Preceding Sentence Context Research Articles

Is there a processing advantage for verb-noun collocations in Chinese reading? Evidence from eye movements during reading.

A growing number of studies show a processing advantage for collocations, which are commonly-used juxtapositions of words, such as "joint effort" or "shake hands," suggesting that skilled readers are keenly perceptive to the occurrence of two words in phrases. With the current research, we report two experiments that used eye movement measures during sentence reading to explore the processing of four-character verb-noun collocations in Chinese, such as ("revise the article"). Experiment 1 compared the processing of these collocations relative to similar four-character expressions that are not collocations (e.g., , "revise the ending") in neutral contexts and contexts in which the collocation was predictable from the preceding sentence context. Experiment 2 further examined the processing of these four-character collocations, by comparing eye movements for commonly-used "strong" collocations, such as ("protect the environment"), as compared to less commonly-used "weak" collocations, such as ("protect nature"), again in neutral contexts and contexts in which the collocations were highly predictable. The results reveal a processing advantage for both collocations relative to novel expressions, and for "strong" collocations relative to "weak" collocations, which was independent of effects of contextual predictability. We interpret these findings as providing further evidence that readers are highly sensitive to the frequency that words co-occur as a phrase in written language, and that a processing advantage for collocations occurs independently of contextual expectations.

Second language word processing in sentence contexts: pre-lexical prediction versus post-lexical integration

This study investigated the effects of sentence contexts on the second language (L2) word recognition process. It aims at finding whether second language (L2) learners of English perform similar to English native speakers in terms of using the sentence context to predict upcoming word in their L2. A group of L2 participants and a control group of native speakers (L1) participants performed a cross-modal priming task in which they were asked to make a lexical decision on a visually presented word while listening to a semantically related or non- related English sentence. The test was conducted to determine whether both groups of participants were able to predict an upcoming word based on the context of the preceding sentence that is auditorily presented. The study is conducted using PsychoPy software whereas the data was analyzed using linear-mixed effects modeling in RStudio software. The results showed that the L1 speakers were able to predict an upcoming word based on the context of the preceding sentence. That is, a significantly faster recognition of the related word was observed compared to the less related words. On other hand, the English second language participants were not as able to predict an upcoming word as quickly as the English native speaker participants were. However, the L2 participants showed post-access lexical processing or what is called an integrating process of the presented word to the previous sentence context. That is, an effect of the sentence context was observed with L2 participants, yet only after reading the presented word, they decide whether it is appropriate to the preceding sentence context or not. Acknowledgments The author is thankful to the Deanship of Scientific Research at Najran University for funding this work under the National Research Priorities funding program.

Sentence context guides phonetic retuning to speaker idiosyncrasies.

Speakers vary in their pronunciations of the sounds in their native language. Listeners use lexical knowledge to adjust their phonetic categories to speakers' idiosyncratic pronunciations. Lexical information can, however, be inconclusive or become available too late to guide this phonetic retuning. Sentence context is known to affect lexical processing, and listeners are typically more likely to categorize steps of a phonetic continuum in line with the semantic content of a sentence. In a series of experiments, we tested whether preceding sentence context can guide phonetic retuning. During a passive-listening exposure phase, English listeners heard a sound ambiguous between /s/ and /f/ spliced into the onset position of minimal word pairs (e.g., sin vs. fin). Sentence context disambiguated these minimal pairs as /s/-initial for 1 group of listeners and as /f/-initial for another group. At subsequent test, listeners categorized more steps on a /sa/-/fa/ continuum in line with their prior exposure; that is, when sentence context had disambiguated the ambiguous sound during exposure as /s/, listeners gave more /s/ responses than /f/ responses at test. These aftereffects occurred independently of whether contrastive phonemes from the respective other category were provided. No phonetic retuning was found when the disambiguating sentence contexts were replaced with neutral ones. Overall, these results provide evidence that sentence context can guide phonetic retuning, therefore expanding the usefulness of phonetic retuning as a tool for listeners to accommodate speakers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Prediction differs at sentence and discourse level: An event-related potential study

AbstractThis study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how predicting upcoming words differ when contextual information used to generate the prediction is from the immediately preceding sentence context versus an earlier discourse context. Four-sentence discourses were presented to participants, with the critical words in the last sentences, either predictable or unpredictable based on sentence- or discourse-level contextual information. At the sentence level, the crucial contextual information for prediction was provided by the last sentence, where the critical word was embedded (e.g., Xiaoyu came to the living room. She made a cup of lemon tea. Then she sat down in a chair. She opened a box/an album to look at the pictures.), and at the discourse level by the first sentence (e.g., Xiaoyu took out a box/an album. She made a cup of lemon tea. Then she sat down in a chair. She leisurely looked at the pictures.). Results showed reduced N400 for predictable words compared to unpredictable counterparts at sentence and discourse levels and also a post-N400 positivity effect of predictability at sentence level. This suggests that both sentence- and discourse-level semantic information help readers predict upcoming words, but supportive sentence context more than discourse context.

How working memory capacity modulates the time course of semantic integration at sentence and discourse level

During comprehension, language users not only immediately integrate information from local sentence context, but also information from global discourse context for full understanding. In the present study, we examined whether the time course of these integration processes is constrained by language users’ working memory capacity. Sentence and discourse stimuli were constructed. For the sentence stimuli, each sentence contained a critical word that was either congruent or incongruent with its preceding sentence context. For the discourse stimuli, each discourse contained four sentences with a target word embedded at the final sentence and the target word was either congruent or incongruent with the information provided at the first sentence of the discourse. Participants of high and low working memory span were instructed to read for comprehension. Our results showed that while the high span readers showed the N400 and P600 effects to semantically incongruent words, the low span readers only showed the P600 effect. This pattern was found regardless of whether the incongruent words were placed at sentence or discourse context. These results suggest that the low span readers are relatively delayed than the high span ones at both sentence- and discourse-level semantic integration and indicate that working memory functions have greater influence than context scope on the time course of semantic integration.

Context Effect on L2 Word Recognition: Visual Versus Auditory Modalities.

This study tested the effect of constraining sentence context on word recognition time (RT) in the first and second language. Native (L1) and nonnative (L2) speakers of English performed self-paced reading and listening tasks to see whether a semantically-rich preceding context would lead to the activation of a probable upcoming word prior to encountering it. The pre-access prediction model (e.g., Altmann and Kamide in Cognition 73(3):247-264, 1999; McClelland and Rumelhart in Psychol Rev 88:375-407, 1981) posits that when the preceding context is semantically high-constraining, the perceptual system anticipates a probable upcoming word prior to encountering it. In contrast, the post-access model (e.g., Fodor in The modularity of mind, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1983; Forster in Q J Exp Psychol Sect A 33(4):465-495, 1981; Traxler et al. in J Psycholinguist Res 29(6):581-595, 2000; Van Petten and Luka in Int J Psychophysiol 83(2): 176-190, 2012) suggests that it is only after a word is encountered that a subsequent process integrates it into the preceding context. The integration process is easier and faster when the word is more congruent with the preceding context. In line with these two models of visual word recognition, auditory word recognition is modeled by the TRACE model (McClelland and Elman in Cogn Psychol 18(1):1-86, 1986), which suggests that a spoken word is influenced by the preceding sentence context, whereas models such as the cohort model (Marslen-Wilson in Cognition 25(1-2):71-102, 1987) support a post-access integration process. Some studies observe a facilitative effect of sentence context on L2 word recognition (e.g., Kamide et al. in J Mem Lang 49(1):133-156, 2003), while others find no effect of sentence context in L2 (e.g., Ito et al. in Lang Cogn Neurosci 32(8):954-965, 2017; Martin et al. in J Mem Lang 69(4):574-588, 2013). In the present experiments, the RTs of native English speakers (L1) and non-native English speakers (L2) were collected in both visual and auditory word recognition in semantically high-constraint sentences and semantically low-constraint sentences. A linear, mixed-effects model shows that both groups of participants are faster to recognize a word when it is preceded by a semantically high-constraining context. This result is observed in both the visual and the auditory modalities, lending some support for a mechanism facilitating the access of target words based on sentence context in both L1 and L2.

When embeddedness matters: Electrophysiological evidence for the role of head noun position in Chinese relative clause processing

Abstract This ERP study of Chinese subject- and object-modifying relative clauses (RCs) aimed at investigating how sentence context (embeddedness) temporally interacted with relativization in terms of processing load. In stead of adotping a static view of processing costs of RCs, we focused on the dynamic modulation of processing load by sentence context at two critical words–the relative marker de and head noun. Using cluster-based permutation analyses of ERPs, our study found an early relativization effect (110–220 ms) followed by an embeddedness effect (411–441 ms) and a late interaction effect (540–620 ms) at the relative marker de. The main effect of relativization as an early left anterior negativity suggests a transitory processing advantage of subject-relativization independent of sentence context. The sentence context was processed just 410 ms after word onset as a late left-lateralized anterior negativity for the center-embedded RCs, indicating increased working memory load introduced by sentence context constraints. A late centro-posterior positivity registered for object-relativization RCs with preceding sentence context due to structural reanalysis. An early anterior negativity (73–123 ms) reflecting the embeddedness effect at the head noun suggests the complexity of information encoded in phrase markers when semantic contents of verb arguments are instantiated. Our results indicate that it is necessary to adjust the account of RC processing beyond a universal processing advantage for subject-relativization to integrate the effects of sentence context cross-linguistically.

Parafoveal preview effects depend on both preview plausibility and target predictability.

Recent studies using the boundary paradigm have shown that readers benefit from a parafoveal preview of a plausible continuation of the sentence. This plausibility preview effect occurs irrespective of the semantic or orthographic relatedness of the preview and target word, suggesting that it depends on the degree to which a preview word fits the preceding context. The present study tested this hypothesis by examining the impact of contextual constraint on processing a plausible word in the parafovea. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences in which a target word was either highly predictable or unpredictable. The boundary paradigm was used to compare predictable, unpredictable, and implausible previews. The results showed that target predictability significantly modulated the effects of identical and plausible previews. Identical previews yielded significantly more benefit than plausible previews for highly predictable targets, but for unpredictable targets a plausible preview was as beneficial as an identical preview. The results shed light on the role of contextual predictability in early lexical processing. Furthermore, these data support the view that readers activate a set of appropriate words from the preceding sentence context, prior to the presentation of the target word.

Context Effects and Spoken Word Recognition of Chinese: An Eye-Tracking Study.

This study examined the time-course of context effects on spoken word recognition during Chinese sentence processing. We recruited 60 native Mandarin listeners to participate in an eye-tracking experiment. In this eye-tracking experiment, listeners were told to listen to a sentence carefully, which ended with a Chinese homophone, and look at different visual probes (Chinese characters or different line-drawing pictures) presented concurrently on the computer screen naturally. Different types of context and probe types were manipulated in the experiment. The results showed that (1) preceding sentence context had an early effect on spoken word recognition processes and (2) phonological information of the distracters had only a negligible effect on the spoken word recognition processes. Finally, the patterns of eye-tracking results seemed to favor an interactive approach in spoken word recognition.

Ambiguous function words do not prevent 18-month-olds from building accurate syntactic category expectations: An ERP study

To comprehend language, listeners need to encode the relationship between words within sentences. This entails categorizing words into their appropriate word classes. Function words, consistently preceding words from specific categories (e.g., the ballNOUN, I speakVERB), provide invaluable information for this task, and children's sensitivity to such adjacent relationships develops early on in life. However, neighboring words are not the sole source of information regarding an item's word class. Here we examine whether young children also take into account preceding sentence context online during syntactic categorization. To address this question, we use the ambiguous French function word la which, depending on sentence context, can either be used as determiner (the, preceding nouns) or as object clitic (it, preceding verbs). French-learning 18-month-olds’ evoked potentials (ERPs) were recorded while they listened to sentences featuring this ambiguous function word followed by either a noun or a verb (thus yielding a locally felicitous co-occurrence of la + noun or la + verb). Crucially, preceding sentence context rendered the sentence either grammatical or ungrammatical. Ungrammatical sentences elicited a late positivity (resembling a P600) that was not observed for grammatical sentences. Toddlers’ analysis of the unfolding sentence was thus not limited to local co-occurrences, but rather took into account non-adjacent sentence context. These findings suggest that by 18 months of age, online word categorization is already surprisingly robust. This could be greatly beneficial for the acquisition of novel words.

A time course analysis of interlingual homograph processing: Evidence from eye movements

We recorded eye movements during natural reading to explore the influence of sentence context on bilingual word recognition. English monolinguals and Spanish–English bilinguals read sentences in English that biased either the English or the Spanish meaning of interlingual homographs. Shortly after encountering the homograph, the groups showed equivalent implausibility effects when its English meaning was incongruent with the preceding sentence context. No evidence for immediate homograph interference emerged during this period in the bilingual group. Only in later processing measures did group and congruency interact. Bilinguals may have initially accessed and selected the language appropriate meaning of the homograph to integrate into the sentence. Later, bilinguals accessed their first language lexicon and integrated the Spanish meaning into the sentence when semantically appropriate. Rather than always experiencing cross-language competition, proficient bilinguals may dynamically adapt to contextual cues and selectively access information associated with the contextually cued language under certain conditions.

Dissociating word frequency and predictability effects in reading: Evidence from coregistration of eye movements and EEG.

Two very reliable influences on eye fixation durations in reading are word frequency, as measured by corpus counts, and word predictability, as measured by cloze norming. Several studies have reported strictly additive effects of these 2 variables. Predictability also reliably influences the amplitude of the N400 component in event-related potential studies. However, previous research suggests that while frequency affects the N400 in single-word tasks, it may have little or no effect on the N400 when a word is presented with a preceding sentence context. The present study assessed this apparent dissociation between the results from the 2 methods using a coregistration paradigm in which the frequency and predictability of a target word were manipulated while readers' eye movements and electroencephalograms were simultaneously recorded. We replicated the pattern of significant, and additive, effects of the 2 manipulations on eye fixation durations. We also replicated the predictability effect on the N400, time-locked to the onset of the reader's first fixation on the target word. However, there was no indication of a frequency effect in the electroencephalogram record. We suggest that this pattern has implications both for the interpretation of the N400 and for the interpretation of frequency and predictability effects in language comprehension.

Meaning Inhibition and Sentence Processing in Chinese.

The present study examined the inhibitory processes of spoken word recognition of Chinese homophones during sentence processing, using a standard cross-modal naming experiment with an innovative design and materials construction. Results confirmed that (1) preceding sentence context has exerted an early effect on disambiguating among different alternative meanings of the homophones; (2) the contextually inappropriate meanings of the ambiguous word were inhibited rapidly during sentence processing; and (3) the present results also demonstrated that the inhibitory mechanism could be sustained to a longer duration following the occurrence of the ambiguous word (homophone). Finally, all these results clearly revealed the dynamics of interaction of context effects and spoken word recognition processes.

No association between autistic traits and contextual influences on eye-movements during reading.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders are claimed to show a local cognitive bias, termed “weak central coherence”, which manifests in a reduced influence of contextual information on linguistic processing. Here, we investigated whether this bias might also be demonstrated by individuals who exhibit sub-clinical levels of autistic traits, as has been found for other aspects of autistic cognition. The eye-movements of 71 university students were monitored as they completed a reading comprehension task. Consistent with previous studies, participants made shorter fixations on words that were highly predicted on the basis of preceding sentence context. However, contrary to the weak central coherence account, this effect was not reduced amongst individuals with high levels of autistic traits, as measured by the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Further exploratory analyses revealed that participants with high AQ scores fixated longer on words that resolved the meaning of an earlier homograph. However, this was only the case for sentences where the two potential meanings of the homograph result in different pronunciations. The results provide tentative evidence for differences in reading style that are associated with autistic traits, but fail to support the notion of weak central coherence extending into the non-autistic population.

Contribution of bimodal hearing to lexical tone normalization in Mandarin-speaking cochlear implant users

Native Mandarin normal-hearing (NH) listeners can easily perceive lexical tones even under conditions of great voice pitch variations across speakers by using the pitch contrast between context and target stimuli. It is however unclear whether cochlear implant (CI) users with limited access to pitch cues can make similar use of context pitch cues for tone normalization. In this study, native Mandarin NH listeners and pre-lingually deafened unilaterally implanted CI users were asked to recognize a series of Mandarin tones varying from Tone 1 (high-flat) to Tone 2 (mid-rising) with or without a preceding sentence context. Most of the CI subjects used a hearing aid (HA) in the non-implanted ear (i.e., bimodal users) and were tested both with CI alone and CI + HA. In the test without context, typical S-shaped tone recognition functions were observed for most CI subjects and the function slopes and perceptual boundaries were similar with either CI alone or CI + HA. Compared to NH subjects, CI subjects were less sensitive to the pitch changes in target tones. In the test with context, NH subjects had more (resp. fewer) Tone-2 responses in a context with high (resp. low) fundamental frequencies, known as the contrastive context effect. For CI subjects, a similar contrastive context effect was found statistically significant for tone recognition with CI + HA but not with CI alone. The results suggest that the pitch cues from CIs may not be sufficient to consistently support the pitch contrast processing for tone normalization. The additional pitch cues from aided residual acoustic hearing can however provide CI users with a similar tone normalization capability as NH listeners.

Differences in the recognition of careful and casual speech

Previous work in spoken word recognition and speech perception has shown two seemingly conflicting patterns. While some studies have shown a processing benefit for more frequent word variants (i.e., in a casual speech mode), others have found a benefit for more canonical word forms (i.e., in a careful speech mode). This study aims to reconcile these findings, proposing that different types of processing apply to each speech mode–top-down processing for casual speech, and bottom-up for careful speech. Listeners in an auditory priming task heard natural (non-spliced) sentences spoken in either a careful or casual speech mode. The final word of the auditory prime was either semantically predictable from the preceding sentence context or unpredictable. After the audio prime, listeners responded in a lexical decision task to a visual probe: either the final word heard in the prime, an unrelated word, or a nonword. Preliminary results suggest that, regardless of speech style, reaction times are faster for related targets in the semantically predictable conditions than for unrelated targets. Crucially, responses to the target word in the careful condition are delayed compared to casual speech for semantically unpredictable sentences. The implications for the apparent paradox in previous results will be discussed.

How fast can predictability influence word skipping during reading?

Participants' eye movements were tracked when reading sentences in which target word predictability was manipulated to being unpredictable from the preceding context, predictable from the sentence preceding the one in which the target word was embedded, or predictable from the adjective directly preceding the target word. Results show that there was no difference in skipping rates between the 2 predictability conditions, which were skipped more often than the neutral condition. This suggests that predictability can impact the decision of whether to skip a word to a similar degree irrespective of whether the predictability originated from the prior word or the entire preceding sentence context. This finding can only be explained by models of eye-movement control during reading that assume that word n is processed up to a high level before the decision to skip word n + 1 is made.

How and when accentuation influences temporally selective attention and subsequent semantic processing during on-line spoken language comprehension: An ERP study

An event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment was carried out to investigate how and when accentuation influences temporally selective attention and subsequent semantic processing during on-line spoken language comprehension, and how the effect of accentuation on attention allocation and semantic processing changed with the degree of accentuation. Chinese spoken sentences were used as stimuli. The critical word in the carrier sentence was either semantically congruent or incongruent to the preceding sentence context. Meanwhile, the critical word was de-accented (DeAccent), generally accented (Accent), or greatly accented (GreatAccent). Results showed that, relative to semantically congruent words, the semantically incongruent word elicited a parietal–occipital N400 effect in the Accent condition and a broadly distributed N400 effect in the GreatAccent condition; however, no significant N400 effect was found in the DeAccent condition. Further onset analysis found that the N400 effect in the GreatAccent condition started around 50ms earlier than that in the Accent conditions. In addition, in the GreatAccent condition, the incongruent words also elicited an early negative effect in the window latency of 110–190ms after the acoustic onset of the critical word. The results indicated that, during on-line speech processing, accentuation can rapidly modulate temporally selective attention and consequently influence the depth or the speed of subsequent semantic processing; the effect of accentuation on attention allocation and semantic processing can change with the degree of accentuation gradually.

Integration or Predictability? A Further Specification of the Functional Role of Gamma Oscillations in Language Comprehension

Gamma-band neuronal synchronization during sentence-level language comprehension has previously been linked with semantic unification. Here, we attempt to further narrow down the functional significance of gamma during language comprehension, by distinguishing between two aspects of semantic unification: successful integration of word meaning into the sentence context, and prediction of upcoming words. We computed event-related potentials (ERPs) and frequency band-specific electroencephalographic (EEG) power changes while participants read sentences that contained a critical word (CW) that was (1) both semantically congruent and predictable (high cloze, HC), (2) semantically congruent but unpredictable (low cloze, LC), or (3) semantically incongruent (and therefore also unpredictable; semantic violation, SV). The ERP analysis showed the expected parametric N400 modulation (HC < LC < SV). The time-frequency analysis showed qualitatively different results. In the gamma-frequency range, we observed a power increase in response to the CW in the HC condition, but not in the LC and the SV conditions. Additionally, in the theta frequency range we observed a power increase in the SV condition only. Our data provide evidence that gamma power increases are related to the predictability of an upcoming word based on the preceding sentence context, rather than to the integration of the incoming word’s semantics into the preceding context. Further, our theta band data are compatible with the notion that theta band synchronization in sentence comprehension might be related to the detection of an error in the language input.

How accentuation influences semantic short-term memory representations during on-line speech processing: an event-related potential study

In the present study, the ERP (event-related brain potentials) technique was used to investigate how accentuation influences the semantic short-term memory representations during on-line speech processing, and how this accentuation effect interacts with the distance of accentuation in the speech signal. Chinese spoken sentences were used as stimuli. The sentences included two critical words: Noun1 and Noun2, with the ERP time-locked to Noun2. During sentence comprehension, when the listener hears Noun2, he needs to retrieve Noun1 from the working memory and integrate it with Noun2. We manipulated the (de-)accentuation of Noun1 and the semantic relationship between Noun1 and Noun2 by changing Noun1 in the sentence context. Moreover, we manipulated the distance of accentuation (distance between Noun1 and Noun2) by changing the syntactic structure of the sentences. The results revealed a significant main effect of semantic relatedness, indicating that the low semantic relatedness condition elicited a larger N400 than the high semantic relatedness condition. Importantly, there was a significant two-way interaction between semantic relatedness and accentuation and a significant three-way interaction between semantic relatedness, accentuation, and distance. Further analysis demonstrated that, the semantic relatedness effect was modulated by accentuation in the long-distance sentences, but not in the short-distance sentences. That is, in the long-distance sentences, the semantic relatedness effect reached significance only when the to-be-integrated expression in the preceding sentence context was accented; however, in the short-distance sentences, the semantic relatedness effects reached significance regardless of the presence or absence of accentuation. The results indicated that, during on-line speech processing, accentuation can enhance the corresponding information's semantic short-term memory representation, and that the effect of accentuation on semantic short-term memory is somewhat flexible and shows up only when the words in the speech signal were far apart.