with several improvements. However, the results did not show any early priming effects. Consequently, the influence of context on the activation of word candidates cannot be established. Our tentative conclusion is that cross-modal semantic priming is not suitable for studying the early stages of word recognition.