Sentence Continuations Research Articles

Effects of Task Instructions on Predictive Eye Movements and Word Recognition During Second Language Sentence Comprehension

AbstractThis study tested whether encouraging prediction enhances prediction in second language (L2) speakers. L2 English speakers listened to English sentences like The woman … will read/buy one of the newspapers while viewing the target (a newspaper) and distractor objects (a rose, a bowl, and a mango) on a screen and clicked on the target as quickly as possible. The target was predictable (read) or unpredictable (buy) from the verb meaning. Participants looked at the target longer and were quicker to move the mouse to it when instructed to predict sentence continuation than when they were merely instructed to comprehend sentences. This result held true both when the target was predictable and unpredictable. Furthermore, only when instructed to predict did the participants make more clicking errors when the target was unpredictable than predictable, which suggested that encouraging prediction can interfere with word recognition accuracy in unpredictable contexts due to reduced cognitive resources or failed predictions.

Age differences in context use during reading and downstream effects on recognition memory.

It is well-known that sentential context modulates sentence processing. But does context also have effects that extend beyond the immediate moment, for example, by impacting the memory representations that people store? And are there age-related differences in this process? Here, we investigated this question. German readers who varied in age self-paced through constraining sentences that continued in a predictable or less predictable fashion. Participants' recognition memory was then tested for previously seen (i.e., "old") words and for initially predictable but not actually presented words (i.e., "lures"). The results showed that readers of all ages slowed down when reading unpredictable sentences. However, aging individuals maintained less sentence-specific information than younger adults: They not only understood sentential materials less correctly on the fly, but they also showed disproportionate rates of false remembering and less successful old-new discrimination in the recognition memory test. Of note, rates of false remembering were reduced in those aging readers who allocated more time toward reading unpredictable sentence continuations. Together, our results show that aging increases reliance on gist or schema-congruent processing but that more attentive encoding of text can buffer against some of the resulting memory distortions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Metaphor comprehension and production in verbally able children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Research in the field of figurative language processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has demonstrated that autistic individuals experience systematic difficulties in the comprehension of different types of metaphors. However, there is scarce evidence regarding metaphor production skills in ASD. Importantly, the exact source of metaphor processing difficulties in ASD remains largely controversial. The debate has mainly focused on the mediating role of structural language skills (i.e., lexical knowledge) and cognitive abilities (i.e., Theory of Mind and executive functions) in ASD individuals' ability to comprehend and generate metaphors. The present study examines metaphor comprehension and production in 18 Greek-speaking verbally able children with ASD and 31 typically-developing (TD) controls. Participants completed two tasks, namely, a low-verbal multiple-choice sentence-picture matching task that tested their ability to comprehend conventional predicate metaphors, and a sentence continuation task that assessed their ability to generate metaphors. The study also included measures of fluid intelligence, expressive vocabulary, and working memory within the sample. The results show that the ASD group had significantly lower performance than the TD group in both metaphor comprehension and production. The findings also reveal that expressive vocabulary skills were a key factor in the metaphor comprehension and production performance of the children with ASD. Working memory capacity was also found to correlate significantly with metaphor comprehension performance in the ASD group. Conversely, no correlations were found in the TD group with neither of the above factors. Of note, children with ASD generated significantly more inappropriate responses and no-responses to the metaphor production task compared with the control group. The overall results reveal that children with ASD had difficulty with both comprehending and using metaphorical language. The findings also indicate that TD children may employ diverse cognitive strategies or rely on different underlying skills when processing metaphors compared with children with ASD.

Romanian (subject-like) DPs attract more than bare nouns: Evidence from speeded continuations

This paper investigates whether agreement attraction is modulated by distributional properties determining subject-likelihood by examining the degree to which bare nouns and full determiner phrases (DPs) cause agreement attraction effects in Romanian. Romanian represents an ideal testing ground for this, given two distributional constraints making bare nouns less subject-like: Locative Determiner Omission, preventing locative prepositions from taking nouns with definite articles (unless modified by adjectives), and the Naked Noun Constraint, disallowing bare nouns as preverbal subjects. We predicted that bare nouns should be less likely to trigger agreement attraction than overt DPs. We conducted four speeded forced-choice sentence continuation tasks on Romanian native speakers to test this prediction. We observe that overt DPs cause significantly more attraction than bare nouns. We suggest that the results are consistent with a cue-based retrieval mechanism for forming agreement dependencies, where cues that determine subjecthood are used to reactivate elements in working memory upon processing a verb. These cues can be language specific, and in Romanian, this means that agreement attraction is sensitive to the morphophonological overtness of the determiner.

Exploring the Sensitivity to Alternative Signals of Coherence Relations


 Coherence relations between elements of discourse can be signaled by linguistic devices such as connectives and/or alternative signals. While the use and comprehension of connectives have been studied in different categories of speakers, less is known about the functioning of alternative signals of coherence relations, especially in younger populations. In the current study, we aim to examine the sensitivity of French-speaking teenagers to the alternative signals of list relation (words such as plusieurs ‘several’ and différents ‘various’), combined with connectives varying in frequency and signaling two types of coherence relations (addition: en plus, en outre; consequence: donc, ainsi). Our results reveal that, as early as in teenage years, speakers are sensitive (i.e., they produce list continuation sentences) to alternative signals of list relation. Furthermore, the inference of list relation is not significantly changed when an alternative signal is combined with the more frequent additive connective en plus. However, this inference is inhibited by the less frequent additive connective en outre, and is almost completely hindered by the consequence connectives donc and ainsi. Overall, these results show that alternative list signals are an important source for the inference of the list relation, even in the presence of more salient signals of coherence such as connectives.

Pinning down the interaction between animacy and syntactic function in the interpretation of German and Italian personal and demonstrative pronouns

ABSTRACT This article investigates how animacy in interaction with the syntactic function of a referent’s antecedent determines the interpretation of different types of pronouns and demonstratives in German and Italian. The results of a sentence continuation task conducted in both languages show that Italian null pronouns and German p-pronouns have a strong tendency to refer to a preceding subject, but only if its referent is animate. With inanimate subjects, both forms tend to refer to the animate referent in object position, showing that animacy enhances a referent’s accessibility more than the syntactic function of its previous mention. Demonstratives in German and Italian generally tend to refer to object antecedents, a tendency that is also influenced by the animacy of the referent, especially in German. The cross-linguistic comparison reveals that the effect of animacy is overall stronger in German than in Italian, suggesting that across languages, different forms may show a different sensitivity to syntactic function and animacy.

Even young children make multiple predictions in the complex visual world

Children can anticipate upcoming input in sentences with semantically constraining verbs. In the visual world, the sentence context is used to anticipatorily fixate the only object matching potential sentence continuations. Adults can process even multiple visual objects in parallel when predicting language. This study examined whether young children can also maintain multiple prediction options in parallel during language processing. In addition, we aimed at replicating the finding that children’s receptive vocabulary size modulates their prediction. German children (5–6 years, n = 26) and adults (19–40 years, n = 37) listened to 32 subject–verb–object sentences with semantically constraining verbs (e.g., “The father eats the waffle”) while looking at visual scenes of four objects. The number of objects being consistent with the verb constraints (e.g., being edible) varied among 0, 1, 3, and 4. A linear mixed effects model on the proportion of target fixations with the effect coded factors condition (i.e., the number of consistent objects), time window, and age group revealed that upon hearing the verb, children and adults anticipatorily fixated the single visual object, or even multiple visual objects, being consistent with the verb constraints, whereas inconsistent objects were fixated less. This provides first evidence that, comparable to adults, young children maintain multiple prediction options in parallel. Moreover, children with larger receptive vocabulary sizes (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) anticipatorily fixated potential targets more often than those with smaller ones, showing that verbal abilities affect children’s prediction in the complex visual world.

Does negation influence the choice of sentence continuations? Evidence from a four-choice cloze task.

Event plausibility facilitates the processing of affirmative sentences, but little is known about how it affects negative sentences. In six behavioural experiments, we investigated negation's impact on the choice of sentence continuations that differ with respect to event plausibility. In a four-choice cloze task, participants saw affirmative and negative sentence fragments (The child will [not] eat the . . .) in combination with four potential continuations: yoghurt (a plausible word), shellfish (a weak world knowledge violating word), branch (a severe world knowledge violating word), and minivan (a word resulting in a semantic violation). Across all experiments the plausible word was highly preferred in both affirmative and negative sentences. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 while ruling out the possibility that the lack of effect of negation in Experiment 1 stemmed from participants not fully processing the negation. Experiment 3 showed that the observed plausibility effects can be generalised to other aspectual forms (The child has [not] eaten the yoghurt). Experiment 4 ruled out the possibility that the choices were mainly driven by lexical associations and additionally suggested a role for informativity. Experiment 5 replicated Experiment 4 and reinforced the general pattern according to which negative sentences express the denial of plausible positive events. Experiment 6 provided evidence that informativity might be driving patterns of choices in the negative sentences. All in all, these findings suggest that upcoming continuations are chosen to maximise the plausibility of the event in the affirmative sentences and to deny that event in the negative sentences. The observed plausibility effects do not seem to be modulated by the internal representation of events, but they can be modulated by changes to the expected informativity of the sentence.

A multi-method approach to estimating subjectivity of causal connectives: The case of ‘poetomu’ and ‘tak chto’ in Russian

Cross-linguistic evidence shows that languages often employ specialized causal connectives to express subjective versus objective relations. This evidence mostly comes from corpus studies. However, the phenomenon of connective specialization can also be approached with experimental methods. The present study set out to compare different methods of investigating subjectivity profiles of causal connectives in a language, uncovering the different aspects of connective specialization that they elucidate. A combination of the traditional corpus analysis (Study 1), a connective insertion experiment (Study 2), and a sentence continuation experiment (Study 3) was applied to Russian forward causal connectives poetomu ‘that’s why’ and tak chto ‘so’, which have not been studied in this respect. The results of all three methods show that, across discourse types, tak chto prefers subjective relations more than poetomu, which expresses objective relations. The specialization of connectives is most pronounced in the connective insertion experiment due to the constraining nature of this task and the prototypicality of the stimuli. The corpus study and the sentence continuation experiment show less strong specialization profiles of connectives because they are more sensitive to other contextual factors. Our research illustrates the importance of combining different methods and contributes to the cross-linguistic research in the field.

The interpretation of Spanish masculine plural NPs: Are they perceived as uniformly masculine or as a mixture of masculine and feminine?

AbstractThis article investigates whether human masculine plural noun phrases (NPs) in Spanish, which can be interpreted with an exclusively masculine or a mixed-gender meaning, are a case of balanced or unbalanced ambiguity. The results of an experiment using a sentence continuation task with oral stimuli are consistent with the claim that masculine grammatical gender biases listeners toward an exclusively masculine interpretation. The acceptance rate of continuations with the pronoun uno/una referring to a masculine plural antecedent showed that the exclusively masculine meaning of the NP is accessed more frequently and involves a lower cognitive cost than the mixed-gender interpretation. Further, this effect interacts with the stereotypicality of the noun: nouns independently established to carry a masculine stereotype are less likely to be associated with a mixed-gender interpretation. The study also found that the speakers’ attitudes toward nonsexist language predict their acceptance of the mixed-gender interpretation of masculine NPs.

Hedging Bets in Linguistic Prediction: Younger and Older Adults Vary in the Breadth of Predictive Processing

Language processing is predictive in nature, but it is unknown whether language users generate multiple predictions about upcoming content simultaneously or whether spreading activation from one pre-activated word facilitates other words downstream. Simultaneously, developmental accounts of predictive processing simultaneously highlight potential tension among spreading activation vs. multiple activation accounts. We used self-paced reading to investigate if younger and older readers of German generate (multiple) graded predictions about the grammatical gender of nouns. Gradedness in predictions was operationalized as the difference in cloze probability between the most likely and second-most likely continuation that could complete a sentence. Sentences with a greater probabilistic difference were considered as imbalanced and more biased towards one gender. Sentences with lower probabilistic differences were considered to be more balanced towards multiple genders. Both young and older adults engaged in predictive processing. However, only younger adults activated multiple predictions, with slower reading times (RTs) when gender representations were balanced, but facilitation when one gender was more likely than others. In contrast, older adults’ RTs did not pattern with imbalance but merely with predictability, showing that, while able to generate predictions based on context, older adults did not predict multiple gender continuations. Hence, our findings suggest that (younger) language users generate graded predictions about upcoming content, by weighing possible sentence continuations according to their difference in cloze probability. Compared to younger adults, older adults’ predictions are reduced in scope. The results provide novel theoretical insights into the developmental mechanisms involved in predictive processing.

Sentence Continuation Inference of Urdu Text by BERT Technique

Sentence Continuation Inference of Urdu Text by BERT Technique

Discourse behavior of possessives reflects the importance of interpersonal relationships

Nominal possessive constructions (e.g. Sam's car) present a challenge for theories of discourse since, unlike simpler nominal phrases (e.g. a car), they explicitly refer to two entities, not just one. Research on the discourse prominence of these two referents has been limited in scope and produced contradictory findings. We use a sentence continuation experiment to investigate the prominence of possessions as a function of their animacy. We find that possessed animates (e.g. her butler) are especially prominent. Their privileged status in discourse may relate to non-linguistic theories on the importance of interpersonal relationships.

Phonetic detail is used to predict a word’s morphological composition

An eye-tracking experiment tested the hypothesis that listeners use within-word fine phonetic detail that systematically reflects morphological structure, when the phonemes are identical (dis in discolour (true prefix) vs. discover (pseudo prefix)) and when they differ (re-cover vs. recover). Spoken sentence pairs, identical up to at least the critical word (e.g. I’d be surprised if the boys discolour/discover it), were cross-spliced at the prefix-stem boundary to produce stimuli in which the critical syllable’s acoustics either matched or mismatched the sentence continuation. On each trial listeners heard one sentence, and selected one of two photographs depicting the pair. Matched and mismatched stimuli were heard in separate sessions, at least a week apart. Matched stimuli led to more looks to the target photograph overall and time-course analysis suggested this was true at the earliest moments. We also observed stronger effects for earlier trials and the effects tended to weaken over the course of the experiment. These results suggest that normal speech perception involves continuously monitoring phonetic detail, and, when it is systematically associated with meaning, using it to facilitate rapid understanding.

Testing limits: ERP evidence for word form preactivation during speeded sentence reading.

While it is commonly agreed upon that language comprehenders preactivate information at multiple levels, there is less consensus regarding what and when information is predicted, under which circumstances, and via which mechanism(s). Regarding when, Ito, Corley, Pickering, Martin, & Nieuwland (2016) concluded that during sentence processing, word form-unlike semantic-preactivation crucially relies on the time available to generate late-stage predictions via language production mechanisms, setting this limit between 500 and 700ms/word. The current event-related brain potential (ERP) study tests this proposal at a substantially faster serial visual presentation (SVP) rate of four words/s, on par with normal reading. We utilize the experimental design and replicate the general ERP findings of the two words/s SVP study of DeLong, Chan, & Kutas (2019), with results showing similar N400 reductions to unpredictable sentence continuations whether semantically or orthographically related to contextually predictable words, as well as an increased late posterior positivity to orthographic neighbors. These findings indicate that processing of written word information can be rapidly facilitated through context-based expectancies, establishing that if there is a time constraint for word form preactivation, it must be far less than limits specified by the prediction-by-production comprehension model championed by Ito et al.

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.

Activating words beyond the unfolding sentence: Contributions of event simulation and word associations to discourse reading

Previous studies have shown that during comprehension readers activate words beyond the unfolding sentence. An open question concerns the mechanisms underlying this behavior. One proposal is that readers mentally simulate the described event and activate related words that might be referred to as the discourse further unfolds. Another proposal is that activation between words spreads in an automatic, associative fashion. The empirical support for these proposals is mixed. Therefore, theoretical accounts differ with regard to how much weight they place on the contributions of these sources to sentence comprehension. In the present study, we attempted to assess the contributions of event simulation and lexical associations to discourse reading, using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants read target words, which were preceded by associatively related words either appearing in a coherent discourse event (Experiment 1) or in sentences that did not form a coherent discourse event (Experiment 2). Contextually unexpected target words that were associatively related to the described events elicited a reduced N400 amplitude compared to contextually unexpected target words that were unrelated to the events (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, a similar but reduced effect was observed. These findings support the notion that during discourse reading event simulation and simple word associations jointly contribute to language comprehension by activating words that are beyond contextually congruent sentence continuations.

Internal and External Mechanisms of Englishization: Changes in Marked and Unmarked Chinese Passive Constructions

The Chinese language is changing, and like other languages, has been becoming more like English. This article focuses on the Englishization (Europeanization) of certain Chinese passive constructions. Previous research indicates that written Chinese has seen an increase in the use of the 被 bèi passive construction (BEIC) and a concomitant decrease in use of the notional passive construction (NPC) over time. This assertion is supported by a corpus-based analysis. An apparent-time research study shows that, in general, younger, more educated participants (those hypothesized to have more exposure to English) are more likely to use BEIC than are older, less educated participants in the sentence continuation task. However, this difference between groups is not captured in the binary forced choice task due to the increased use of BEIC under a conscious condition by the older, less educated participants. This finding sheds light on the psychological mechanism of internalization involved with Englishization.

The effect of contextual plausibility on word skipping during reading

Recent eye-movement evidence suggests readers are more likely to skip a high-frequency word than a low-frequency word independently of the semantic or syntactic acceptability of the word in the sentence. This has been interpreted as strong support for a serial processing mechanism in which the decision to skip a word is based on the completion of a preliminary stage of lexical processing prior to any assessment of contextual fit. The present large-scale study was designed to reconcile these findings with the plausibility preview effect: higher skipping and reduced first-pass reading times for words that are previewed by contextually plausible, compared to implausible, sentence continuations that are unrelated to the target word. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing a short (3–4 letters) or long (6 letters) target word. The boundary paradigm was used to present parafoveal previews which were either higher or lower frequency than the target, and either plausible or implausible in the sentence context. The results revealed strong, independent effects of all three factors on target skipping and early measures of target fixation duration, while frequency and plausibility interacted on later measures of target fixation duration. Simulations using the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading demonstrated that plausibility effects on skipping are potentially consistent with the assumption that higher-level contextual information only affects post-lexical integration processes. However, no current model of eye movements in reading provides an explicit account of the information or processes that allow readers to rapidly detect an integration failure.

The interpretation of German personal pronouns and d-pronouns

AbstractThree experiments investigated the interpretation and production of pronouns in German. The first two experiments probed the preferred interpretation of a pronoun in contexts containing two potential antecedents by having participants complete a sentence fragment starting either with a personal pronoun or a d-pronoun. We systematically varied three properties of the potential antecedents: syntactic function, linear position, and topicality. The results confirm a subject preference for personal pronouns. The preferred interpretation of d-pronouns cannot be captured by any of the three factors alone. Although a d-pronoun preferentially refers to the non-topic in many cases, this preference can be overridden by the other two factors, linear position and syntactic function. In order to test whether interpretive preferences follow from production biases as proposed by the Bayesian theory of Kehler et al. (2008), a third experiment had participants freely produce a continuation sentence for the contexts of the first two experiments. The results show that personal pronouns are used more often to refer to a subject than to an object, recapitulating the subject preference found for interpretation and thereby confirming the account of Kehler et al. (2008). The interpretation results for the d-pronoun likewise follow from the corresponding production data.