Research on post-repair representations of garden path sentences has found that readers systematically arrive at misinterpretations even after displaying evidence of reanalysis (Christianson et al., 2001; Ferreira et al., 2001). These comprehension errors have been attributed to the semantic interpretation associated with the incorrect parse persisting past disambiguation, but less is known about the mechanism driving this phenomenon (Sturt, 2007; Slattery et al., 2013). A speeded auditory comprehension experiment examined the depth of semantic processing as an independent influence on the strength of semantic persistence, drawing on known effects of pitch accent on the processing of focus-related semantic meaning (Fraundorf et al., 2010). Participants heard garden path sentences with early/late-closure ambiguity (e.g., While Anna dressed the baby stopped crying) with a sharply rising pitch accent on either the unambiguous adjunct subject or the ambiguously transitive adjunct verb, followed by a comprehension question that probed whether the incorrect late-closure analysis persisted. Since the pitch accent is often a strong cue for semantic focus when it occurs in prosodically marked phrase-medial positions, we reasoned that a deeper semantic processing would be facilitated for the late-closure analysis only when the verb receives a pitch accent. Findings indicate that a pitch accent on the verb significantly decreased accuracy without a corresponding increase on response time, suggesting that a deeper semantic processing of the erroneous parse can strengthen its resistance to revision without necessarily interfering with the process of structure-building.
对花园小径句子的修复后表征的研究发现,即使在展示了重新分析的证据后,读者也会系统地到达误解(Christianson et al., 2001;Ferreira et al., 2001)。这些理解错误归因于与错误解析持续过去消歧相关的语义解释,但对驱动这种现象的机制知之甚少(Sturt, 2007;Slattery等人,2013)。一项快速听觉理解实验利用音高重音对焦点相关语义加工的已知影响,检验了语义加工深度对语义持久性强度的独立影响(Fraundorf et al., 2010)。参与者听到的花园小径句子具有早/晚结束的模糊性(例如,当安娜给婴儿穿衣服时,婴儿停止了哭泣),在明确的主语或含糊的及物动词上,音调急剧上升,然后是一个理解问题,探究错误的晚结束分析是否持续存在。由于重音出现在韵律标记的短语-中间位置时,往往是语义聚焦的强烈线索,因此我们推断,只有当动词出现重音时,才有利于后期结束分析的更深层次的语义处理。研究结果表明,动词的音高重音显著降低了准确性,但没有相应的增加响应时间,这表明对错误解析进行更深层次的语义处理可以增强其对修改的抵抗力,而不一定会干扰结构构建过程。
{"title":"The role of prosodic focus in the reanalysis of garden path sentences: Depth of semantic processing impedes the revision of an erroneous local analysis","authors":"Jun Choe, Masaya Yoshida, Jennifer Cole","doi":"10.5070/g601136","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/g601136","url":null,"abstract":"Research on post-repair representations of garden path sentences has found that readers systematically arrive at misinterpretations even after displaying evidence of reanalysis (Christianson et al., 2001; Ferreira et al., 2001). These comprehension errors have been attributed to the semantic interpretation associated with the incorrect parse persisting past disambiguation, but less is known about the mechanism driving this phenomenon (Sturt, 2007; Slattery et al., 2013). A speeded auditory comprehension experiment examined the depth of semantic processing as an independent influence on the strength of semantic persistence, drawing on known effects of pitch accent on the processing of focus-related semantic meaning (Fraundorf et al., 2010). Participants heard garden path sentences with early/late-closure ambiguity (e.g., While Anna dressed the baby stopped crying) with a sharply rising pitch accent on either the unambiguous adjunct subject or the ambiguously transitive adjunct verb, followed by a comprehension question that probed whether the incorrect late-closure analysis persisted. Since the pitch accent is often a strong cue for semantic focus when it occurs in prosodically marked phrase-medial positions, we reasoned that a deeper semantic processing would be facilitated for the late-closure analysis only when the verb receives a pitch accent. Findings indicate that a pitch accent on the verb significantly decreased accuracy without a corresponding increase on response time, suggesting that a deeper semantic processing of the erroneous parse can strengthen its resistance to revision without necessarily interfering with the process of structure-building.","PeriodicalId":164622,"journal":{"name":"Glossa Psycholinguistics","volume":"259 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132911948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The idea that comprehenders predict upcoming linguistic content has become core to many theories of language processing. Experimental studies exploiting morphosyntactic and phonotactic constraints on a word form preceding a high cloze target word have been key to underpinning predictive accounts of comprehension, but investigating these tight sequential contrasts with traditional behavioral methods is difficult. The maze task, with its more focal measure of incremental processing, may provide a cheap and easy methodology to study early cues to prediction. An experiment investigating the a/an contrast (DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005; Nieuwland, et al., 2018) using A-maze (Boyce, Futrell, & Levy, 2020) finds that unexpected articles, as well as nouns, elicit slower focal response times. Response times are also shown to be inversely related to noun cloze probabilities, with slower responders showing larger effects of expectation. This study demonstrates that the maze task can be sensitive to expectation and is a useful alternative methodology for investigating prediction in comprehension.
{"title":"Prediction in the maze: Evidence for probabilistic pre-activation from the English a/an contrast","authors":"E. M. Husband","doi":"10.5070/g601153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/g601153","url":null,"abstract":"The idea that comprehenders predict upcoming linguistic content has become core to many theories of language processing. Experimental studies exploiting morphosyntactic and phonotactic constraints on a word form preceding a high cloze target word have been key to underpinning predictive accounts of comprehension, but investigating these tight sequential contrasts with traditional behavioral methods is difficult. The maze task, with its more focal measure of incremental processing, may provide a cheap and easy methodology to study early cues to prediction. An experiment investigating the a/an contrast (DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005; Nieuwland, et al., 2018) using A-maze (Boyce, Futrell, & Levy, 2020) finds that unexpected articles, as well as nouns, elicit slower focal response times. Response times are also shown to be inversely related to noun cloze probabilities, with slower responders showing larger effects of expectation. This study demonstrates that the maze task can be sensitive to expectation and is a useful alternative methodology for investigating prediction in comprehension.","PeriodicalId":164622,"journal":{"name":"Glossa Psycholinguistics","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114976168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Scalar implicature depends on the activation of alternatives. For instance, in English, finger implicates 'not thumb', suggesting that thumb is an activated alternative. Is this because it is more specific (Quantity) and equally short (Manner)? Indeed, toe doesn't imply 'not big toe', perhaps because big toe is longer. As L. Horn points out, this Quantity/Manner explanation predicts that if English had the simplex Latin word pollex meaning 'thumb or big toe', then the asymmetry would disappear. But would it suffice for that word to exist in the language, or would the word also have to be sufficiently salient? We explore this question in four languages that are sometimes said to lack a single-word alternative for thumb: Spanish (which does have pulgar 'thumb or big toe' (< pollex), though it is a non-colloquial form), Russian, Persian, and Arabic. To gauge the salience of various ways of describing digits, we use a fill-in-the-blank production task. We then measure the availability of implicatures using a forced choice comprehension task. We find cross-linguistic differences in implicature, and moreover that implicature calculation tracks production probabilities more closely than structural complexity of the alternatives. A comparison between two Rational Speech Act models—one in which the speaker replicates our production data and a standard one in which the speaker chooses based on a standard cost/accuracy trade-off—shows that comprehension is more closely tied to production probability than to the complexity of alternatives.
{"title":"Complexity vs. salience of alternatives in implicature: A cross-linguistic investigation","authors":"D. Dionne, E. Coppock","doi":"10.5070/g601190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/g601190","url":null,"abstract":"Scalar implicature depends on the activation of alternatives. For instance, in English, finger implicates 'not thumb', suggesting that thumb is an activated alternative. Is this because it is more specific (Quantity) and equally short (Manner)? Indeed, toe doesn't imply 'not big toe', perhaps because big toe is longer. As L. Horn points out, this Quantity/Manner explanation predicts that if English had the simplex Latin word pollex meaning 'thumb or big toe', then the asymmetry would disappear. But would it suffice for that word to exist in the language, or would the word also have to be sufficiently salient? We explore this question in four languages that are sometimes said to lack a single-word alternative for thumb: Spanish (which does have pulgar 'thumb or big toe' (< pollex), though it is a non-colloquial form), Russian, Persian, and Arabic. To gauge the salience of various ways of describing digits, we use a fill-in-the-blank production task. We then measure the availability of implicatures using a forced choice comprehension task. We find cross-linguistic differences in implicature, and moreover that implicature calculation tracks production probabilities more closely than structural complexity of the alternatives. A comparison between two Rational Speech Act models—one in which the speaker replicates our production data and a standard one in which the speaker chooses based on a standard cost/accuracy trade-off—shows that comprehension is more closely tied to production probability than to the complexity of alternatives. ","PeriodicalId":164622,"journal":{"name":"Glossa Psycholinguistics","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128435984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Visual World eye tracking is a temporally fine-grained method of monitoring attention, making it a popular tool in the study of online sentence processing. Recently, while infrared eye tracking was mostly unavailable, various web-based experiment platforms have rapidly developed webcam eye tracking functionalities, which are now in urgent need of testing and evaluation. We replicated a recent Visual World study on the incremental processing of verb aspect in English using ‘out of the box’ webcam eye tracking software (jsPsych; de Leeuw, 2015) and crowdsourced participants, and fully replicated both the offline and online results of the original study. We furthermore discuss factors influencing the quality and interpretability of webcam eye tracking data, particularly with regards to temporal and spatial resolution; and conclude that remote webcam eye tracking can serve as an affordable and accessible alternative to lab-based infrared eye tracking, even for questions probing the time-course of language processing.
{"title":"Comparing infrared and webcam eye tracking in the Visual World Paradigm","authors":"Myrte Vos, Serge Minor, G. Ramchand","doi":"10.5070/g6011131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/g6011131","url":null,"abstract":"Visual World eye tracking is a temporally fine-grained method of monitoring attention, making it a popular tool in the study of online sentence processing. Recently, while infrared eye tracking was mostly unavailable, various web-based experiment platforms have rapidly developed webcam eye tracking functionalities, which are now in urgent need of testing and evaluation. We replicated a recent Visual World study on the incremental processing of verb aspect in English using ‘out of the box’ webcam eye tracking software (jsPsych; de Leeuw, 2015) and crowdsourced participants, and fully replicated both the offline and online results of the original study. We furthermore discuss factors influencing the quality and interpretability of webcam eye tracking data, particularly with regards to temporal and spatial resolution; and conclude that remote webcam eye tracking can serve as an affordable and accessible alternative to lab-based infrared eye tracking, even for questions probing the time-course of language processing.","PeriodicalId":164622,"journal":{"name":"Glossa Psycholinguistics","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130701398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
C. Gattei, Federico Alvarez, Luis París, A. Wainselboim, Y. Sevilla, Diego E. Shalom
We present an eyetracking study that investigates how linking is achieved during real-time comprehension of Spanish sentences with causative psych verbs and alternative case marking. This group of verbs lead to verbs’ argument structures that require direct or inverse syntax-to-semantics linking according to the type of case marking assigned to their object. The study aimed at disentangling whether processing inverse linking was more costly than direct linking, and exploring how incremental argument interpretation takes place when lexemes that accept several case markings are used. Results showed that during incremental comprehension, inverse linking is more difficult than direct linking, irrespective of word order. As for argument interpretation, the current study partially replicated the results of previous studies conducted in this language using different verb types. Findings are discussed under the light of different psycholinguistic models addressing case marking processing and incremental linking.
{"title":"Why bother? What our eyes tell about psych verb (non) causative constructions","authors":"C. Gattei, Federico Alvarez, Luis París, A. Wainselboim, Y. Sevilla, Diego E. Shalom","doi":"10.5070/g601138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/g601138","url":null,"abstract":"We present an eyetracking study that investigates how linking is achieved during real-time comprehension of Spanish sentences with causative psych verbs and alternative case marking. This group of verbs lead to verbs’ argument structures that require direct or inverse syntax-to-semantics linking according to the type of case marking assigned to their object. The study aimed at disentangling whether processing inverse linking was more costly than direct linking, and exploring how incremental argument interpretation takes place when lexemes that accept several case markings are used. Results showed that during incremental comprehension, inverse linking is more difficult than direct linking, irrespective of word order. As for argument interpretation, the current study partially replicated the results of previous studies conducted in this language using different verb types. Findings are discussed under the light of different psycholinguistic models addressing case marking processing and incremental linking.","PeriodicalId":164622,"journal":{"name":"Glossa Psycholinguistics","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114808964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In a non-verbal aesthetic judgement task and a pre-registered production task, we tested how the orientation of the patient relative to the agent in a visual scene affects the perception and description of the depicted transitive event. Previous research has shown that a visual property like the position of the patient relative to the agent can affect speakers’ verbalization of events. Here, we investigated whether orientation constitutes another factor besides position that affects scene description. While speakers of German displayed an overall preference for scenes in which agent and patient faced each other, these scenes needed more time for sentence planning than the same scenes that showed the patient looking in the same direction and thus away from the agent. Moreover, we elicited more patient-initial sentences for face-to-face scenes than for same-direction scenes. The increase in patient-initial sentences was comparable to the increase in patient-initial sentences for scenes with left-positioned patients as compared to right-positioned patients. Based on our findings, we argue that manipulations of both position and orientation can change the prominence of the patient. The more prominent the patient (facing the agent, being placed to the left of the agent), the more likely speakers are to choose the patient as the sentence-initial subject. Hence, subtle changes of visual properties may affect not only how speakers perceive an event but also how they describe an event. Our findings are of relevance for a range of tasks that use visual materials.
{"title":"(How) Visual properties affect the perception and description of transitive events","authors":"Judith Schlenter, M. Penke","doi":"10.5070/g601193","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/g601193","url":null,"abstract":"In a non-verbal aesthetic judgement task and a pre-registered production task, we tested how the orientation of the patient relative to the agent in a visual scene affects the perception and description of the depicted transitive event. Previous research has shown that a visual property like the position of the patient relative to the agent can affect speakers’ verbalization of events. Here, we investigated whether orientation constitutes another factor besides position that affects scene description. While speakers of German displayed an overall preference for scenes in which agent and patient faced each other, these scenes needed more time for sentence planning than the same scenes that showed the patient looking in the same direction and thus away from the agent. Moreover, we elicited more patient-initial sentences for face-to-face scenes than for same-direction scenes. The increase in patient-initial sentences was comparable to the increase in patient-initial sentences for scenes with left-positioned patients as compared to right-positioned patients. Based on our findings, we argue that manipulations of both position and orientation can change the prominence of the patient. The more prominent the patient (facing the agent, being placed to the left of the agent), the more likely speakers are to choose the patient as the sentence-initial subject. Hence, subtle changes of visual properties may affect not only how speakers perceive an event but also how they describe an event. Our findings are of relevance for a range of tasks that use visual materials.","PeriodicalId":164622,"journal":{"name":"Glossa Psycholinguistics","volume":"63 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114229454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Studies of agreement attraction in language production have shown that speakers systematically produce verb agreement errors in the presence of a local noun whose features differ from that of the agreement controller. However, in attraction experiments, these errors only ever occur in a subset of trials. In the present study, we applied a naturalistic scene-description paradigm to investigate how attraction affects the distribution of errors and the time-course of correctly inflected verbs. We conducted our experiment both in the lab and in an unsupervised web-based setting. The results were strikingly similar across the experimental settings for both the error and timing analyses, demonstrating that it is possible to conduct production experiments via the internet with a high level of similarity to those done in the lab. The experiments replicated the basic number attraction effect, though they elicited comparable interference from both singular and plural local nouns, challenging common assumptions about a strong plural markedness effect in attraction. We observed slowdowns before correct verbs that paralleled the distribution of agreement errors, suggesting that the process resulting in attraction can be active even when no error is produced. Our results are easily captured by a model of agreement attraction in which errors arise at the point of computing agreement, rather than reflecting earlier errors made during initial encoding of the subject number.
{"title":"Agreement attraction error and timing profiles in continuous speech","authors":"Margaret Kandel, Cassidy Wyatt, C. Phillips","doi":"10.5070/g601157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/g601157","url":null,"abstract":"Studies of agreement attraction in language production have shown that speakers systematically produce verb agreement errors in the presence of a local noun whose features differ from that of the agreement controller. However, in attraction experiments, these errors only ever occur in a subset of trials. In the present study, we applied a naturalistic scene-description paradigm to investigate how attraction affects the distribution of errors and the time-course of correctly inflected verbs. We conducted our experiment both in the lab and in an unsupervised web-based setting. The results were strikingly similar across the experimental settings for both the error and timing analyses, demonstrating that it is possible to conduct production experiments via the internet with a high level of similarity to those done in the lab. The experiments replicated the basic number attraction effect, though they elicited comparable interference from both singular and plural local nouns, challenging common assumptions about a strong plural markedness effect in attraction. We observed slowdowns before correct verbs that paralleled the distribution of agreement errors, suggesting that the process resulting in attraction can be active even when no error is produced. Our results are easily captured by a model of agreement attraction in which errors arise at the point of computing agreement, rather than reflecting earlier errors made during initial encoding of the subject number.","PeriodicalId":164622,"journal":{"name":"Glossa Psycholinguistics","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131623927","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Previous studies on the processing of ambiguous pronominal reference have led to contradictory results: some suggested that ambiguity may hinder processing (Stewart, Holler, & Kidd, 2007), while others showed an ambiguity advantage (Grant, Sloggett, & Dillon, 2020) similar to what has been reported for structural ambiguities. This study provides a conceptual replication of Stewart et al. (2007, Experiment 1), to examine whether the discrepancy in earlier results is caused by the processing depth that participants engage in (cf. Swets, Desmet, Clifton, & Ferreira, 2008). We present the results from a word-by-word self-paced reading experiment with Dutch sentences that contained a personal pronoun in an embedded clause that was either ambiguous or disambiguated through gender features. Depth of processing of the embedded clause was manipulated through offline comprehension questions. The results showed that the difference in reading times for ambiguous versus unambiguous sentences depends on the processing depth: a significant ambiguity penalty was found under deep processing but not under shallow processing. No significant ambiguity advantage was found, regardless of processing depth. This replicates the results in Stewart et al. (2007) using a different methodology and a larger sample size for appropriate statistical power. These findings provide further evidence that ambiguous pronominal reference resolution is a flexible process, such that the way in which ambiguous sentences are processed depends on the depth of processing of the relevant information. Theoretical and methodological implications of these findings are discussed.
{"title":"The processing of ambiguous pronominal reference is sensitive to depth of processing","authors":"Ava Creemers, A. Meyer","doi":"10.5070/g601166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/g601166","url":null,"abstract":"Previous studies on the processing of ambiguous pronominal reference have led to contradictory results: some suggested that ambiguity may hinder processing (Stewart, Holler, & Kidd, 2007), while others showed an ambiguity advantage (Grant, Sloggett, & Dillon, 2020) similar to what has been reported for structural ambiguities. This study provides a conceptual replication of Stewart et al. (2007, Experiment 1), to examine whether the discrepancy in earlier results is caused by the processing depth that participants engage in (cf. Swets, Desmet, Clifton, & Ferreira, 2008). We present the results from a word-by-word self-paced reading experiment with Dutch sentences that contained a personal pronoun in an embedded clause that was either ambiguous or disambiguated through gender features. Depth of processing of the embedded clause was manipulated through offline comprehension questions. The results showed that the difference in reading times for ambiguous versus unambiguous sentences depends on the processing depth: a significant ambiguity penalty was found under deep processing but not under shallow processing. No significant ambiguity advantage was found, regardless of processing depth. This replicates the results in Stewart et al. (2007) using a different methodology and a larger sample size for appropriate statistical power. These findings provide further evidence that ambiguous pronominal reference resolution is a flexible process, such that the way in which ambiguous sentences are processed depends on the depth of processing of the relevant information. Theoretical and methodological implications of these findings are discussed.","PeriodicalId":164622,"journal":{"name":"Glossa Psycholinguistics","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115236585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We use children’s noun learning as a probe into the nature of their syntactic prediction mechanism and the statistical knowledge on which that prediction mechanism is based. We focus on verb-based predictions, considering two possibilities: children’s syntactic predictions might rely on distributional knowledge about specific verbs—i.e. they might be lexicalized — or they might rely on distributional knowledge that is general to all verbs. In an intermodal preferential looking experiment, we establish that, by as early as 19 months of age, verb-based predictions are lexicalized: children encode the syntactic distributions of particular verbs and use those distributions to make predictions, but they do not assume that these can be used for verbs in general. knowledge from specific lexical Our data suggests that syntactic knowledge begins with abstract categories and that lexically specific distributional information informs the development of parsing strategies, but not the knowledge itself. That knowledge is revealed when we take away children’s ability to rely on lexically specific knowledge, as in the current study.
{"title":"Lexicalization in the developing parser","authors":"Aaron Steven White, J. Lidz","doi":"10.5070/g601148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/g601148","url":null,"abstract":"We use children’s noun learning as a probe into the nature of their syntactic prediction mechanism and the statistical knowledge on which that prediction mechanism is based. We focus on verb-based predictions, considering two possibilities: children’s syntactic predictions might rely on distributional knowledge about specific verbs—i.e. they might be lexicalized — or they might rely on distributional knowledge that is general to all verbs. In an intermodal preferential looking experiment, we establish that, by as early as 19 months of age, verb-based predictions are lexicalized: children encode the syntactic distributions of particular verbs and use those distributions to make predictions, but they do not assume that these can be used for verbs in general. knowledge from specific lexical Our data suggests that syntactic knowledge begins with abstract categories and that lexically specific distributional information informs the development of parsing strategies, but not the knowledge itself. That knowledge is revealed when we take away children’s ability to rely on lexically specific knowledge, as in the current study.","PeriodicalId":164622,"journal":{"name":"Glossa Psycholinguistics","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114987200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Replications are an integral part of cumulative experimental science. Yet many scientific disciplines do not replicate enough because novel confirmatory findings are valued over direct replications. To provide a systematic assessment of the replication landscape in experimental linguistics, the present study estimated replication rates for over 50.000 articles across 98 journals. We used automatic string matching using the Web of Science combined with in-depth manual inspections of 210 papers. The median rate of mentioning the search string "replicat*" was as low as 1.6%. Subsequent manual analyses revealed that only eight of these were direct replications, i.e. studies that arrive at the same scientific conclusions as an initial study by using exactly the same methodology. Moreover, only 1 in 1600 experimental linguistic studies reports a direct replication performed by independent researchers. We conclude that, similar to neighboring disciplines, experimental linguistics does not replicate enough.
{"title":"Assessing the replication landscape in experimental linguistics","authors":"Kristina Kobrock, Timo B. Roettger","doi":"10.31234/osf.io/fzngs","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fzngs","url":null,"abstract":"Replications are an integral part of cumulative experimental science. Yet many scientific disciplines do not replicate enough because novel confirmatory findings are valued over direct replications. To provide a systematic assessment of the replication landscape in experimental linguistics, the present study estimated replication rates for over 50.000 articles across 98 journals. We used automatic string matching using the Web of Science combined with in-depth manual inspections of 210 papers. The median rate of mentioning the search string \"replicat*\" was as low as 1.6%. Subsequent manual analyses revealed that only eight of these were direct replications, i.e. studies that arrive at the same scientific conclusions as an initial study by using exactly the same methodology. Moreover, only 1 in 1600 experimental linguistic studies reports a direct replication performed by independent researchers. We conclude that, similar to neighboring disciplines, experimental linguistics does not replicate enough.","PeriodicalId":164622,"journal":{"name":"Glossa Psycholinguistics","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128939139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}