Language and cognitive processes最新文献

In this study, children, young adults and elderly adults were tested in production and comprehension tasks assessing referential choice. Our aims were (1) to determine whether speakers egocentrically base their referential choice on the preceding linguistic discourse or also take into account the perspective of a hypothetical listener and (2) whether the possible impact of perspective taking on referential choice changes with increasing age, with its associated changes in cognitive capacity. In the production task, participants described picture-based stories featuring two characters of the same gender, making it necessary to use unambiguous forms; in the comprehension task, participants interpreted potentially ambiguous pronouns at the end of similar orally presented stories. Young adults (aged 18-35) were highly sensitive to the informational needs of hypothetical conversational partners in their production and comprehension of referring expressions. In contrast, children (aged 4-7) did not take into account possible conversational partners and tended to use pronouns for all given referents, leading to the production of ambiguous pronouns that are unrecoverable for a listener. This was mirrored in the outcome of the comprehension task, where children were insensitive to the shift of discourse topic marked by the speaker. The elderly adults (aged 69-87) behaved differently from both young adults and children. They showed a clear sensitivity to the other person's perspective in both production and comprehension, but appeared to lack the necessary cognitive capacities to keep track of the prominence of discourse referents, producing more potentially ambiguous pronouns than young adults, though fewer than children. In conclusion then, referential choice seems to depend on perspective taking in language, which develops with increasing linguistic experience and cognitive capacity, but also on the ability to keep track of the prominence of discourse referents, which is gradually lost with older age.

This study addresses a much-debated effect on a much-debated region: the increase of left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) activation associated with object-extracted relative clauses. This haemodynamic result is one of the most central and most cited findings in the cognitive neuroscience of syntax and it has robustly contributed to the popular association of Broca's region with syntax. Our study had two goals: (1) to characterise the timing of this classic effect with magnetoencephalography (MEG) and (2) to connect it to psycholinguistic research on the effects of similarity-based interference during sentence processing. Specifically, behavioural studies have shown that object relatives are primarily only costly when the two preverbal noun phrases are parallel in their surface syntax, for example, both consisting of a definite determiner and a noun (e.g. the reporter who the senator attacked), as opposed to employing, for example, a definite noun phrase and a proper name (the reporter who Bill attacked). This finding suggests that the difficulty of object extraction lies not within its syntax but rather in similarity-based interference affecting working memory processes. Although working memory is a prominent hypothesis for the LIFG engagement in object extraction, the haemodynamic literature has routinely employed stimuli involving parallel as opposed to non-parallel syntax. Using written sentences presented word-by-word, we tested whether an LIFG effect of object extraction is obtained with MEG, allowing us to characterise its timing, and whether it reduces or disappears if the two preverbal noun phrases are non-parallel in their surface syntax. Our results show an LIFG increase for object relatives at around 600 ms after verb onset, but only when the preverbal arguments are parallel. These findings are consistent with memory and competition-based explanations of the LIFG effect of object extraction and challenge accounts attributing it to displacement.

This comment offers observations that support Hickok's claim that phoneme sized representations are involved more in speech production than speech perception, but notes that languages may vary with regard to the importance of the phoneme.

Three experiments investigated factors contributing to syntactic priming during on-line comprehension. In all of the experiments, a prime sentence containing a reduced relative clause was presented prior to a target sentence that contained the same structure. Previous studies have shown that people respond more quickly when a syntactically related prime sentence immediately precedes a target. In the current study, ERP and eyetracking measures were used to assess whether priming in sentence comprehension persists when one or more unrelated filler sentences appear between the prime and the target. In experiment 1, a reduced P600 was found to target sentences both when there were no intervening unrelated fillers, and when there was one unrelated filler between the prime and the target. Thus, processing the prime sentence facilitated processing of the syntactic form of the target sentence. Experiments 2 and 3, eye-tracking experiments, showed that target sentence processing was facilitated when three filler sentences intervened between the prime and the target. These experiments show that priming effects in comprehension can be observed when unrelated material appears after a prime sentence and before the target. We interpret the results with respect to residual activation and implicit learning accounts of priming.

Bilinguals experience more tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states than monolinguals, but it is not known if this is caused in part by access of representations from both of bilinguals' languages, or dual-language activation. In two translation priming experiments, bilinguals were given three Spanish primes and produced either semantically (Experiment 1) or phonologically related Spanish words (Experiment 2) to each. They then named a picture in English. On critical trials, one of the primes was the Spanish translation of the English picture name. Translation primes significantly increased TOTs regardless of task, and also speeded correct retrievals but only with the semantic task. In both experiments translation-primed TOTs were significantly more likely to resolve spontaneously. These results illustrate an effect of non-dominant language activation on dominant-language retrieval, as well as imply that TOTs can arise during (not after) lexical retrieval, at a level of processing where translation equivalent lexical representations normally interact (possibly competing for selection, or mutually activating each other, or both depending on the locus of retrieval failure).

Visual word recognition is a process that, both hierarchically and in parallel, draws on different types of information ranging from perceptual to orthographic to semantic. A central question concerns when and how these different types of information come online and interact after a word form is initially perceived. Numerous studies addressing aspects of this question have been conducted with a variety of techniques (e.g., behavior, eye-tracking, ERPs), and divergent theoretical models, suggesting different overall speeds of word processing, have coalesced around clusters of mostly method-specific results. Here, we examine the time course of influence of variables ranging from relatively perceptual (e.g., bigram frequency) to relatively semantic (e.g., number of lexical associates) on ERP responses, analyzed at the single item level. Our results, in combination with a critical review of the literature, suggest methodological, analytic, and theoretical factors that may have led to inconsistency in results of past studies; we will argue that consideration of these factors may lead to a reconciliation between divergent views of the speed of word recognition.

Most theories of coreference specify linguistic factors that modulate antecedent accessibility in memory; however, whether non-linguistic factors also affect coreferential access is unknown. Here we examined the impact of a non-linguistic generation task (letter transposition) on the repeated-name penalty, a processing difficulty observed when coreferential repeated names refer to syntactically prominent (and thus more accessible) antecedents. In Experiment 1, generation improved online (event-related potentials) and offline (recognition memory) accessibility of names in word lists. In Experiment 2, we manipulated generation and syntactic prominence of antecedent names in sentences; both improved online and offline accessibility, but only syntactic prominence elicited a repeated-name penalty. Our results have three important implications: first, the form of a referential expression interacts with an antecedent's status in the discourse model during coreference; second, availability in memory and referential accessibility are separable; and finally, theories of coreference must better integrate known properties of the human memory system.

Aging affects the ability to retrieve words for production, despite maintainence of lexical knowledge. In this study, we investigate the influence of lexical variables on picture naming accuracy and latency in adults ranging in age from 22 to 86 years. In particular, we explored the influence of phonological neighborhood density, which has been shown to exert competitive effects on word recognition, but to facilitate word production, a finding with implications for models of the lexicon. Naming responses were slower and less accurate for older participants, as expected. Target frequency also played a strong role, with facilitative frequency effects becoming stronger with age. Neighborhood density interacted with age, such that naming was slower for high-density than low-density items, but only for older subjects. Explaining this finding within an interactive activation model suggests that, as we age, the ability of activated neighbors to facilitate target production diminishes, while their activation puts them in competition with the target.

Speech is typically a multimodal phenomenon, yet few studies have focused on the exclusive contributions of visual cues to language acquisition. To address this gap, we investigated whether visual prosodic information can facilitate speech segmentation. Previous research has demonstrated that language learners can use lexical stress and pitch cues to segment speech and that learners can extract this information from talking faces. Thus, we created an artificial speech stream that contained minimal segmentation cues and paired it with two synchronous facial displays in which visual prosody was either informative or uninformative for identifying word boundaries. Across three familiarisation conditions (audio stream alone, facial streams alone, and paired audiovisual), learning occurred only when the facial displays were informative to word boundaries, suggesting that facial cues can help learners solve the early challenges of language acquisition.