Journal of memory and language最新文献

When reading polysyllabic words, assignment of lexical stress is a challenge for readers, especially in languages, such as English or Italian, in which stress position is not strictly determined even though words as well as nonwords typically contain several sublexical cues to stress that readers might use. Here, we attempted to identify such cues using a corpus analysis and to examine their impact on human performance in a megastudy in which participants (N = 45) assigned stress to nonwords (N = 800), stimuli particularly revealing of stress cue use because they have no predefined stress pattern. Hierarchical regression results confirmed an impact of sublexical cues examined in former studies and revealed a role for cues not previously examined, including similarity to real words. These results are informative for computational models of reading as they indicate that readers assign stress to nonwords based on not only sublexical but also lexical information.

How phonological neighborhood affects lexical retrieval can shed important light on lexical organization and processing. Yet these effects are unclear, particularly in Mandarin Chinese. This is likely because the working definition of phonological neighbors (i.e., the one-phoneme edit rule) used in Indo-European languages inadequately characterizes the phonological similarity among Mandarin words, which have simpler syllable structures and lexical tones. The current study proposes a graded Mandarin phonological neighborhood and investigates the impacts of near-to-distant Mandarin phonological neighbors on lexical retrieval. In Study 1, we investigated how Mandarin phonological similarity is influenced by the editing of lexical tone, constituent (onset/rime, initial/final) and phoneme. Native Mandarin speakers rated the similarity between the edited monosyllabic words. We found that constituent-edit neighbors were rated as the most dissimilar, followed by phoneme-edit neighbors, while tone-edit neighbors were the most similar. In Study 2, we calculated the constituent-, phoneme- and tone-edit phonological neighborhood densities and frequencies for 4,706 monosyllabic Mandarin words. We then utilized extant datasets to examine how the density and frequency of neighbors at varied distances, as well as of homophonic neighbors, impact response latencies in word naming, visual lexical decision, and picture naming tasks. The results showed that graded phonological neighbors had differential impacts on lexical retrieval efficiency: distant (constituent-edit) neighbors facilitated word retrieval, while near (phoneme-, tone-edit and homophonic) neighbors had inhibitory effects. We discuss these findings within an interactive activation and competition framework and suggest future directions to study the representation and processing of the Mandarin phonological lexicon.

This study evaluates two broad classes of language processing accounts that make predictions for sentences like “The admirer of the singer(s) apparently thinks...”. Feature distortion accounts predict increased processing difficulty at the verb in sentences with a plural distractor noun (singers) while similarity-based interference accounts predict the opposite: increased difficulty in sentences with a singular distractor noun (singer). Neither of these effects was reliably observed in earlier research, and the Bayesian meta-analysis of 31 published studies reported here is almost perfectly inconclusive. An explanation may be that both effects occur simultaneously and therefore mask each other. To test this idea, we conducted three single-trial self-paced reading experiments ($N_1=4,296$, $N_2=3,920$, $N_3=3,559$) which orthogonally manipulated agreement attraction and inhibitory interference. Surprisingly, all three experiments produced evidence for agreement attraction but none for inhibitory interference, which supports feature distortion but not similarity-based interference accounts. Experiment 4 ($N_4=3,535$) tested the role of the expected task by preparing participants for a comprehension question (vs. acceptability judgment in Experiments 1–3). It showed neither agreement attraction nor inhibitory interference effects. Our findings demonstrate that agreement attraction effects can arise in grammatical sentences – contra earlier research – but also that these effects crucially depend on the task. This explains inconsistent results in prior research and supports feature distortion as the driving force behind attraction effects in grammatical sentences.

When people read temporarily ambiguous (“garden-path”) sentences, the forward movement of their eyes is often interrupted by regressions. These regressions are usually followed by rereading some portion of the previously read text. Frazier and Rayner (1982) proposed the Selective Reanalysis Hypothesis (SRH), which proposed that readers regress to critical choice points in the syntactic phrase marker of garden-paths where misparses had occurred, and furthermore, then reanalyzed the syntactic structure to arrive at a correct parse in most cases. A considerable amount of more recent work, however, suggests that readers often do not derive a correct parse or interpretation from such sentences. If these more recent observations are accurate, perhaps rereading is not necessarily strategic, controlled, or predictable. The current study consists of two large-scale eye-tracking experiments designed specifically to examine where and how much people reread garden-path sentences, and whether rereading influences comprehension accuracy. A variable text-masking paradigm was employed to restrict access to portions of garden-paths and non-garden-paths during rereading. Scanpath analyses were used to determine whether some or all participants targeted syntactically critical parts of previously read text. Comprehension questions probed final interpretations. In short, readers often misinterpreted the garden-paths, and no rereading measures predicted better comprehension. Furthermore, scanpath analyses revealed considerable variation across and within readers; only small percentages of trials conformed to structurally-based predictions. Taken together, we fail to find support for structurally strategic rereading. We therefore propose that rereading of these sentences is more often “confirmatory” than “revisionary” in nature.

The study examined whether word-level eye-movement patterns in text reading can be predicted by individual differences in foveal and parafoveal word processing efficiency. Individual differences in lexical skills were gauged by presenting words and pseudowords with short exposure times in the fovea (30–60 ms) and at varying eccentricities in the parafovea. Lexical decision was used to index orthographic processing, word naming to index phonological processing and pseudoword naming to index grapheme-phoneme decoding. The Random Forests statistical technique was used to assess the relative importance of individual difference measures in predicting readers’ eye-movement patterns. The results show that individual differences in foveal word processing efficiency are better predictors of both foveal and parafoveal word processing during reading than differences in parafoveal processing efficiency. Results indicate that individual variability in foveal word recognition skills are better determinants of reading fluency among adult readers than variability in parafoveal word recognition skills.

When listening to speech, adults rely on context to anticipate upcoming words. Evidence for this comes from studies demonstrating that the N400, an event-related potential (ERP) that indexes ease of lexical-semantic processing, is influenced by the predictability of a word in context. We know far less about the role of context in children’s speech comprehension. The present study explored lexical processing in adults and 5–10-year-old children as they listened to a story. ERPs time-locked to the onset of every word were recorded. Each content word was coded for frequency, semantic association, and predictability. In both children and adults, N400s reflect word predictability, even when controlling for frequency and semantic association. These findings suggest that both adults and children use top-down constraints from context to anticipate upcoming words when listening to stories.

What is the role of executive functions in longitudinally predicting reading success in general and perceptual-span size in particular? We present two new waves of our sequential-cohort longitudinal study of perceptual-span development, including five waves totally spanning grades 1 to 10. Using nonlinear mixed effects growth-curve modeling we here show that executive functioning measured in the early primary-school years predicts reading performance seven years later, even if controlled for initial reading performance. Moreover, the two variables exerted an interactive influence, suggesting mutual benefit. Effects of initial executive functioning on the final perceptual span were even more pronounced than on reading rate, suggesting a substantial contribution of executive processes to perceptual-span development. Perceptual-span development is critical for successful reading: The initial reading-rate difference between slower and faster readers diverged at the point when perceptual-span development was fastest, and stabilized at inflated differences thereafter. In an educational setting, early tests of executive functioning may be useful for identifying children who are likely to need intervention to become proficient readers.

Cue-based retrieval theories of sentence processing posit that long-distance dependency formation is guided by a cue-based retrieval mechanism: dependents are retrieved via retrieval cues associated with a verb. When retrieval cues match multiple similar items in memory, this leads to cue-based retrieval interference. A landmark study by Van Dyke and McElree tested interference from sentence-external items: retrieval cues were manipulated to (mis-)match semantically similar items presented prior to a target dependency. The support for interference of this type is weak, and only comes from English object cleft constructions. Our study provides a cross-linguistic investigation of interference from sentence-external items: Three eyetracking studies in English, German and Russian tested interference in the online processing of filler-gap dependencies under varying task demands. A fourth study attempted to replicate the Van Dyke and McElree study using self-paced reading. Bayes factors analyses show cross-linguistic evidence against interference from sentence-external items. A broader implication from these data is that cue-based retrieval interference is driven by sentence-internal distracting items, suggesting that a cue-based search is restricted to the current linguistic context.

Prediction has been proposed as an overarching principle that explains human information processing in language and beyond. To what degree can processing difficulty in syntactically complex sentences – one of the major concerns of psycholinguistics – be explained by predictability, as estimated using computational language models, and operationalized as surprisal (negative log probability)? A precise, quantitative test of this question requires a much larger scale data collection effort than has been done in the past. We present the Syntactic Ambiguity Processing Benchmark, a dataset of self-paced reading times from 2000 participants, who read a diverse set of complex English sentences. This dataset makes it possible to measure processing difficulty associated with individual syntactic constructions, and even individual sentences, precisely enough to rigorously test the predictions of computational models of language comprehension. By estimating the function that relates surprisal to reading times from filler items included in the experiment, we find that the predictions of language models with two different architectures sharply diverge from the empirical reading time data, dramatically underpredicting processing difficulty, failing to predict relative difficulty among different syntactic ambiguous constructions, and only partially explaining item-wise variability. These findings suggest that next-word prediction is most likely insufficient on its own to explain human syntactic processing.

This novel experiment investigates the relationship between readers’ eye movements and their use of “noisy channel” inferences when reading implausible sentences, and how this might be affected by cognitive aging. Young (18–26 years) and older (65–87 years) adult participants read sentences which were either plausible or implausible. Crucially, readers could assign a plausible interpretation to the implausible sentences by inferring that a preposition (i.e., to) had been unintentionally omitted or included. Our results reveal that readers’ fixation locations within such sentences are associated with the likelihood of them inferring the presence or absence of this critical preposition to reach a plausible interpretation. Moreover, our older adults were more likely to make these noisy-channel inferences than the younger adults, potentially because their poorer visual processing and greater linguistic experience promote such inference-making. We propose that the present findings provide novel experimental evidence for a perceptual contribution to noisy-channel inference-making during reading.