The amount and structure of prior event experience affects anticipatory sentence interpretation

Arielle Borovsky

doi:10.1080/23273798.2016.1238494

Abstract

ABSTRACTListeners easily interpret speech about novel events in everyday conversation; however, much of research on mechanisms of spoken language comprehension, by design, capitalises on event knowledge that is familiar to most listeners. This paper explores how listeners generalise from previous experience during incremental processing of novel spoken sentences. In two studies, participants initially heard stories that conveyed novel event mappings between agents, actions and objects, and their ability to interpret a novel, related event in real-time was measured via eye-tracking. A single exposure to a novel event was not sufficient to support generalisation in real-time sentence processing. When each story event was repeated with either the same agent or a different, related agent, listeners generalised in the repetition condition, but not in the multiple agent condition. These findings shed light on the conditions under which listeners leverage prior event experience while interpreting novel linguistic signals in everyday speech.

Highlights

Listeners interpret speech about novel events in everyday conversation; much of research on mechanisms of spoken language comprehension, by design, capitalises on event knowledge that is familiar to most listeners
They found that when adults and school-aged children heard sentences depicting combinatorial relations from the unique events from the previous story (The monkey rides in the...), participants quickly generated predictive fixations towards the appropriate thematic object (CAR). This result indicated that listeners could use novel “fast-mapped” higherorder contingencies among agents, actions and objects to generate expectancies in real-time speech comprehension, paralleling findings from studies of sentence processing in highly familiar contexts (Borovsky, Elman, & Fernald, 2012; Kamide, Altmann, & Haywood, 2003). Can listeners extend their knowledge from a similar situation to generate real-time referential predictions in a novel one? For example, after hearing a story about a monkey who rides in a car, as described above, would a listener generalise this knowledge to generate real-time linguistic predictions about similar agents who might participate in a similar event? prior research has demonstrated that learners can predictively activate recently trained event knowledge to a separate instance of an identical situation, we might not expect listeners to generate “promiscuous” extensions of novel event knowledge after minimal training
Participants appeared to view target item before the onset of the spoken object. These fixations to the target suggest that participants rapidly encoded information from the initial story and predictive re-activated this information during a realtime sentence processing task, replicating findings from prior work (Borovsky, et al, 2014)

Summary

Introduction

Listeners interpret speech about novel events in everyday conversation; much of research on mechanisms of spoken language comprehension, by design, capitalises on event knowledge that is familiar to most listeners. They found that when adults and school-aged children (aged 5 to 10) heard sentences depicting combinatorial relations from the unique events from the previous story (The monkey rides in the...), participants quickly generated predictive fixations towards the appropriate thematic object (CAR) This result indicated that listeners could use novel “fast-mapped” higherorder contingencies among agents, actions and objects to generate expectancies in real-time speech comprehension, paralleling findings from studies of sentence processing in highly familiar contexts (Borovsky, Elman, & Fernald, 2012; Kamide, Altmann, & Haywood, 2003). Can listeners extend their knowledge from a similar situation to generate real-time referential predictions in a novel one? A central question in this case is how the structure of novel event experiences may influence generalisation

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