Sentence Completion Task Research Articles

Generating data as a proxy for unavailable corpus data: the contextualized sentence completion task

AbstractThere is much interest in using large corpora to explore predictors of the probability of higher level linguistic structures, but suitable corpora are not available for all languages and their varieties. We explore a task that uses discourse contexts from an existing corpus as prompts for sentence completion to investigate the usefulness of the method for generating data as a proxy for unavailable corpus data. Mini databases of dative and genitive structures were obtained with the method using American and Australian participants. It is shown that the databases are indeed a good proxy for corpus data.

Long-term semantic priming of propositions representing general knowledge

Abstract Six experiments investigated semantic priming of individual propositions that reflect common knowledge. Participants performed a sentence-completion task in which each sentence expressed a single proposition, and the same or similar proposition was expressed in prime-target sentence pairs that shared no words. The primary goal was to evaluate the degree to which long-lasting facilitation in primed target sentences reflected memory for abstract proposition meaning versus memory for the operations used to construct proposition meaning and select a response. Priming effects persisted over delays exceeding 15 min, were not attributable to explicit memory processes, did not depend on either repeated syntactic structure or response decision, and were greater than facilitation attributable to priming individual word meanings. In total, the evidence provides initial support for operation-independent, long-term semantic priming of propositions outside the context of connected discourse. This extends the empirical evidence for long-lasting facilitation that theories of semantic priming must explain.

On the role of experience and age-related effects: Evidence from the Spanish CP

The present study examines and compares the extent to which advanced L2 learners of Spanish and Spanish heritage speakers acquire the syntactic and semantic properties that regulate the grammatical representation of double complementizer questions in Spanish, a CP-related structure not present in English. Results from an aural sentence completion task, an acceptability judgment task, and a preference task indicate significant differences between the two experimental groups and the monolingual controls. However, the heritage speakers outperformed the L2 learners in their target use and interpretation, which suggests a linguistic benefit for earlier exposure and use of Spanish during childhood. We propose that the differences observed among the L2 learners and the heritage speakers can be accounted for in terms of cross-linguistic influence from the dominant language as well as language experience and age of onset of bilingualism as an interrelated dimension in L2 and heritage language development.

Asymmetries in the acquisition of subject–verb agreement in Dutch: Evidence from comprehension and production

Across languages, children do not comprehend 3SG/3PL subject–verb agreement before age five, despite early mastery in spontaneous speech. This study investigates subject–verb agreement in a language hitherto not studied in this respect, namely Dutch. The authors examine if (1) Dutch two- and three-year-olds comprehend subject–verb agreement and (2) a comprehension–production asymmetry still exists if task materials are kept constant across domains. Dutch-speaking two- and three-year-olds completed a comprehension (picture selection) and production (sentence completion) task testing 3SG and 3PL. In comprehension, both groups performed above chance on 3PL but not on 3SG. In production, accuracy on 3PL and 3SG was slightly higher than in comprehension. Comprehension and production were moderately correlated. These results show that comprehension is earlier in Dutch than in previously investigated languages, but only for 3PL, suggesting that phonological salience and cue reliability are important. They also show an asymmetry between comprehension and production, albeit much smaller than assumed in previous studies.

The Effects of Priming on Business Ethical Perceptions: A Comparison Between Two Cultures

The present study examines the effect of priming on business ethical decision making. Priming is based on the idea that our perceptions, actions, and emotions are distorted by unconscious cues from our environment. Subjects were primed for either “politeness” or “rudeness” using a sentence completion task. Following the priming, the subjects were asked to react to a series of ethical scenarios. The results showed that subjects primed for “rudeness” perceived the scenarios as less unethical than subjects primed for “politeness”. Similar results were observed in both the American and the Dominican samples. The results indicate that business ethical decision making is influenced by environmental factors we are unaware off.

Executive function in psychopathy: The Tower of London, Brixton Spatial Anticipation and the Hayling Sentence Completion Tests

Executive dysfunction in those high on traits of psychopathy has often been reported, with many disagreements as to the nature of the dysfunction. We aimed to see if tests of planning and rule acquisition/adherence would discriminate those high on psychopathic traits. A battery of executive function tests (Tower of London, Brixton Spatial Anticipation, and Hayling Sentence Completion Tasks) was given to 28 British male prisoners. Psychopathy was measured using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. High psychopathy was related to reduced planning in the Tower of London Test and poor rule-adherence on the Brixton Test. Other tests of executive function were not related to psychopathy. The results appear supportive of the notion that function of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is dysfunctional in psychopathy whilst that of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is normal and suggest that impulsivity in those high on psychopathy traits impedes planning and rule following. We suggest the adapted Tower of London Test and the Brixton Test could be useful objective measures of this type of impulsivity in offenders which could help identify key treatment goals.

Lexical Retrieval of Nouns and Verbs in a Sentence Completion Task.

This study explored noun and verb retrieval using a sentence completion task to expand upon previous findings from picture naming tasks. Participants completed sentences missing either a target noun or verb in the final position. Non-target responses were coded for substitution type, imageability and frequency. Like picture naming, nouns and verbs differed in non-target substitution type-within-category substitutions were primarily nouns and out-of-category substitutions were primarily verbs. Imageability predicted multiple substitution types for both word classes, whereas frequency predicted noun substitution types but not verbs. Findings support theories of noun and verb differences in semantic retrieval, showing the robustness of this effect across methodologies, and shed new light on the influence of imageability and frequency during semantic retrieval.

Choosing referring expressions in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch: Effects of animacy

It has been argued that animate entities are referred to with more attenuated expressions than inanimate entities, because they are more accessible in memory. Two previously untested claims made for Dutch suggest that the situation may be more complex. Firstly, it has been stated that full pronouns can only refer to animate entities, while reduced pronouns can also refer to inanimate entities. This seems to be inconsistent with the accessibility account. Secondly, inanimate entities may be pronominalized less to avoid gender-marked expressions when grammatical gender is unclear. Using a sentence completion task, we tested these claims by investigating the effect of animacy on both the choice of pronouns versus more specific expressions and the choice of reduced versus full pronouns in Dutch. We compared speakers of Netherlandic Dutch, who have generally lost intuitions about masculine and feminine grammatical gender of nouns, with speakers of Belgian Dutch, for whom these intuitions are still relatively intact. Both groups showed an effect of animacy on pronominalization, suggesting that this effect cannot only be explained as a gender avoidance strategy. At the same time, the choice between full and reduced pronouns cannot be explained by accessibility. Implications for theories of reference production are discussed.

Using suggestion to model different types of automatic writing

Our sense of self includes awareness of our thoughts and movements, and our control over them. This feeling can be altered or lost in neuropsychiatric disorders as well as in phenomena such as "automatic writing" whereby writing is attributed to an external source. Here, we employed suggestion in highly hypnotically suggestible participants to model various experiences of automatic writing during a sentence completion task. Results showed that the induction of hypnosis, without additional suggestion, was associated with a small but significant reduction of control, ownership, and awareness for writing. Targeted suggestions produced a double dissociation between thought and movement components of writing, for both feelings of control and ownership, and additionally, reduced awareness of writing. Overall, suggestion produced selective alterations in the control, ownership, and awareness of thought and motor components of writing, thus enabling key aspects of automatic writing, observed across different clinical and cultural settings, to be modelled.

Some, but not all, egocentric behaviours change with age

To learn more about the nature of egocentricity, we examined the changes in different aspects of egocentricity from adolescence to adulthood. Four scales commonly used to measure egocentricity (the Adolescent Egocentricity Scale, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, the Self-Consciousness Scale and Exner’s Sentence Completion Task) were administered to 117 adolescents aged 14–15 and 110 adults aged 17–45. An exploratory factor analysis of the scores revealed a 3-factor model consisting of (i) self-importance, (ii) perspective-taking, and (iii) distress. Perspective-taking, but not self-importance or distress was sensitive to age, with young adults demonstrating more reflection about their own motivation and the motivation of others (perspective-taking) than did the adolescents. Distress was higher in females than in males, regardless of age. There were no effects of age or sex on self-importance. These 3 components of egocentric behaviour have different roots and may have different roles in the regulation of interpersonal behaviour.

‘Teachers are Always Good. Children have Flaws.’

What do the poor in India say about the education their children are receiving? And how do they remember their own years of schooling? This cultural psychological study of parental beliefs about education explored these questions by employing participant observation, in-depth interviews, focus groups and sentence-completion tasks. The participants were 19 low-income parents from the state of Gujarat, India, with a child between 8 and 18 years of age. Results indicated that these materially impoverished parents nostalgically deified teachers, whom they often referred to as Guru, while they characterised their young student selves as playful and distracted. They upheld the sanctity of the teacher–student relationship, only occasionally criticising the schools and teachers of their childhood. Examining the personal narratives of these parents, I argue that Guru is a shared cultural concept that they have appropriated as a cultural resource for understanding their own educational experiences and reconstructing their childhood selves in acts of remembering. Upholding this ancient concept also allows them to stake a claim to their ethnocultural belonging in the present.

Faculty women as models for women students: how context matters

We explored how frequently academic staff serve as role models for women undergraduate students, how this compares to the family context, and the qualities associated with potential role models in both contexts. Participants were 138 psychology students at a Dutch university. They completed a self-administered, online survey about inspirational people and a sentence-completion task. Older university women were inspiring for 20.5% of students; younger university women for 14.4%. Men were rarely identified as role models in the academic context, but with almost the same frequency as women in the family context. Academic women were admired primarily for qualities related to their work and as people with authority/power while family women were associated mainly with relational qualities, like caring. Focusing on the academic context, we argue that there is a ‘hidden gender curriculum,’ which contributes to students' identity development and which may reproduce or disrupt social and cultural inequalities.

Time reference decoupled from tense in agrammatic and fluent aphasia

Background: Reference to an event’s time frame can be accomplished through verb inflection. In agrammatic aphasia, a deficit in past time reference has been identified by Bastiaanse and colleagues (2011). In fluent aphasia, specific problems with this time frame (expressed by the past tense) have been found as well (Dragoy & Bastiaanse, 2013; Jonkers & de Bruin, 2009). However, time reference does not always coincide with tense; in languages such as Dutch and English, reference to the past can be established by using past tense (e.g., “he wrote a letter”) or a present tense auxiliary in combination with a participle, i.e., the present perfect (e.g., “he has written a letter”).Aims: The goal of this study is twofold. First, it aims to untangle tense problems from problems with past time reference through verb morphology in people with aphasia. Second, this study aims to compare the production of time reference inflection by people with agrammatic and fluent aphasia.Methods & Procedures: A sentence completion task was used to elicit reference to the non-past and past in Dutch. Reference to the past was tested through (1) a simple verb in past tense and (2) a verb complex with an auxiliary in present tense + participle (the present perfect). Reference to the non-past was tested through a simple verb in present tense. Fourteen agrammatic aphasic speakers, sixteen fluent aphasic speakers, and twenty non-brain-damaged speakers (NBDs) took part in this study. Data were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively.Outcomes & Results: NBDs scored at ceiling and significantly higher than the aphasic participants. Agrammatic speakers performed worse than fluent speakers, but the pattern of performance in both aphasic groups was similar. Reference to the past through past tense and [present tense auxiliary + participle] was more impaired than reference to the non-past. An error analysis revealed differences between the two groups.Conclusions: People with agrammatic and fluent aphasia experience problems with expressing reference to the past through verb inflection. This past time reference deficit is irrespective of the tense employed. The error patterns between the two groups reveal different underlying problems.

Brief non-symbolic, approximate number practice enhances subsequent exact symbolic arithmetic in children

Recent research reveals a link between individual differences in mathematics achievement and performance on tasks that activate the approximate number system (ANS): a primitive cognitive system shared by diverse animal species and by humans of all ages. Here we used a brief experimental paradigm to test one causal hypothesis suggested by this relationship: activation of the ANS may enhance children’s performance of symbolic arithmetic. Over 2 experiments, children who briefly practiced tasks that engaged primitive approximate numerical quantities performed better on subsequent exact, symbolic arithmetic problems than did children given other tasks involving comparison and manipulation of non-numerical magnitudes (brightness and length). The practice effect appeared specific to mathematics, as no differences between groups were observed on a comparable sentence completion task. These results move beyond correlational research and provide evidence that the exercise of non-symbolic numerical processes can enhance children’s performance of symbolic mathematics.

The language of magnitude comparison.

When 2 objects differ in magnitude, their relation can be described with a "smaller" comparative (e.g., less, shorter, lower) or a "larger" comparative (e.g., more, taller, higher). We show that, across multiple dimensions and tasks, English speakers preferentially use the latter. In sentence completion tasks, this higher use of larger comparatives (HULC) effect is more pronounced when the larger item is presented on the left (for simultaneous presentation) or second (for sequential presentation). The HULC effect is not diminished by making the 2 items more similar, but it is somewhat lessened when both objects are of low magnitude. These results illuminate the processes underlying the judgment and representation of relative magnitudes.

An Automatic Reference Aid for Improving EFL Learners' Formulaic Expressions in Productive Language Use

Formulaic language is important to language acquisition; however, English language learners are often reported to have problems with formulaic expressions. Several lists of formulaic sequences have been proposed, mainly for developing teaching and testing materials. However, their limited numbers and insufficient usage information seem unable to benefit formulaic language use. To address these issues we have developed GRASP, a reference aid for formulaic expressions, to promote learners' productive competence. Users are allowed multi-word inputs to target their desired phrases or collocations. Utilizing natural language processing techniques, our system categorizes and displays the structures and sequences in a hierarchical way. The corresponding example sentences are also provided. The formulaic structures serve as a quick access index. The formulaic sequences and corpus examples illustrate the real world language use. Importantly, automatic summarization from language data lends support to the idea of data-driven learning. A single-group pre-posttest design was adopted to assess the effectiveness of GRASP on 150 Chinese-speaking college freshmen. The results indicated that our reference aid made a substantial contribution to students' performance on formulaic expression use in a sentence completion task, compared with the existing tools. Notably, the less proficient students showed marked improvement.

How to assess abstract conceptual knowledge: construction, standardization and validation of a new battery of semantic memory tests

The neuropsychological investigation of semantic memory has mainly focused on concrete concepts, while abstract concepts have been relatively neglected. We describe a new battery for assessing abstract concepts in brain-damaged patients. The battery includes three different tests: an association task, a multiplechoice naming-to-description task and a sentence completion task. The three tasks are based on the same 40 stimuli belonging to different categories of abstract concepts and they are tightly controlled for variables that can account for quantitative differences between abstract concepts (i.e. concreteness, imageability, context availability, familiarity, age of acquisition, mode of acquisition, emotional valence and arousal). The three tasks showed high reliability. Normative data were collected from 108 healthy Italian adults. To assess its sensitivity, the battery was administered to 13 patients with probable Alzheimer's disease who performed worse than matched controls. Significant correlations were also found between the tests and other semantic memory tests, supporting the validity of the battery.

Evaluating the effectiveness of therapy based around Shape Coding to develop the use of regular past tense morphemes in two children with language impairments

It has been suggested that difficulties with tense and agreement marking are a core feature of language impairment. Hence, studies are required that analyse the effectiveness of intervention in this area, including consideration of whether changes seen in therapy sessions generalize to spontaneous speech. This study assessed the effectiveness of therapy based around Shape Coding in developing the use of the regular past tense morpheme -ed in two school-aged children with language impairments. It also considered whether participants benefited from additional generalization therapy in order to start using target forms in their spontaneous speech. The former was assessed using a sentence completion task and the latter by a conversational task with blind assessors. One participant improved markedly in sentence completion but did not gain in the conversation task until after the generalization therapy. The other made more modest gains on the sentence completion task and seemed to generalize to the conversation task without recourse to the generalization therapy. Larger studies are required to confirm these interpretations and to determine whether they are applicable to the wider population of children with language impairments.

Interferencias en la producción de la concordancia sujeto-verbo en el español. Un estudio sobre el rol de los factores semánticos y morfofonológicos

The goal of this study is to study the influence of semantic and morphophonological information in agreement computation during sentence production in Spanish. We designed an experiment using the error-elicitation paradigm in an oral sentence-completion task. Subject type (distributive vs. non-distributive), number of local noun (singular vs. plural) and local noun type according to the morphophonological realization (marked vs. invariant/unmarked) were manipulated. The results confirm the influence of semantic and morphological factors in the Spanish and, taken together with evidence from other languages, permit to assess the divergent hypotheses relating to the flow of information and the degree of autonomy of syntactic information in sentence production. In addition, they provide evidence regarding the role of the richness of inflectional morphology in the computation of subject-verb agreement.

Conditional and future tense impairment in non-fluent aphasia

Background: Morphological errors of tense and agreement are salient in agrammatic aphasia. The PADILIH predicts impairments in discourse linking that translate to greater difficulties in referring to a past event time than to a future or a present event time. In Catalan, the Periphrastic conditional tense (e.g., “if the man had had time, he would have…”) refers to the past and the Simple conditional tense refers to the future (e.g., “if the man had time, he would…”). These two tenses refer to an event that may happen (irrealis).Aims: We fill in the gap of the conditional tense and provide further data to study contrasts in verb inflection for time reference. We predict that verb forms that refer to an irrealis past event (Periphrastic conditional) are more impaired than forms that refer to an irrealis future event (Simple conditional and Future). We also predict that there are no differences between verb forms that refer to an irrealis future event (Simple conditional and Future). We also assessed whether problems in time reference extend to individuals with non-fluent aphasia that are not typical agrammatic Broca aphasia.Methods & Procedures: A sentence completion task that included 60 sentences (20 per type) of equal length in a Conditional structure (if-sentences) was designed. We tested three sentence types: Periphrastic conditional, Simple conditional and Future. The task was administered to nine participants with non-fluent aphasia and nine age-matched non-brain-damaged participants.Outcomes & Results: The Control group scored at ceiling on the three sentence types. Participants with non-fluent aphasia were most impaired in the production of the Periphrastic conditional as compared with the Simple conditional and the Future.Conclusions: When irrealis event times are compared, past events are more impaired than future events. These results can be explained by a deficit in time reference as predicted by the PADILIH. Our data reveal that the predictions of the PADILIH also hold for non-fluent speakers who have been diagnosed with Transcortical motor aphasia.