Psycholinguistic Theories Research Articles

German and English Bodies: No Evidence for Cross-Linguistic Differences in Preferred Orthographic Grain Size

Previous studies have found that words and nonwords with many body neighbours (i.e., words with the same orthographic body, e.g., cat, brat, at) are read faster than items with fewer body neighbours. This body-N effect has been explored in the context of cross-linguistic differences in reading where it has been reported that the size of the effect differs as a function of orthographic depth: readers of English, a deep orthography, show stronger facilitation than readers of German, a shallow orthography. Such findings support the psycholinguistic grain size theory, which proposes that readers of English rely on large orthographic units to reduce ambiguity of print-to-speech correspondences in their orthography. Here we re-examine the evidence for this pattern and find that there is no reliable evidence for such a cross-linguistic difference. Re-analysis of a key study (Ziegler et al., 2001), analysis of data from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007), and a large-scale analysis of nine new experiments all support this conclusion. Using Bayesian analysis techniques, we find little evidence of the body-N effect in most tasks and conditions. Where we do find evidence for a body-N effect (lexical decision for nonwords), we find evidence against an interaction with language.

Методология и методика интердисциплинарного анализа oнтологии, прагматики и гносеологии лексической единицы

Формализация модели знака должна предполагать возможность установления классификационных семантических параметров описываемой единицы через разные степени сочетаемости. Для этого требуется установление набора наиболее релевантных маркеров стиля и дискурса, а также морфологических и деривативных маркеров лексико-грамматической принадлежности знака его типовой синтаксической и семантической функции. Первые должны служить установлению ситуативно-речевых свойств текста, что позволит отфильтровать стилистически и социолектно нерелевантные омонимичные и омонимоидные знаки (полисемы), вторые же – поиску смежно связанных с анализируемым знаком единиц текста, которые помогут отфильтровать стилистически и социолектно однородные омонимы и омонимоиды (полисемы).

Why we need to investigate casual speech to truly understand language production, processing and the mental lexicon

The majority of studies addressing psycholinguistic questions focus on speech produced and processed in a careful, laboratory speech style. This ‘careful’ speech is very different from the speech that listeners encounter in casual conversations. This article argues that research on casual speech is necessary to show the validity of conclusions based on careful speech. Moreover, research on casual speech produces new insights and questions on the processes underlying communication and on the mental lexicon that cannot be revealed by research using careful speech. This article first places research on casual speech in its historic perspective. It then provides many examples of how casual speech differs from careful speech and shows that these differences may have important implications for psycholinguistic theories. Subsequently, the article discusses the challenges that research on casual speech faces, which stem from the high variability of this speech style, its necessary casual context, and that casual speech is connected speech. We also present opportunities for research on casual speech, mostly in the form of new experimental methods that facilitate research on connected speech. However, real progress can only be made if these new methods are combined with advanced (still to be developed) statistical techniques.

How robust are prediction effects in language comprehension? Failure to replicate article-elicited N400 effects

ABSTRACTCurrent psycholinguistic theory proffers prediction as a central, explanatory mechanism in language processing. However, widely-replicated prediction effects may not mean that prediction is necessary in language processing. As a case in point, C. D. Martin et al. [2013. Bilinguals reading in their second language do not predict upcoming words as native readers do. Journal of Memory and Language, 69(4), 574–588. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2013.08.001] reported ERP evidence for prediction in native- but not in non-native speakers. Articles mismatching an expected noun elicited larger negativity in the N400 time window compared to articles matching the expected noun in native speakers only. We attempted to replicate these findings, but found no evidence for prediction irrespective of language nativeness. We argue that pre-activation of phonological form of upcoming nouns, as evidenced in article-elicited effects, may not be a robust phenomenon. A view of prediction as a necessary computation in language comprehension must be re-evaluated.

ODNOS EKSPLICITNIH I IMPLICITNIH MERA STAVA PREMA HOMOSEKSUALNOSTI I VERBALNE PRODUKCIJE

Veliki broj istraživanja pokazuje da eksplicitni i implicitni stavovi determinišu ponašanje. Verbalna produkcija, kao bihejvioralna manifestacija unutrašnjeg sveta osobe prema savremenim psiholingvističkim teorijama predstavlja, kako nameran, tako i automatski proces. Cilj ovog istraživanja bilo je ispitivanje odnosa između različitih mera verbalnog ponašanja u vezi sa homoseksualnošću, sa jedne, i implicitnih i eksplicitnih mera stava prema homoseksualnosti sa druge strane. U istraživanju je učestvovalo 105 ispitanika. Kao mere stava korišćeni su Test homofobije (H25) i Test Implicitnih Asocijacija, dok su mere verbalne produkcije ekstrahovane iz dve eksperimentalne situacije korišćenjem programa za automatsku analizu teksta LIWCser. U prvoj eksperimentalnoj situaciji ispitanici su indirektno usmeravani na stavski objekat (homoseksualnost), dok su u drugoj situaciji instruisani da direktno govore o stavskom objektu. Rezultati su pokazali umerenu povezanost između eksplicitnih i implicitnih mera stava, kao i relativno nisku do umerenu povezanost ovih mera sa pojedinačnim merama verbalne produkcije. Dodatno, pokazalo se da u osnovi verbalne produkcije stoje implicitni i eksplicitni procesi i to da su spontani aspekti verbalne produkcije pre svega vođeni implicitnim procesima, dok namerni aspekti verbalne produkcije predstavljaju manifestaciju eksplicitnih stavova. Dobijeni rezultati u skladu su sa postojećim modelima odnosa implicitnih i eksplicitnih mera stavova i ponašanja, kao i savremenim psiholingvističkim teorijama.

Naturalistic Sentence Comprehension in the Brain

AbstractThe cognitive neuroscience of language relies largely on controlled experiments that are different from the everyday situations in which we use language. This review describes an approach that studies specific aspects of sentence comprehension in the brain using data collected while participants perform an everyday task, such as listening to a story. The approach uses ‘neuro‐computational’ models that are based on linguistic and psycholinguistic theories. These models quantify how a specific computation, such as identifying a syntactic constituent, might be carried out by a neural circuit word‐by‐word. Model predictions are tested for their statistical fit with measured brain data. The paper discusses three applications of this approach: (i) to probe the location and timing of linguistic processing in the brain without requiring unnatural tasks and stimuli, (ii) to test theoretical hypotheses by comparing the fits of different models to naturalistic data, and (iii) to study neural mechanisms for language processing in populations that are poorly served by traditional methods.

Explaining human performance in psycholinguistic tasks with models of semantic similarity based on prediction and counting: A review and empirical validation

Abstract Recent developments in distributional semantics (Mikolov, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013; Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013) include a new class of prediction-based models that are trained on a text corpus and that measure semantic similarity between words. We discuss the relevance of these models for psycholinguistic theories and compare them to more traditional distributional semantic models. We compare the models’ performances on a large dataset of semantic priming (Hutchison et al., 2013) and on a number of other tasks involving semantic processing and conclude that the prediction-based models usually offer a better fit to behavioral data. Theoretically, we argue that these models bridge the gap between traditional approaches to distributional semantics and psychologically plausible learning principles. As an aid to researchers, we release semantic vectors for English and Dutch for a range of models together with a convenient interface that can be used to extract a great number of semantic similarity measures.

Multiple Solutions to the Same Problem: Utilization of Plausibility and Syntax in Sentence Comprehension by Older Adults with Impaired Hearing.

A fundamental question in psycholinguistic theory is whether equivalent success in sentence comprehension may come about by different underlying operations. Of special interest is whether adult aging, especially when accompanied by reduced hearing acuity, may shift the balance of reliance on formal syntax vs. plausibility in determining sentence meaning. In two experiments participants were asked to identify the thematic roles in grammatical sentences that contained either plausible or implausible semantic relations. Comprehension of sentence meanings was indexed by the ability to correctly name the agent or the recipient of an action represented in the sentence. In Experiment 1 young and older adults’ comprehension was tested for plausible and implausible sentences with the meaning expressed with either an active-declarative or a passive syntactic form. In Experiment 2 comprehension performance was examined for young adults with age-normal hearing, older adults with good hearing acuity, and age-matched older adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss for plausible or implausible sentences with meaning expressed with either a subject-relative (SR) or an object-relative (OR) syntactic structure. Experiment 1 showed that the likelihood of interpreting a sentence according to its literal meaning was reduced when that meaning expressed an implausible relationship. Experiment 2 showed that this likelihood was further decreased for OR as compared to SR sentences, and especially so for older adults whose hearing impairment added to the perceptual challenge. Experiment 2 also showed that working memory capacity as measured with a letter-number sequencing task contributed to the likelihood that listeners would base their comprehension responses on the literal syntax even when this processing scheme yielded an implausible meaning. Taken together, the results of both experiments support the postulate that listeners may use more than a single uniform processing strategy for successful sentence comprehension, with the existence of these alternative solutions only revealed when literal syntax and plausibility do not coincide.

ABOUT POSSIBLE APPROACHES TO STUDYING PECULIARITIES OF ORAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Corpus studies, experimental procedures and speech error analysis are discussed as useful approaches to speech development investigation The necessity to apply a psycholinguistic theory of word meaning focusing on the user of language is grounded

Writing Learning Outcomes for English Language Lessons in Multilingual Schools

This article proposes a pedagogic innovation in teacher education by articulating a method for writing learning outcomes for English language lessons in multilingual school contexts. The argument for this approach is founded on curriculum studies; however, the practice also draws specifically on applied psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic theories of teaching and learning the English language. Examples support this five-step process of writing learning outcomes in detailing how to identify a focus, specify language, ensure appropriateness, create coherence, and revise. Although the approach addresses research studies reporting that experienced teachers encounter difficulties in lesson planning, here the practice is offered as a way of educating novice teachers to clarify their ideas about language teaching and assessment through reflection. Additionally, the process serves as a means for teachers to develop greater language awareness as subject content knowledge. This technique of writing learning outcomes for language lessons, therefore, may assist in developing language teacher professionalism.

The future of code mixing research: Integrating psycholinguistic and formal grammatical theories

Our keynote article “Coactivation in bilingual grammars: A computational account of code mixing” (Goldrick, Putnam & Schwarz) aimed to provide a framework that would begin to unify psycholinguistic and formal grammatical approaches to code mixing. We situated our account within a large body of psycholinguistic and phonetic evidence suggesting that, under many conditions, multiple representational elements simultaneously occupy (to varying degrees) a single position within a linguistic structure. The presence of such blends in multilingual cognition is not compatible with many formal grammatical approaches that assume mental representations are necessarily discrete.

Language Processing as Cue Integration: Grounding the Psychology of Language in Perception and Neurophysiology.

I argue that cue integration, a psychophysiological mechanism from vision and multisensory perception, offers a computational linking hypothesis between psycholinguistic theory and neurobiological models of language. I propose that this mechanism, which incorporates probabilistic estimates of a cue's reliability, might function in language processing from the perception of a phoneme to the comprehension of a phrase structure. I briefly consider the implications of the cue integration hypothesis for an integrated theory of language that includes acquisition, production, dialogue and bilingualism, while grounding the hypothesis in canonical neural computation.

Similarity of wh-Phrases and Acceptability Variation in wh-Islands.

In wh-questions that form a syntactic dependency between the fronted wh-phrase and its thematic position, acceptability is severely degraded when the dependency crosses another wh-phrase. It is well known that the acceptability degradation in wh-island violation ameliorates in certain contexts, but the source of this variation remains poorly understood. In the syntax literature, an influential theory – Featural Relativized Minimality – has argued that the wh-island effect is modulated exclusively by the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features in the two wh-phrases, but psycholinguistic theories of memory encoding and retrieval mechanisms predict that semantic properties of wh-phrases should also contribute to wh-island amelioration. We report four acceptability judgment experiments that systematically investigate the role of morpho-syntactic and semantic features in wh-island violations. The results indicate that the distribution of wh-island amelioration is best explained by an account that incorporates the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features as well as the semantic denotation of the wh-phrases. We argue that an integration of syntactic theories and perspectives from psycholinguistics can enrich our understanding of acceptability variation in wh-dependencies.

Do Children with SLI Use Verbs to Predict Arguments and Adjuncts: Evidence from Eye Movements During Listening.

Different psycholinguistic theories have suggested the importance of verb semantics in rapidly anticipating upcoming information during real-time sentence comprehension. To date, no study has examined if children use verbs to predict arguments and adjuncts in sentence comprehension using children with specific language impairment (SLI). Twenty-five children with SLI (aged 5 years and 3 months to 8 years and 2 months), 25 age-matched controls (aged 5 years and 3 months to 8 years and 2 months), 25 MLU-w controls (aged 3 years and 3 months to 7 years and 1 month), and 31 adults took part in the study. The eye movements of participants were monitored while they heard 24 sentences, such as El hombre lee con atención un cuento en la cama (translation: The man carefully reads a storybook in bed), in the presence of four depicted objects, one of which was the target (storybook), another, the competitor (bed), and another two, distracters (wardrobe and grape). The proportion of looks revealed that, when the meaning of the verb was retrieved, the upcoming argument and adjunct referents were rapidly anticipated. However, the proportion of looks at the theme, source/goal and instrument referents were significantly higher than the looks at the locatives. This pattern was found in adults as well as children with and without language impairment. The present results suggest that, in terms of sentence comprehension, the ability to understand verb information is not severely impaired in children with SLI.

Syntactic processing is distributed across the language system

Language comprehension recruits an extended set of regions in the human brain. Is syntactic processing localized to a particular region or regions within this system, or is it distributed across the entire ensemble of brain regions that support high-level linguistic processing? Evidence from aphasic patients is more consistent with the latter possibility: damage to many different language regions and to white-matter tracts connecting them has been shown to lead to similar syntactic comprehension deficits. However, brain imaging investigations of syntactic processing continue to focus on particular regions within the language system, often parts of Broca's area and regions in the posterior temporal cortex. We hypothesized that, whereas the entire language system is in fact sensitive to syntactic complexity, the effects in some regions may be difficult to detect because of the overall lower response to language stimuli. Using an individual-subjects approach to localizing the language system, shown in prior work to be more sensitive than traditional group analyses, we indeed find responses to syntactic complexity throughout this system, consistent with the findings from the neuropsychological patient literature. We speculate that such distributed nature of syntactic processing could perhaps imply that syntax is inseparable from other aspects of language comprehension (e.g., lexico-semantic processing), in line with current linguistic and psycholinguistic theories and evidence. Neuroimaging investigations of syntactic processing thus need to expand their scope to include the entire system of high-level language processing regions in order to fully understand how syntax is instantiated in the human brain.

The impact of language on the relationships between phonological awareness and word reading in different orthographies: A test of the psycholinguistic grain size theory in bilinguals

ABSTRACTThe relationships among first language (L1) and second language (L2) phonological awareness and reading skills were examined in English L2 learners with a variety of L1s, specifically Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese (maximumN= 252). Longitudinal and concurrent relations between word reading and subcomponents of phonological awareness (i.e., syllable, onset-rime, phoneme, and, where applicable, tone awareness) were examined in kindergarten and first and second grades. The relationships between reading and specific subcomponents of phonological awareness were associated with the orthography being read, English or the L1. Phonological awareness subcomponents related to English reading were generally similar for the three English L2 groups, despite differences in the orthographies of learners’ native language. The findings support the psycholinguistic grain size theory with regard to links between phonological sensitivity and the sound–symbol correspondences used to read the specific languages.

Resolving Semantic Ambiguities in Sentences: Cognitive Processes and Brain Mechanisms

AbstractFunctional MRI studies of how the brain processes sentences containing semantically ambiguous words have consistently implicated (i) the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and (ii) posterior regions of the left temporal lobe in processing high‐ambiguity sentences. This article reviews recent findings on this topic and relates them to (i) psycholinguistic theories about the underlying cognitive processes and (ii) general neuro‐cognitive accounts of the relevant brain regions. We suggest that the LIFG plays a general role in the cognitive control processes that are necessary to select contextually relevant meanings and to reinterpret sentences that were initially misunderstood, but it is currently unclear whether these control processes should best be characterised in terms of specific processes such as conflict resolution and controlled retrieval that are required for high‐ambiguity sentences, or whether its function is better characterised in terms of a more general set of ‘unification’ processes. In contrast to the relatively rapid progress that has been made in understanding the function of the LIFG, we suggest that the contribution of the posterior temporal lobe is less well understood and future work is needed to clarify its role in sentence comprehension.

Evidence accumulation as a model for lexical selection

We propose and demonstrate evidence accumulation as a plausible theoretical and/or empirical model for the lexical selection process of lexical retrieval. A number of current psycholinguistic theories consider lexical selection as a process related to selecting a lexical target from a number of alternatives, which each have varying activations (or signal supports), that are largely resultant of an initial stimulus recognition. We thoroughly present a case for how such a process may be theoretically explained by the evidence accumulation paradigm, and we demonstrate how this paradigm can be directly related or combined with conventional psycholinguistic theory and their simulatory instantiations (generally, neural network models). Then with a demonstrative application on a large new real data set, we establish how the empirical evidence accumulation approach is able to provide parameter results that are informative to leading psycholinguistic theory, and that motivate future theoretical development.

Teachers’ implicit theories of learning to read: A cross-cultural study in Ibero-American countries

The main goal of this study was to explore the nature and structure of implicit theories of Spanish-speaking in-service teachers on learning to read. The study sample consisted of 591 in-service teachers from various Ibero-American countries (Spain, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, and Ecuador). The study analyzed attributional structure or teacher beliefs on learning to read based on principal component analysis. Findings revealed that many of the implicit theories on learning to read held by the teachers correspond to the historiography analysis and representational structure identified in previous studies. Based on main component analysis with varimax rotation, a factorial structure was found to be formed by the seven main factors related to the constructivist, nativist, maturationist, social, repetition, corrective, and psycho-linguistic learning theories. Also, significant differences were found in the learning theories of the teachers depending on geographical and cultural context. Spanish teachers were more likely to be associated with the psycho-linguistic and nativist theories. Mexican teachers were more closely associated with the constructivist theory, and both Guatemalan and Colombian teachers tended to be linked to the repetition-based theory. Finally, Ecuadorian teachers tended to rely on the nativist theory.

Healthy Kids: Examining the Effect of Message Framing and Polarity on Children's Attitudes and Behavioral Intentions

Should we ask children to be “more healthy” or “less unhealthy”? Drawing from both prospect and psycholinguistic theory, we manipulate the framing (gain versus loss) and linguistic polarity (affirmation versus negation) of a child-directed health message. Results from two experiments demonstrate that, in a behavioral adoption context, a message employing gain framing or affirmation leads to more positive attitudes and greater intention to adopt the target behavior; while in a behavioral cessation context, messages utilizing loss framing or negation are most effective. Results also indicate a developmental-based boundary for message polarity, with effects not observed for younger children.