Grammatical Cues Research Articles

Validation of a Rubric to Assess Physiology Exam Multiple Choice Questions to Create Fair and Equitable Assessments

Inequities and achievement gaps exist for students from groups underrepresented in medicine (URiM) and for English language learners (ELLs). This is particularly evident with multiple choice assessments which are prevalent in health professions and medical education. Increasing the linguistic accessibility of test items by simplifying the language used while keeping the content diffculty was perceived as helpful to ELLs in an undergraduate Chemistry course (Lee & Orgill, 2022). Following best practices when writing exam questions provides consistent and valid measures of student comprehension. Across institutions we face similar challenges when forming and assessing multiple choice questions for our physiology exams. Some major flaws include long complex options; using vague terms; negatively structured stems; grammatical cues; word repeats. Lopez (2023) found that 56% items contained at least one flaw. The most common flaws identified were those in which the items were not approximately the same length and item options that did not have parallel grammatical form and structure. In order to address these issues in an objective way, we collectively modified the previously detailed rubric (Lopez, 2023) for identifying common flaws based on the “Item-Writing Guide” from the National Board of Medical Education (NBME®) and one formed in the context of general chemistry by Breakall et al. (2019). Twenty-six questions from physiology exams at three different institutions were evaluated by three faculty using the newly created rubric. After analyzing the questions, we returned as a group and compared our individual ratings, clarified any discrepancies and modified the rubric accordingly. We will conduct statistical analysis to assess our inter-rater reliability score before using this rubric to analyze the full question banks for physiology exams at each institution. This process is not limited to physiology educators since it can be utilized by teachers in any program or discipline. The significance of the work will not only benefit our validation of learning but it will also address specific equity issues by eliminating flaws that provide irrelevant diffculty or benefit test wise students. Furthermore, this rubric is also helpful in generating new questions for future exams, ensuring equitable assessments.

An exploratory study on dialect density estimation for children and adult's African American Englisha).

This paper evaluates an innovative framework for spoken dialect density prediction on children's and adults' African American English. A speaker's dialect density is defined as the frequency with which dialect-specific language characteristics occur in their speech. Rather than treating the presence or absence of a target dialect in a user's speech as a binary decision, instead, a classifier is trained to predict the level of dialect density to provide a higher degree of specificity in downstream tasks. For this, self-supervised learning representations from HuBERT, handcrafted grammar-based features extracted from ASR transcripts, prosodic features, and other feature sets are experimented with as the input to an XGBoost classifier. Then, the classifier is trained to assign dialect density labels to short recorded utterances. High dialect density level classification accuracy is achieved for child and adult speech and demonstrated robust performance across age and regional varieties of dialect. Additionally, this work is used as a basis for analyzing which acoustic and grammatical cues affect machine perception of dialect.

Language Analytic Ability, Print Exposure, Memory and Comprehension of Complex Syntax by Adult Native Speakers.

Nativist theories of language development assume that all native speakers of a particular language ultimately converge on (more or less) the same grammar, and argue that this is only possible because they are born with a genetic blueprint for language. However, a number of recent studies have found that there are, in fact, considerable individual differences in adult native speakers' grammatical attainment. In this study, we examine some possible reasons for these differences. We examine both learner internal cognitive factors (implicit and explicit memory for sequences, non-verbal working memory, and language analytic ability) as well as an experiential factor (print exposure). In contrast to many earlier studies which focused on the temporal aspects of language processing, we are interested in the extent to which individuals are able to use grammatical cues to extract meaning from complex sentences. To minimize the effect of performance factors, sentences remained on screen while participants responded to comprehension questions (thus easing working memory load) and participants were given as much time as they needed to respond. Our findings revealed large effects of language analytic ability and print exposure, and a much smaller effect of implicit learning. While the effect of implicit learning fits in well with current theories of language acquisition and processing, the first two findings do not. The strong relationship between print exposure and comprehension suggests that the ability to process complex syntax may depend on a particular type of language experience which is not available to all speakers. Finally, the effect of language analytic ability challenges the wide-held conviction that the ability to identify and explicitly reason about linguistic patterns is only relevant in adult second language learning.

Grammatical cues to subjecthood are redundant in a majority of simple clauses across languages

Grammatical cues are sometimes redundant with word meanings in natural language. For instance, English word order rules constrain the word order of a sentence like “The dog chewed the bone” even though the status of “dog” as subject and “bone” as object can be inferred from world knowledge and plausibility. Quantifying how often this redundancy occurs, and how the level of redundancy varies across typologically diverse languages, can shed light on the function and evolution of grammar. To that end, we performed a behavioral experiment in English and Russian and a cross-linguistic computational analysis measuring the redundancy of grammatical cues in transitive clauses extracted from corpus text. English and Russian speakers (n = 484) were presented with subjects, verbs, and objects (in random order and with morphological markings removed) extracted from naturally occurring sentences and were asked to identify which noun is the subject of the action. Accuracy was high in both languages (∼89% in English, ∼87% in Russian). Next, we trained a neural network machine classifier on a similar task: predicting which nominal in a subject-verb-object triad is the subject. Across 30 languages from eight language families, performance was consistently high: a median accuracy of 87%, comparable to the accuracy observed in the human experiments. The conclusion is that grammatical cues such as word order are necessary to convey subjecthood and objecthood in a minority of naturally occurring transitive clauses; nevertheless, they can (a) provide an important source of redundancy and (b) are crucial for conveying intended meaning that cannot be inferred from the words alone, including descriptions of human interactions, where roles are often reversible (e.g., Ray helped Lu/Lu helped Ray), and expressing non-prototypical meanings (e.g., “The bone chewed the dog.”).

One Is Not Enough: Interactive Role of Word Order, Case-marking, and Verbal Morphology in Children’s Comprehension of Suffixal Passive in Korean

ABSTRACT The present study investigates the role of three structural factors (word order, case-marking, and verbal morphology) in the comprehension of the Korean suffixal passive by Korean-speaking children. To measure the relative impact of each factor on the comprehension of the passive, we devise a novel method where these factors are obscured systematically by employing acoustic masking – chewing and coughing. Results from three picture selection tasks show that (i) the Agent-First preference is not ubiquitously employed by young children, but is dependent on other grammatical cues, (ii) despite mediocre accuracy rates on passive sentences, we nonetheless find evidence that children have some knowledge about the passive construction, and (iii) scrambling of passive sentences does not aid in comprehension. These findings suggest that, in order to understand the acquisition of the passive, all these structural factors need to be considered.

Limits on the Agent-First Strategy: Evidence from Children's Comprehension of a Transitive Construction in Korean.

It has long been believed across languages that the Agent-First strategy, a comprehension heuristic that maps the first noun onto the agent role, is a general cognitive bias which applies automatically and faithfully to children's comprehension. The present study asks how this strategy interplays with such grammatical cues as the number of overt arguments and the presence of case-marking in Korean, an SOV language with case-marking by dedicated markers. To investigate whether and how these cues affect the operation of this strategy, we measure children's comprehension of a transitive construction (with scrambling and omission of sentential components) in a novel experimental setting where arguments and case markers were obscured to varying degrees through acoustic masking. We find that children do not demonstrate the agent-first interpretation strongly in the noun-verb pattern without case-marking, showing their uncertainty about the thematic role of the nominal when it is both the only argument in the sentence and lacks case-marking. They perform significantly better in the patterns with additional cues, the impact of which is asymmetric by age and by the nature of alignment between cues from word order and case-marking. These findings suggest that, for Korean-speaking children's comprehension of a transitive construction, the Agent-First strategy is activated properly only in conjunction with other types of interpretive cues.

Supplemental Material for “Where Are the . . . Fixations?”: Grammatical Number Cues Guide Anticipatory Fixations to Upcoming Referents and Reduce Lexical Competition

Supplemental Material for “Where Are the . . . Fixations?”: Grammatical Number Cues Guide Anticipatory Fixations to Upcoming Referents and Reduce Lexical Competition

Grammatical Aspect and Mental Activation of Implied Instruments: A Mouse-Tracking Study in Persian.

Can grammatical cues affect the way people activate event knowledge? We used mouse tracking to study the effect of grammatical aspect on the mental activation of instruments in Persian. Verb aspect is defined as how an action or event is extended over time, whether it is perfective (complete) or imperfective (incomplete). We predicted that imperfective aspect would trigger the mental activation of event knowledge, thus making participants mistakenly believe that the instrument with which the action is normally performed was present in the sentence. We tested this hypothesis using manual action verbs. Fifty female participants read a simple active sentence in which an actor had done or was doing an action (e.g., Sara has sliced/is slicing the zucchinis) with an implied instrument (knife). Then, they were presented with a picture of the implied instrument and judged whether the instrument was mentioned in the sentence they just read by clicking on the PRESENT or ABSENT response option. We predicted that participants would be less efficient at clicking ABSENT in the imperfective condition. In line with this prediction, we found that the imperfective condition caused significant deviation to the incorrect response PRESENT. However, no significant time differences emerged. The results are consistent with embodied views of language comprehension.

L2 processing of filler-gap dependencies: Attenuated effects of naturalistic L2 exposure in a multilingual setting

In the online processing of long-distance wh-dependencies, native speakers have been found to make use of intermediate syntactic gaps, which has the effect of facilitating dependency resolution. This strategy has also been observed in second language (L2) speakers living in an L2 immersion context, but not in classroom L2 learners. This research note investigates whether there is evidence of use of the intermediate gap among L2 speakers that have received considerable naturalistic exposure to the L2 from a young age, but do not live in a standard immersion context. Two groups of participants, one L1 English and one L1 Afrikaans–L2 English, completed a self-paced reading task involving English sentences containing long-distance wh-dependencies. The data were analysed using Bayesian regression. The results indicate that the intermediate gap facilitated dependency resolution in the L1 English group but not in the L2 group. Increased L2 exposure seemed to increase sensitivity to the intermediate gap among the L2 speakers, but was not associated with faster dependency resolution. The findings suggest that although non-immersive L2 experience affects L2 processing of abstract grammatical cues, it may be less effective than fully immersive experience in engendering nativelike processing of long-distance wh-dependencies.

The Impact of Native-Language Gender Suffixes on Assignment of Professional Roles: Evidence from L1-Arabic Students

This study investigated the effects of gender-stereotypical cues presented in sentences in school textbooks to differentiate them from the effects of grammatical gender. Saudi Arabia Ministry of Education (MoE) Arabic textbooks are ideal sources for this study because of their hybrid nature—both educational and literary. The study first used MoE Arabic textbooks to document occurrences of generically referential suffixes in role nouns. Further, it employed descriptions of occupations from the textbooks in a questionnaire that contained no grammatical cues to the gender referent, followed by a masculine or feminine role noun, to examine how the absence of the Arabic feminine suffix /-t/ in these descriptions affected the assignment of jobs to genders by students. The study found that the un-suffixed masculine nouns (also generic nouns) were mentioned with greater frequency than suffixed role nouns in both stages of the study. However, the study also tracked growth in the percentage of the professional nouns that had feminine suffixes This is the first study to investigate the impact of job-related linguistic gender cues on children.

How classifiers facilitate predictive processing in L1 and L2 Chinese: the role of semantic and grammatical cues

ABSTRACTThis study examines long-standing claims that L2 learners rely more on non-grammatical than on grammatical information during sentence processing compared to native speakers. Nominal classifiers in Mandarin Chinese offer an ideal opportunity to test this claim, as they simultaneously encode semantic as well as grammatical form-class cues about co-occurring nouns. This paper reports findings from a visual world eye-tracking experiment with L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin, which was designed to assess listeners’ relative reliance on these two concurrently available cues when creating expectations about an upcoming noun in a sentence. Results show that L2 listeners experienced greater competition than L1 listeners from nouns that were grammatically incompatible with the classifier they heard but shared semantic features associated with it. The greater reliance on semantic cues observed in L2 processing is argued to be an effect of adaptation to the relative reliability of information, serving to maximise L2 processing efficiency.

Integration and structure building across a sentence boundary: ERP indicators of definite/indefinite article, noun repetition, and comprehension skill effects

ABSTRACTText comprehension requires integrating meanings within and across sentences. However, sentence boundaries mark an occasion for readers to begin a new structure – integration with prior meanings is not immediately required in the absence of a retrieval cue to a text segment in memory. In an ERP study we investigated a grammatical cue for integration, the definite article. We varied whether definite (the) or indefinite articles (a/an) occurred at sentence-initial positions and whether the article was followed by a repeated noun. Evidence for lexical-semantic facilitation for repeated nouns was observed as a centro-parietal N400 effect. Early frontal and Late Positivity Component (LPC) effects differentiated nouns that followed definite articles from those that followed indefinite articles. Following definite articles, an increased LPC occurred when readers encountered new nouns compared with repeated nouns; this effect was not present when nouns followed indefinite articles. Results show readers’ sensitivity to cues for co-referential integration and new structure building.

PROCESSING INSTRUCTION AND THE EFFECTS OF INPUT MODALITY AND VOICE FAMILIARITY ON THE ACQUISITION OF THE FRENCH CAUSATIVE CONSTRUCTION

AbstractTwo eye-tracking experiments tested (a) whether L2 learners benefit from the consistency of input modality (auditory instead of written processing instruction [PI] training) and (b) whether they benefit from training using the same voice as the test voice. Results confirmed a robust effect of PI training on picture-selection accuracy, yet the improvement did not differ between training modalities. Eye-tracking data revealed resilient looks to the incorrect (first noun = agent) picture even after training, demonstrating the challenge in tuning to the grammatical forms while processing auditory L2 input. The effect of voice familiarity was larger for the male voice, which had longer duration for the later cue (à Marie/Pierre) than the female voice. Auditory PI training can be as effective as written PI training, but it does not immediately enhance learners’ sensitivity to grammatical cues. However, learners may benefit from hearing a salient grammatical cue toward the end of the sentence.

Intonation guides sentence processing in the left inferior frontal gyrus

Speech prosody, the variation in sentence melody and rhythm, plays a crucial role in sentence comprehension. Specifically, changes in intonational pitch along a sentence can affect our understanding of who did what to whom. To date, it remains unclear how the brain processes this particular use of intonation and which brain regions are involved. In particular, one central matter of debate concerns the lateralisation of intonation processing. To study the role of intonation in sentence comprehension, we designed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) experiment in which participants listened to spoken sentences. Critically, the interpretation of these sentences depended on either intonational or grammatical cues. Our results showed stronger functional activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) when the intonational cue was crucial for sentence comprehension compared to when it was not. When instead a grammatical cue was crucial for sentence comprehension, we found involvement of an overlapping region in the left IFG, as well as in a posterior temporal region. A further analysis revealed that the lateralisation of intonation processing depends on its role in syntactic processing: activity in the IFG was lateralised to the left hemisphere when intonation was the only source of information to comprehend the sentence. In contrast, activity in the IFG was right-lateralised when intonation did not contribute to sentence comprehension. Together, these results emphasise the key role of the left IFG in sentence comprehension, showing the importance of this region when intonation establishes sentence structure. Furthermore, our results provide evidence for the theory that the lateralisation of prosodic processing is modulated by its linguistic role.

The use(s) of is in mathematics

This paper analyzes some of the ambiguities that arise among statements with the copular verb “is” in the mathematical language of textbooks as compared to day-to-day English language. We identify patterns in the construction and meaning of “is” statements using randomly selected examples from corpora representing the two linguistic registers. We categorize these examples according to the part of speech of the object word in the grammatical form “[subject] is [object].” In each such grammatical category, we compare the relative frequencies of the subcategories of logical relations conveyed by that construction. Within some categories we observe that the same grammatical structure alternatively conveys different logical relations and that the intended logical relation can only sometimes be inferred from the grammatical cues in the statement itself. This means that one can only interpret the intended logical relation by already knowing the relation among the semantic categories in question. Such ambiguity clearly poses a communicative challenge for teachers and students. We discuss the pedagogical significance of these patterns in mathematical language and consider the relationship between these patterns and mathematical practices.

When Grammar Meets Pragmatics: Subject Preference and Coherence Relations in Brazilian Portuguese Pronoun Interpretation

Although pronominal reference is a common device in language, there is much debate about how we use contextual and structural cues to process pronouns. The main goal of the present study was to set a completion experiment following Rohde’s (2008) work to test how pragmatic and grammatical cues interact during pronoun interpretation. Our motivation was to use Brazilian Portuguese as the target language, as its pronominal system is known to differ from English, which could give rise to cross-linguistic differences in pronoun interpretation. Forty-eight participants wrote continuations for incomplete passages to verify whether verbal aspect, verb semantics and coherence relations elicited the same pattern of pronoun interpretation as reported in Rohde (2008). Overall, our findings support an expectation-driven model, in which pronoun interpretation is the result of both structural and pragmatic cues. We conclude that cross-linguistic differences can be accounted by such model, and that structural cues have a more prominent role in causing these differences, while pragmatic-driven expectations would exert the same influence on pronoun interpretation across languages.

Interpreting mood choice effects in L2 and L1 Spanish: empirical evidence and theoretical implications

Abstract The rich morphology of Spanish, such as that of tense and verbal mood, encodes a range of features leading to diverse contextual effects on interpretation, some of which are examined in the light of original experimental data in the present study. Specifically, we analyse data on the interpretation of mood in concessive structures by upper-intermediate and advanced learners of L2 Spanish, with L1 French (N=48) and L1 English (N=40), and from an L1 European Spanish control group (N=35). The results of the learner-group interpretation experiment led to a follow-on study enquiring into the understanding of mood alternation in concessive clauses by another group of L1 European Spanish speakers through a metalinguistic interpretation task. Learner group findings suggested a heavier reliance on lexical information and world-knowledge than on grammatical cues, while L1 speakers’ data indicate a default association maintained between subjunctive and irrealis interpretations, leading to a greater measure of variability in describing presuppositional uses of this mood. The native speaker data may reflect challenges posed by representing and describing, using metalinguistic knowledge, structures whose interpretation requires the integration of linguistic, discourse and extralinguistic information. Findings are discussed in relation to current linguistic descriptions and potential contributions of our empirical data.

Relationship of Grammatical Context on Children's Recognition of s/z-Inflected Words.

Access to aided high-frequency speech information is currently assessed behaviorally using recognition of plural monosyllabic words. Because of semantic and grammatical cues that support word+morpheme recognition in sentence materials, the contribution of high-frequency audibility to sentence recognition is less than that for isolated words. However, young children may not yet have the linguistic competence to take advantage of these cues. A low-predictability sentence recognition task that controls for language ability could be used to assess the impact of high-frequency audibility in a context that more closely represents how children learn language. To determine if differences exist in recognition of s/z-inflected monosyllabic words for children with normal hearing (CNH) and children who are hard of hearing (CHH) across stimuli context (presented in isolation versus embedded medially within a sentence that has low semantic and syntactic predictability) and varying levels of high-frequency audibility (4- and 8-kHz low-pass filtered for CNH and 8-kHz low-pass filtered for CHH). A prospective, cross-sectional design was used to analyze word+morpheme recognition in noise for stimuli varying in grammatical context and high-frequency audibility. Low-predictability sentence stimuli were created so that the target word+morpheme could not be predicted by semantic or syntactic cues. Electroacoustic measures of aided access to high-frequency speech sounds were used to predict individual differences in recognition for CHH. Thirty-five children, aged 5-12 yrs, were recruited to participate in the study; 24 CNH and 11 CHH (bilateral mild to severe hearing loss) who wore hearing aids (HAs). All children were native speakers of English. Monosyllabic word+morpheme recognition was measured in isolated and sentence-embedded conditions at a +10 dB signal-to-noise ratio using steady state, speech-shaped noise. Real-ear probe microphone measures of HAs were obtained for CHH. To assess the effects of high-frequency audibility on word+morpheme recognition for CNH, a repeated-measures ANOVA was used with bandwidth (8 kHz, 4 kHz) and context (isolated, sentence embedded) as within-subjects factors. To compare recognition between CNH and CHH, a mixed-model ANOVA was completed with context (isolated, sentence-embedded) as a within-subjects factor and hearing status as a between-subjects factor. Bivariate correlations between word+morpheme recognition scores and electroacoustic measures of high-frequency audibility were used to assess which measures might be sensitive to differences in perception for CHH. When high-frequency audibility was maximized, CNH and CHH had better word+morpheme recognition in the isolated condition compared with sentence-embedded. When high-frequency audibility was limited, CNH had better word+morpheme recognition in the sentence-embedded condition compared with the isolated condition. CHH whose HAs had greater high-frequency speech bandwidth, as measured by the maximum audible frequency, had better word+morpheme recognition in sentences. High-frequency audibility supports word+morpheme recognition within low-predictability sentences for both CNH and CHH. Maximum audible frequency can be used to estimate word+morpheme recognition for CHH. Low-predictability sentences that do not contain semantic or grammatical context may be of clinical use in estimating children's use of high-frequency audibility in a manner that approximates how they learn language.

Gender context effects in noun recognition: grammatical cues or co-occurrence effects?

ABSTRACTDeterminers with congruent gender facilitate the recognition of the following noun. We examine two explanations of this effect: either gender information is retrieved and influences lexical access, or gender effects are due to the determiner-noun co-occurrence. French nouns are either feminine or masculine and are preceded by feminine or masculine determiners in the singular. Plural articles are unmarked for gender. Because some nouns (peanuts) occur more frequently in the plural than in their singular, they frequently co-occur with determiners that do not provide gender information. Conversely, nouns that occur more frequently in their singular form (cathedral) co-occur more frequently with gender-marked determiners. We examined the recognition of plural- and singular-oriented nouns preceded by gender-marked and unmarked determiners. Singular-oriented nouns were recognised faster after gender-marked (singular) articles than after gender-unmarked (plural) ones. However, plural-oriented nouns were recognised faster after gender-unmarked (plural) articles, suggesting that articles/nouns co-occurrence outweigh abstract gender cue.

Detection of text-based social cues in adults with traumatic brain injury

ABSTRACTObjectives: Written text contains verbal immediacy cues—word form or grammatical cues that indicate positive attitude or liking towards an object, action, or person. We asked if adults with moderate-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) would respond to these cues, given evidence of TBI-related social communication impairments.Methods: Sixty-nine adults with TBI and 74 healthy comparison (HC) peers read pairs of sentences containing different types of immediacy cues (e.g., speaker A said “these Canadians” vs. B said “those Canadians.”) and identified which speaker (A or B) had a more positive attitude towards the underlined entity (Task 1); and pairs of sentences comprised of a context sentence (e.g., Fred is asked, “Did you visit Joan and Sue?”) and a statement sentence (Fred says, “I visited Sue and Joan.”) and were asked to indicate how much Fred liked or disliked the underlined words (Task 2).Results: HC group scores were significantly higher on Task 1, indicating more sensitivity to cues. On Task 2, TBI and HC group ratings differed across cue types and immediacy types, and the TBI group appeared to have less sensitivity to these cues.Conclusions: Findings suggest that TBI-related impairments may reduce sensitivity to subtle social cues in text.