Journal of Psycholinguistic Research最新文献

The present study aimed to investigate whether bilinguals' affective processing in a second language (L2) was enhanced by semantic meaning and whether different levels of early L2 exposure influenced affective processing in L2. Mandarin native speakers and two groups of Uyghur-Mandarin bilinguals with different levels of L2 exposure at an early age were selected as participants and a priming evaluative decision task was conducted. We orthogonally manipulated the affective and semantic relations between primes and targets in a within-item manner to examine the reciprocal role of semantic meaning in L2 affective processing. For the Mandarin native speaker group, evaluative decisions for the target could be facilitated by semantically related and affective congruent stimuli independently. However, for the Uyghur-Mandarin bilingual groups, we found the significant interactive effects between semantic relatedness and affective congruency that the affective congruency effect could be moderated by semantic relatedness. Moreover, we found that the experience of early exposure to a second language played a role in L2 affective processing. Taken together, these findings demonstrated that L2 affective representations are different from native language (L1), in which L2 affective processing entails semantic meaning access compared with L1.

This study investigates subject pronoun resolution in Catalan, a null-subject language, by examining linguistic and cognitive factors. We focus on gender, pronoun type (null and overt), and syntactic function (subject and object), as well as the order of mention (first and second) of antecedents. Using eye-tracking in the Visual World Paradigm (VWP), we analyze the interplay between these factors in both canonical (SVO) and non-canonical (OVS) sentence structures. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 (Study 1) explore how gender cues and pronoun type influence pronominal resolution in SVO sentences. Our findings reveal that gender facilitates early resolution but primarily affects first-mentioned antecedents. Null pronouns exhibit a strong preference for subject antecedents. However, overt pronouns, contrary to offline studies, show no strong preference for object antecedents and instead tend to favor first-mentioned subjects in ambiguous contexts. In unambiguous gender-marked cases, overt pronouns heavily rely on gender cues for reference resolution, but in ambiguous contexts, they display delayed resolution patterns. These results suggest that overt and null pronouns do not exhibit the expected division of labor proposed by the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis (PAH). Instead, null pronouns robustly refer to subject antecedents, while overt pronouns show more variability. Experiments 4 and 5 (Study 2) extend this investigation to OVS sentences, revealing that linear order exerts a stronger influence on pronoun resolution than grammatical subjecthood. Specifically, first-mentioned antecedents, rather than syntactic subjects, guide resolution in OVS structures, particularly for overt pronouns. This challenges previous findings that overt pronouns prefer object antecedents and highlights positional prominence as a crucial factor in pronoun resolution in Catalan. Overall, our results contribute to a broader understanding of pronoun processing across null-subject languages and underscore the importance of positional prominence in pronominal interpretation and suggest that, in non-canonical structures, order-of-mention can override subjecthood in guiding resolution.

Chinese is widely known as a topic-prominent language, and topic sentences are typical Chinese sentence structures. Sparse previous L2 processing studies of Chinese topic sentences mainly focused on single-topic sentences, while this study examined the processing of Chinese double-topic sentences. Beginning with three sentence-initial NPs (double topics and a subject), Chinese double-topic sentences are subject to the double-topic constraint, which requires the base-generated topic to precede the moved topic. Adopting a self-paced reading task, this study explores how intermediate and advanced Korean learners of Chinese as well as Chinese native speakers process the double topics and the subject, and whether they are sensitive to the double-topic constraint, revealing to what extent their processing is nativelike. The results showed that all participants had a similar pattern in processing the double topics and the subject in that they showed a reanalysis effect in analyzing the second and third NP. Besides, the Chinese native speakers and advanced Korean learners of Chinese were found to be sensitive to the double-topic constraint, but the intermediate Korean learners were not. The implications of the results for L2 sentence processing are discussed.

Mandarin Chinese has two different types of tone sandhi (TS) rules. One is known as the Tone 3 Sandhi (T3S) rule, a general rule that applies to the T3 syllable, whereby a T3-T3 sequence is realized as T2-T3. The other is associated with specific words and is often referred to as morpheme-specific TS rules, whereby the underlying T4 surfaces as T2 when followed by another T4. The extant literature has yielded mixed results on children's acquisition of the general T3S rule, and less is known about their acquisition of morpheme-specific TS rules. To fill the gap, the present study explored 4- to 6-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's understanding of the general T3S rule associated with hen (meaning 'very') and the morpheme-specific TS rule associated with bu (meaning 'not'), using a tone sandhi predictive processing task. The results showed that the children exhibited a developmental trajectory in their comprehension of the two TS rules, with the 6-year-olds performing significantly better than the 4- and 5-year-olds. To explore how core cognitive abilities like Working Memory (WM, measured by the n-back task) contributed to the observed developmental trajectory, we also examined how the children's WM capacity was associated with their performance in the tone sandhi predictive processing task. The findings showed that the children's scores in the 1-back task reliably predicted their performance in the processing of the morpheme-specific TS rule, highlighting the interaction between the children's knowledge of TS rules and their WM capacity during their development.

This study reports the effects of gender and age on the production of Voice Onset Time (VOT) of stop consonants in Rural Jordanian Arabic (RJA). Participants of the study were divided into four age groups, namely children, preadolescents, adolescents, and adults, and were equally stratified according to their gender. They were asked to produce a series of Arabic words beginning with one of the six stop consonants: voiceless /tˤ/, /t/, /k/ and voiced /b/, /d/, /ɡ/. The results show that voiceless stops were characterized by a long lag (aspirated, positive VOT), and voiced stops were characterized by a long voicing lead (prevoiced, negative VOT). Across all age bands, the results of the study indicated that females have significantly longer VOT durations than males for both the voiced and voiceless stops. In addition, children had significantly the longest VOT duration as compared to preadolescents, adolescents, and adults across the board. Notably, the VOT duration of both voiced and voiceless stops shortened with increasing age; the younger the age, the longer the VOT is, suggesting that VOT production in RJA is gradually incrementally developing.

Recent evidence within the noisy-channel framework suggests that when encountering implausible sentences, rational readers can make inferences about the speaker's intentions. However, it remains unclear how the nature of noise and the degree of changes from a plausible sentence to its implausible alternative affect the reader's inferences. Using an explicit error-correction task, we manipulated the degree of changes in implausible sentences by transposing two characters within a Chinese reversible word, either maintaining or changing its syntactic category. The nature of noise was also manipulated between participants by having them read, along with experimental stimuli, exposure sentences that contained common mistakes, transposition errors, mixed errors, or no errors. Results showed that Chinese readers were able to infer that the implausible test sentences were corrupted by word transpositions, and that their inferences were modulated by the exposure condition, but not by the degree of changes. These findings are consistent with the Context-Specific Noise hypothesis, suggesting that Chinese readers make fine-grained inferences for implausible sentences, independent of the degree of changes between the implausible and plausible alternatives.

This study explores the comprehension of four meronymy types: Component Meronymy (CM), Member Meronymy (MM), Substance Meronymy (SM) and Portion Meronymy (PM) among 20 Arabic-speaking, children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and 20 Typically Developing children (TD) using a picture-matching task. The ASD children were recruited from an autism center, while the TD group was sampled from a kindergarten in Amman. T-tests were employed to determine if the differences between the performance of the two groups on the four types of meronymy are statistically significant. The results showed that TD children consistently outperformed ASD children in CM, MM, and SM, whereas both groups found PM relatively easier. The results reveal certain challenges in semantic processing for ASD children especially with: (1) recognizing and internalizing the organizational framework, which binds parts together in CM; (2) the concept of membership within a group in MM; and (3) abstract relationships where the connection between the entities is less concrete and organized in SM. Within the ASD group, statistically significant differences were found in favor of PM over MM and SM due to the simplicity and the concrete nature of PM, which required less cognitive abstraction in comparison to the other types. These findings suggest that assessments of semantic understanding in Arabic-speaking children with ASD should consider the specific challenges posed by different types of meronymy. Targeted interventions focusing on these specific meronymy types may improve communication skills and support the academic progress of children with ASD in Jordanian schools and therapy settings.