Online Sentence Processing Research Articles

A self-organized sentence processing theory of gradience: The case of islands

Formal theories of grammar and traditional parsing models, insofar as they presuppose a categorical notion of grammar, face the challenge of accounting for gradient effects (sentences receive gradient acceptability judgments, speakers report a gradient ability to comprehend sentences that deviate from idealized grammatical forms, and various online sentence processing measures yield gradient effects). This challenge is traditionally met by explaining gradient effects in terms of extra-grammatical factors, positing a purely categorical core for the language system. We present a new way of accounting for gradience in a self-organized sentence processing (SOSP) model. SOSP generates structures with a continuous range of grammaticality values by assuming a flexible structure-formation system in which the parses are formed even under sub-optimal circumstances by coercing elements to play roles that do not optimally suit them. We focus on islands, a family of syntactic domains out of which movement is generally prohibited. Islands are interesting because, although many linguistic theories treat them as fully ungrammatical and uninterpretable, experimental studies have revealed gradient patterns of acceptability and evidence for their interpretability. We describe the conceptual framework of SOSP, showing that it largely respects island constraints, but in certain cases, consistent with empirical data, coerces elements that block dependencies into elements that allow them.

Draw a Star and Make it Perfect: Incremental Processing of Telicity.

Predicates like "coloring-the-star" denote events that have a temporal duration and a culmination point (telos). When combined with perfective aspect (e.g., "Valeria has colored the star"), a culmination inference arises implying that the action has stopped, and the star is fully colored. While the perfective aspect is known to constrain the conceptualization of the event as telic, many reading studies have demonstrated that readers do not make early commitments as to whether the event is bounded or unbounded. A few visual-world studies tested the processing of telic predicates during online sentence processing, demonstrating an early integration of aspectual and temporal cues. By employing the visual-world paradigm, we tested the incremental processing of the perfective aspect in Italian in two eye-tracking studies in which listeners heard durative predicates in the perfective form in a scenario showing a completed and a non-completed event. Differently from previous studies, we compared telic durative predicates such as "coloring-the-star" to punctual predicates such as "lighting-the-candle." While for punctual predicates, the inferences of telicity (the event has a telos) and of culmination (the telos is reached) are lexically encoded in the perfective verb, for durative predicates, the degree of event completion (visually encoded) needs to be integrated with perfective aspect (linguistically encoded) for the culmination inference derivation. By modulating the interaction of visual and linguistic stimuli across the two experiments, we show that the verb's perfective aspect triggers the culmination inference incrementally during sentence processing, offering novel evidence for the continuous integration of linguistic processing with real-world visual information.

Expecting the unexpected: Code-switching as a facilitatory cue in online sentence processing

AbstractDespite its prominent use among bilinguals, psycholinguistic studies reported code-switch processing costs (e.g., Meuter & Allport, 1999). This paradox may partly be due to the focus on the code-switch itself instead of its potential subsequent benefits. Motivated by corpus studies on CS patterns and sociopragmatic functions of CS, we asked whether bilinguals use code-switches as a cue to the lexical characteristics of upcoming speech. We report a visual world study testing whether code-switching facilitates the anticipation of lower-frequency words. Results confirm that US Spanish–English bilinguals (n = 30) use minority (Spanish) to majority (English) language code-switches in real-time language processing as a cue that a less frequent word would ensue, as indexed by increased looks at images representing lower- vs. higher-frequency words in the code-switched condition, prior to the target word onset. These results highlight the need to further integrate sociolinguistic and corpus observations into the experimental study of code-switching.

Adaptive functions of neurobehavioral plasticity in language learning and processing

AbstractThis article presents a large scope of issues on early and late language plasticity that increase our understanding of the neurobehavioral dynamics of change, the main property of the learning brain. In their pioneering work, Bates and Kuhl have convincingly demonstrated that plasticity is intrinsic to development. Bates has provided new data on the impressive recovery of language in children with focal brain injury, highlighting that both hemispheres support the early phases of this change, contrary to previous assumptions. The fundamental reorganization of the early phonemic system around the age of 8 months proposed by Kuhl, combining neural commitment and social abilities, has powerful cascading effects for subsequent word learning. Our developmental crosslinguistic research on online sentence processing in monolinguals and simultaneous bilinguals has revealed distinctive linguistic patterns of “cue cost”, a multifactorial concept relevant for capturing the microplasticity of the processing system. Whatever the language, the shift around the age of 9 towards the canonical adult pattern indicates an efficient adaptive processing occurring with a small delay in bilinguals. Most salient, from childhood, bilinguals exhibit specific cue cost patterns with interactions. In older French adults, cue cost variability is mediated by processing speed which preserves online syntactic abilities but reveals plasticity limits in Alzheimer’s patients.

Recovery from misinterpretations during online sentence processing.

Misinterpretations during language comprehension are common. The ability to recover from processing difficulties is therefore crucial for successful day-to-day communication. Previous research on the recovery from misinterpretations has focused on sentences containing syntactic ambiguities. The present study instead investigated the outcome of comprehension processes and online reading behavior when misinterpretations occurred due to lexical-semantic ambiguity. Ninety-six adult participants read "garden-path" sentences in which an ambiguous word was disambiguated toward an unexpected meaning (e.g., "The ball was crowded"), while their eye movements were monitored. A meaning coherence judgment task required them to decide whether or not each sentence made sense. Results suggested that readers did not always engage in reinterpretation processes but instead followed a "good enough" processing strategy. Successful detection of a violation of sentence coherence and associated reinterpretation processes also required additional processing time compared to sentences that did not induce a misinterpretation. Although these reinterpretation-related processing costs were relatively stable across individuals, there was some evidence to suggest that readers with greater lexical expertise benefited from greater sensitivity to the disambiguating information, and were able to flexibly adapt their online reading behavior to recover from misinterpretations more efficiently. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The Effect of Mood on Predictive Sentence Processing by Older Adults

This study examined the effect of mood on predictive sentence processing by older adults. A self-paced reading task was implemented among a group of younger adults and older adults to measure their performance in online sentence processing. Half of the sentences were highly predictable, whereas the other half were lowly predictable. Music was used to induce positive or negative mood. Results show that in the positive mood condition, highly predictable sentences were processed more efficiently than lowly predictable sentences in both older and younger adults, but no significant age difference was found in the effect of predictability. In the negative mood condition, younger adults processed highly predictable sentences more efficiently than lowly predictable sentences, but there was no significant difference in reading times between the different types of sentences in older adults. The findings suggest that predictive sentence processing might be inhibited by negative mood in older adults. Practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Word Senses as Clusters of Meaning Modulations: A Computational Model of Polysemy.

Most words in natural languages are polysemous; that is, they have related but different meanings in different contexts. This one-to-many mapping of form to meaning presents a challenge to understanding how word meanings are learned, represented, and processed. Previous work has focused on solutions in which multiple static semantic representations are linked to a single word form, which fails to capture important generalizations about how polysemous words are used; in particular, the graded nature of polysemous senses, and the flexibility and regularity of polysemy use. We provide a novel view of how polysemous words are represented and processed, focusing on how meaning is modulated by context. Our theory is implemented within a recurrent neural network that learns distributional information through exposure to a large and representative corpus of English. Clusters of meaning emerge from how the model processes individual word forms. In keeping with distributional theories of semantics, we suggest word meanings are generalized from contexts of different word tokens, with polysemy emerging as multiple clusters of contextually modulated meanings. We validate our results against a human-annotated corpus of polysemy focusing on the gradedness, flexibility, and regularity of polysemous sense individuation, as well as behavioral findings of offline sense relatedness ratings and online sentence processing. The results provide novel insights into how polysemy emerges from contextual processing of word meaning from both a theoretical and computational point of view.

L2ers’ comprehension of different types of negation in English NPI licensing: An ERP study

This paper exploits the sensitivity of negative polarity items (NPIs) to negation to inspect the time course of processing different types of negation by Korean English L2ers. The elicitation of N400 in the ERP experiment with the issue at stake in this paper reveals that like L1 speakers, L2ers in online sentence processing can rapidly recognize negative meaning from different sources, say, from asserted, explicit negation (i.e. negation in the yntactic-semantic representation) and non-asserted, implicit negation (i.e. pragmatically inferred negation in the complement of emotive predicates). At the same time, we observe that unlike L1 speakers, Korean English L2ers cannot carry out the second phase of the integration-involving NPI licensing process. The absence of late P600 in the unlicensed and the emotive predicate conditions suggests that unlike L1 speakers, L2ers stop short of terminating grammatical NPI licensing in the face of asserted, explicit negation. Nor can they enter into the analogous second phase of sanctioning NPIs in the face of pragmatically inferred negation.

How Korean English L2ers Comprehend Exhaustiveness in English ‘It’-Clefts: An ERP Study

From an L2 experimental perspective, the present paper aims at shedding new lights on the nature and the source of exhaustiveness in the two English constructions: (i) ‘it’-clefts; ‘only’-foci. We report experimental evidence that the cancellation of the exhaustiveness construal normally available to the constructions at issue gives rise to different processing costs. Specifically, we provide the results by comparing the ERP patterns that arise when the (marked) cancellation of exhaustiveness is processed in either ‘it’-clefts or ‘only’-foci. Our findings show that during on-line sentence processing, highly proficient Korean English leaners can discern the two different types of exhaustiveness, which in turn indicates that they can recruit different levels of linguistic structure.

Gender attraction in sentence comprehension

Agreement attraction, where ungrammatical sentences are perceived as grammatical (e.g., *The key to the cabinets were rusty), has been influential in motivating models of memory access during language comprehension. It is contested, however, whether such effects arise due to a faulty representation of relevant morphosyntactic features, or as a result of memory retrieval. Existing studies of agreement attraction in comprehension have largely been limited to subject-verb number agreement, primarily in English, and while attraction in other agreement phenomena such as gender has been investigated in production, very few studies have focused on gender attraction in comprehension. We conducted five experiments investigating noun-adjective gender agreement during comprehension in Spanish. Our results indicate attraction effects during online sentence processing that are consistent with approaches ascribing attraction to interference during memory retrieval, rather than to a faulty representation of agreement features. We interpret our findings as consistent with the predictions of cue-based parsing.

Plasticity of sentence processing networks: evidence from a patient with agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia (PPA)

ABSTRACT This study reports the results of a longitudinal study examining the effects of treatment for sentence processing deficits for a 70-year-old gentleman (DK) with the agrammatic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). On entry into the study, he presented with a 2-year history of impaired verb and sentence processing and concomitant neural atrophy in primarily subcortical regions. Spanning an 18-month period, treatment focused on improving comprehension and production of syntactically complex, passive and object cleft, structures, consecutively. Results, derived from extensive behavioral and neurocognitive testing, showed not only improved ability to comprehend and produce both trained and untrained, less complex, linguistically related structures in offline tasks, but also improved online sentence processing strategies as revealed by partially normalized eye movements in online comprehension (i.e., emergence of thematic prediction and thematic integration) and production (i.e., use of incremental processing) tasks. Changes in neural activation from pre- to post-treatment of both structures also were found, with upregulation of tissue in both the left and right hemispheres, overlapping with regions recruited by neurotypical adults performing the same task. These findings indicate that Treatment of Underlying Forms (TUF) is effective for treatment of patients with the agrammatic variant of PPA (as it is for those with stroke-induced agrammatism), and show that unaffected neural tissue in patients with PPA is malleable and may be recruited to support language, providing evidence of experience-based plasticity in neurodegenerative disease.

Online sentence processing impairments in agrammatic and logopenic primary progressive aphasia: Evidence from ERP

Evidence from psycholinguistic research indicates that sentence processing is impaired in Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), and more so in individuals with agrammatic (PPA-G) than logopenic (PPA-L) subtypes. Studies have mostly focused on offline sentence production ability, reporting impaired production of verb morphology (e.g., tense, agreement) and verb-argument structure (VAS) in PPA-G, and mixed findings in PPA-L. However, little is known about real-time sentence comprehension in PPA. The present study is the first to compare real-time semantic, morphosyntactic and VAS processing in individuals with PPA (10 with PPA-G and 9 with PPA-L), and in two groups of healthy (22 young and 19 older) individuals, using event-related potentials (ERP). Participants were instructed to listen to sentences that were either well-formed (n = 150) or contained a violation of semantics (e.g., *Owen was mentoring pumpkins at the party, n = 50), morphosyntax (e.g., *The actors was singing in the theatre, n = 50) or VAS (*Ryan was devouring on the couch, n = 50), and were required to perform a sentence acceptability judgment task while EEG was recorded. Results indicated that in the semantic task both healthy and PPA groups showed an N400 response to semantic violations, which was delayed in PPA and older (vs. younger) groups. Morphosyntactic violations elicited a P600 in both groups of healthy individuals and in PPA-L, but not in PPA-G. A similar P600 response was also found only in healthy individuals for VAS violations; whereas, abnormal ERP responses were observed in both PPA groups, with PPA-G showing no evidence of VAS violation detection and PPA-L showing a delayed and abnormally-distributed positive component that was negatively associated with offline sentence comprehension scores. These findings support characterizations of sentence processing impairments in PPA-G, by providing online evidence that VAS and morphosyntactic processing are impaired, in the face of substantially preserved semantic processing. In addition, the results indicate that on-line processing of VAS information may also be impaired in PPA-L, despite their near-normal accuracy on standardized language tests of argument structure production.

Supplemental Material for Recovery From Misinterpretations During Online Sentence Processing

Supplemental Material for Recovery From Misinterpretations During Online Sentence Processing

Effects of contrastive focus on lexical predictability during sentence reading: The case of not only. . .but also constructions.

Previous research suggests that language comprehenders are sensitive to the presence of focus-sensitive particles-words like only and not that are effective at marking the focus of the sentence. In addition to signalling linguistic focus, these words can also establish a semantic contrast between the focused element and an alternate set. For example, the phrase not only the bride places linguistic focus on the bride and may also prompt comprehenders to anticipate a set of upcoming entities that stand in semantic contrast to the bride. We tested this possibility in an eyetracking-while-reading experiment that systematically crossed structure (focus vs. noun-phrase coordination) with predictability of an upcoming target noun (predictable vs. unpredictable). Whereas first-pass reading time showed a robust predictability effect for the coordination condition, the effect was eliminated for the focus condition. Later eyetracking measures revealed main effects of both predictability and syntactic structure. Overall, the results suggest that language comprehenders rapidly make use of the cue not only and may use this cue to begin anticipating a set of upcoming sentence continuations during online sentence processing.

Locality Domains in Syntax: Evidence from Sentence Processing

AbstractOne of the main discoveries of generative syntax is that long‐distance extraction proceeds in a successive‐cyclic manner, in that these dependencies are comprised of a sequence of local extraction steps. This article provides support for this general picture by presenting novel parsing evidence for intermediate landing sites created by successive‐cyclic movement, and it uses this parsing evidence to investigate the distribution of intermediate gaps. The central findings of this article are that (i) there is evidence that successive‐cyclic movement targets the edge of CPs and that (ii) there is no comparable evidence for an intermediate landing site at vP edges. These findings are fully consistent with the classical view of successive cyclicity, according to which only finite‐clause edges host intermediate landing sites. In the context of phase theory, these results receive a straightforward explanation if CPs are phases but vPs are not. The processing evidence presented here thus provides a novel diagnostic for the distribution of phases and new evidence for their active role in online sentence processing.

A Computational Theory for the Emergence of Grammatical Categories in Cortical Dynamics.

A general agreement in psycholinguistics claims that syntax and meaning are unified precisely and very quickly during online sentence processing. Although several theories have advanced arguments regarding the neurocomputational bases of this phenomenon, we argue that these theories could potentially benefit by including neurophysiological data concerning cortical dynamics constraints in brain tissue. In addition, some theories promote the integration of complex optimization methods in neural tissue. In this paper we attempt to fill these gaps introducing a computational model inspired in the dynamics of cortical tissue. In our modeling approach, proximal afferent dendrites produce stochastic cellular activations, while distal dendritic branches–on the other hand–contribute independently to somatic depolarization by means of dendritic spikes, and finally, prediction failures produce massive firing events preventing formation of sparse distributed representations. The model presented in this paper combines semantic and coarse-grained syntactic constraints for each word in a sentence context until grammatically related word function discrimination emerges spontaneously by the sole correlation of lexical information from different sources without applying complex optimization methods. By means of support vector machine techniques, we show that the sparse activation features returned by our approach are well suited—bootstrapping from the features returned by Word Embedding mechanisms—to accomplish grammatical function classification of individual words in a sentence. In this way we develop a biologically guided computational explanation for linguistically relevant unification processes in cortex which connects psycholinguistics to neurobiological accounts of language. We also claim that the computational hypotheses established in this research could foster future work on biologically-inspired learning algorithms for natural language processing applications.

SCHEMATIC DIAGRAMS IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING OF ENGLISH PREPOSITIONS

AbstractIn the current study of applied cognitive linguistics (CL), schematic diagrams that represent generalizations of physical-spatial experience were applied in a computer-based tutor that trained English prepositions for second language (L2) learners. Behavioral and electrophysiological (ERP) measures were used to examine whether schematic-diagram feedback provided by the tutor had an instructional advantage over the minimally informed correctness feedback. Behavioral results confirmed this prediction and further revealed that the treatment difference was more striking when the participants had a lower L2 proficiency. The ERP results also supported the prediction. Violation uses of prepositions yielded an N270 and an N400. Schematic-diagram feedback motivated significant changes in brain potentials, whereas correctness feedback failed to do so. Overall, our findings suggest that CL-inspired instruction of a relatively short duration led to significant improvements in learners’ behavioral productive performance and in their sensitivity to semantic violation of preposition use during online sentence processing. The study provided strong neurolinguistic evidence for CL-inspired pedagogy in supporting L2 learning.

Differential Effects of Subject Animacy on Online Sentence Processing between Younger and Elderly Adults: Evidence from ERP

본 연구는 사건 관련 전위(Event-related brain potentials, ERP)실험을 통해 주어부의 생물성에 따른 문장 오류 판단과제의 정상 노년층 및 청년층간 문장 처리 과정에서 나타나는 차이를 알아보는 것을 목적으로 하였다. 노년층 17명, 청년층 20명이 본 연구에 참여하였다. 연구 과제는 3가지 조건으로 (1) 오류 없는 문장, (2) 생물성 주어 오류 문장, (3) 무생물성 주어 오류 문장으로 구성되었다. 주어부의 생물성에 따른 문장 오류 판단과제의 연구 결과는 다음과 같다. 문장 오류 판단과제에서 노년층은 청년층보다 낮은 정확도와 느린 반응시간을 보였다. ERP 성분 분석 결과, 200-500ms 구간의 목적어에서는 생물성 주어 오류 문장, 서술어에서는 무생물성 주어 오류 문장에서 N400 성분이 관찰되었다. 500-800ms 구간에서는 의미관련 P600 성분 및 서술어에서는 N400 성분 지속 파형이 나타났다. 이러한 연구 결과는 문장 오류 유형에 따른 집단 간 차이가 있었으며, N400 성분과 P600 성분 진폭 크기 차이가 청년층에 비해 노년층에서 모두 확연하게 감소되어 나타났다. 이는 문장 처리 능력은 노화에 따라 노년층이 청년층에 비해 언어 처리 능력에 있어 약화와 지연이 나타나는 것을 의미하며 이것은 표면적으로 발현되는 정반응률 감소나 반응시간 지연의 원인이 될 수 있음을 시사한다.The purpose of this study is to examine effects of animacy hierarchy on sentence processing in Korean speaking normal elderly adults and younger controls. Animacy hierarchy was manipulated using animate(human),animate(animals) and inanimate categories on the first Noun Pharse(NP1) in a subject position of a sentence. The current study investigated the effects of animacy manipulation in the first noun phrases on real-time sentence processing using Event-Related Potential(ERP) paradigm. A total of 37 individuals (elderly adults=17 and younger group=20) participated in the study. NP1 was systematically manipulated based on the animacy hierarchy:1)non-violation condition with human animate NP1, 2)animate subject-violation with animal NP1,and 3)inanimate subject-violation with inanimate NP1. Event-Related Potential(ERP)paradigm was employed to examine the effects. Results from the behavioral analyses reveald that the elderly group showed lower accuracy and slower response times(RT) than the young group. ERP analyses demonstrated that N400 emerged in animate subject violation condition for NP2 and inanimate subject violation condition for the verbs. P600 component was observed in inanimate subject violation condition for NP2, whereas sustaind negativity was observed in inanimate-subject violation condition for the verb. The results suggest that manipulation of animacy clue may serve as a critical linguistic feature to elicit aging-related changes in online sentence processing between younger and elderly adults.

Visual attention-capture cue in depicted scenes fails to modulate online sentence processing

Everyday communication is enriched by the visual environment that listeners concomitantly link to the linguistic input. If and when visual cues are integrated into the mental meaning representation of the communicative setting, is still unclear. In our earlier findings, the integration of linguistic cues (i.e., topic-hood of a discourse referent) reduced discourse updating costs of the mental representation as indicated by reduced sentence-initial processing costs of the non-canonical word order in German. In the present study we tried to replicate our earlier findings by replacing the linguistic cue by a visual attention-capture cue presented below the threshold of perception in order to direct participant’s attention to a depicted referent. While this type of cue has previously been shown to modulate word order preferences in sentence production, we found no effects on sentence comprehension. We discuss possible theory-based reasons for the null effect of the implicit visual cue as well as methodological caveats and issues that should be considered in future research on multimodal meaning integration.

Neurocognitive Recovery of Sentence Processing in Aphasia.

Purpose Reorganization of language networks in aphasia takes advantage of the facts that (a) the brain is an organ of plasticity, with neuronal changes occurring throughout the life span, including following brain damage; (b) plasticity is highly experience dependent; and (c) as with any learning system, language reorganization involves a synergistic interplay between organism-intrinsic (i.e., cognitive and brain) and organism-extrinsic (i.e., environmental) variables. A major goal for clinical treatment of aphasia is to be able to prescribe treatment and predict its outcome based on the neurocognitive deficit profiles of individual patients. This review article summarizes the results of research examining the neurocognitive effects of psycholinguistically based treatment (i.e., Treatment of Underlying Forms; Thompson & Shapiro, 2005) for sentence processing impairments in individuals with chronic agrammatic aphasia resulting from stroke and primary progressive aphasia and addresses both behavioral and brain variables related to successful treatment outcomes. The influences of lesion volume and location, perfusion (blood flow), and resting-state neural activity on language recovery are also discussed as related to recovery of agrammatism and other language impairments. Based on these and other data, principles for promoting neuroplasticity of language networks are presented. Conclusions Sentence processing treatment results in improved comprehension and production of complex syntactic structures in chronic agrammatism and generalization to less complex, linguistically related structures in chronic agrammatism. Patients also show treatment-induced shifts toward normal-like online sentence processing routines (based on eye movement data) and changes in neural recruitment patterns (based on functional neuroimaging), with posttreatment activation of regions overlapping with those within sentence processing and dorsal attention networks engaged by neurotypical adults performing the same task. These findings provide compelling evidence that treatment focused on principles of neuroplasticity promotes neurocognitive recovery in chronic agrammatic aphasia. Presentation Videohttps://doi.org/10.23641/asha.10257587.