Sentence Frames Research Articles

Children's abstraction and generalization of English lexical stress patterns.

The current study investigated school-aged children's internalization of the distributional patterns of English lexical stress as a function of vocabulary size. Sixty children (5;3 to 8;3) participated in the study. The children were asked to blend two individually presented, equally stressed syllables to produce disyllabic nonwords with different resulting structures in one of two frame sentences. The frame sentences were designed to elicit either a noun or verb interpretation of the nonword. Children's receptive vocabulary was also assessed. The results indicated that children more readily blended syllable pairs that resulted in trochaic-compatible word structures than in iambic-compatible structures. This effect was strongest in young children with large vocabularies. As for stress placement, all children were sensitive to the effect of word structure, but only children with the largest vocabularies were sensitive to the biasing effect of grammatical category (noun = trochee; verb = iamb). The study results are discussed with reference to the observation that speech motor skills develop in tandem with lexical acquisition and the hypothesis that phonological knowledge emerges in part from abstraction across lexical representations.

Single-word predictions of upcoming language during comprehension: Evidence from the cumulative semantic interference task

Comprehenders predict upcoming speech and text on the basis of linguistic input. How many predictions do comprehenders make for an upcoming word? If a listener strongly expects to hear the word “sock”, is the word “shirt” partially expected as well, is it actively inhibited, or is it ignored? The present research addressed these questions by measuring the “downstream” effects of prediction on the processing of subsequently presented stimuli using the cumulative semantic interference paradigm. In three experiments, subjects named pictures (sock) that were presented either in isolation or after strongly constraining sentence frames (“After doing his laundry, Mark always seemed to be missing one…”). Naming sock slowed the subsequent naming of the picture shirt – the standard cumulative semantic interference effect. However, although picture naming was much faster after sentence frames, the interference effect was not modulated by the context (bare vs. sentence) in which either picture was presented. According to the only model of cumulative semantic interference that can account for such a pattern of data, this indicates that comprehenders pre-activated and maintained the pre-activation of best sentence completions (sock) but did not maintain the pre-activation of less likely completions (shirt). Thus, comprehenders predicted only the most probable completion for each sentence.

An Untamed State by Roxane Gay (review)

Reviewed by: An Untamed State by Roxane Gay Régine Michelle Jean-Charles An Untamed State. By Roxane Gay. New York: Black Cat, 2014. ISBN 0802122515. 368 pp. $16. Roxane Gay’s first novel, An Untamed State, contains many of the typical themes found in contemporary literature by Haitian Americans living in the diaspora. She explores the myth of return, the fraught relationship between generations navigating the cultural shifts from homeland to hostland, cross-cultural marriage, and the gaping chasm between the rich and the poor in Haiti. The novel’s first sentence frames it within the fairytale genre, suggesting an attention to form that will be maintained throughout: “Once upon a time in a far-off land … I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones” (1). The fairy tale that is simultaneously elaborated and deconstructed is about Mireille Duval Jameson, whose supposedly perfect life is irrevocably altered after she is kidnapped by gunmen. Held for thirteen days, she is beaten, tortured, and repeatedly raped. Despite the many other themes present throughout, the novel functions primarily as a rape narrative that describes Mireille’s captivity and her stumbling attempts to put her life back together in the aftermath. In my work on representations of sexual violence, I have argued for analyzing the rape victim/survivor narrative as a genre unto itself that privileges the perspective of the survivor and refuses to use rape as a symbol for something else.1 These narratives often do little to render the violence of rape manageable for the reader. They devote careful attention to the intricacies of rape trauma syndrome—what the survivor experiences before, during, and after the rape. Ultimately these narratives refuse to simplify the healing process (which is never straightforward and almost always incomplete) for the victim/survivor of rape. An Untamed State deploys many of these strategies. As an example of the brutal force of rape that is unrelenting, Gay’s novel exemplifies the expository act of writing sexual violence. Most notably, the first two hundred pages present the details of the kidnapping. The violence is described in unremitting detail that makes the reader want to turn away while also causing us to be drawn more deeply into the atmosphere of the novel. The kidnapping that sets the plot into motion occurs on an idyllic day in Port-au-Prince just as Mireille, her American husband Michael, and their infant son exit the high gates of the lavish Duval family home en route to the beach. Mireille is snatched from the car and brought to an [End Page 203] obscure location where she is held for thirteen days. This length of time is due to the fact that her father refuses to pay the $1,000,000 ransom, fearful that the kidnappers will come back for more after he pays. The first part of the novel seems to mirror the days of captivity, gang rape, physical violence, and torture that Mireille is forced to endure; the scenes of violence describing Mireille’s ordeal are graphically relayed. Mireille is raped, gang-raped, burned, and beaten. She attempts to escape and is dragged back. An Untamed State is about the actual kidnapping itself, but even more about its aftermath: Mireille’s physical, psychological, and emotional brokenness (which she refers to as her death), the irreparable damage done to her relationship with her parents, her inability to return to the life she had before, and the calamitous results in her marriage. She suffers from telltale signs of rape trauma syndrome in the form of triggers, intense feelings of shame, disassociation, and sexual “acting out.” We are taken through the different phases of her emotional, physical, and mental states. At first Mireille fights for her life, repeating her father’s mantra to herself: “There is nothing I cannot get through if I try hard enough” (34). She threatens her captors: “My husband is going to kill you. He is going to tear you apart with his bare hands” (39–40). She fights. “I fought him and he laughed...

Toddlers encode similarities among novel words from meaningful sentences

Toddlers can learn about the meanings of individual words from the structure and semantics of the sentences in which they are embedded. However, it remains unknown whether toddlers encode similarities among novel words based on their positions within sentences. In three experiments, two-year-olds listened to novel words embedded in familiar sentence frames. Some novel words consistently occurred in the subject position across sentences, and others in the object position across sentences. An auditory semantic task was used to test whether toddlers encoded similarities based on sentential position, for (a) pairs of novel words that occurred within the same sentence, and (b) pairs of novel words that occurred in the same position across sentences. The results suggest that while toddlers readily encoded similarity based on within-sentence occurrences, only toddlers with more advanced grammatical knowledge encoded the positional similarities of novel words across sentences. Moreover, the encoding of these cross-sentential relationships only occurred if the exposure sentences included a familiar verb. These studies suggest that the types of lexical relationships that toddlers learn depend on the child’s current level of language development, as well as the structure and meaning of the sentences surrounding the novel words.

Using Structural Priming to Study Scopal Representations and Operations

Using Structural Priming to Study Scopal Representations and Operations

Parafoveal-on-foveal effects of emotional word semantics in reading Chinese sentences: evidence from eye movements.

Despite the well-known influence of emotional meaning on cognition, relatively less is known about its effects on reading behavior. We investigated whether fixation behavior during the reading of Chinese sentences is influenced by emotional word meaning in the parafovea. Two-character target words embedded into the same sentence frames provided emotionally positive, negative, or neutral contents. Fixation durations on neutral pretarget words were prolonged for positive parafoveal words and for highly frequent negative parafoveal words. In addition, fixation durations on foveal emotional words were shorter than those on neutral words. We also found that the role of emotional words varied as a function of their valence during foveal and parafoveal processing. These findings suggest a processing advantage for emotional words relative to emotionally neutral stimuli in foveal and parafoveal vision. We discuss implications for the notion of attention attraction due to emotional content.

Training understanding of reversible sentences: a study comparing language-impaired children with age-matched and grammar-matched controls.

Introduction. Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) have problems with language comprehension, and little is known about how to remediate these. We focused here on errors in interpreting sentences such as “the ball is above the cup”, where the spatial configuration depends on word order. We asked whether comprehension of such short reversible sentences could be improved by computerized training, and whether learning by children with SLI resembled that of younger, typically-developing children.Methods. We trained 28 children with SLI aged 6–11 years, 28 typically-developing children aged from 4 to 7 years who were matched to the SLI group for raw scores on a test of receptive grammar, and 20 typically-developing children who were matched to the SLI group on chronological age. A further 20 children with SLI were given pre- and post-test assessments, but did not undergo training. Those in the trained groups were given training on four days using a computer game adopting an errorless learning procedure, during which they had to select pictures to correspond to spoken sentences such as “the cup is above the drum” or “the bird is below the hat”. Half the trained children heard sentences using above/below and the other half heard sentences using before/after (with a spatial interpretation). A total of 96 sentences was presented over four sessions. Half the sentences were unique, whereas the remainder consisted of 12 repetitions of each of four sentences that became increasingly familiar as training proceeded.Results. Age-matched control children performed near ceiling (≥ 90% correct) in the first session and were excluded from the analysis. Around half the trained SLI children also performed this well. Training effects were examined in 15 SLI and 16 grammar-matched children who scored less than 90% correct on the initial training session. Overall, children’s scores improved with training. Memory span was a significant predictor of improvement, even after taking into account performance on training session 1. Unlike the grammar-matched controls, children with SLI showed greater accuracy with repeated sentences compared with unique sentences. Training did not improve children’s performance on a standardized test of receptive grammar.Discussion. Overall, these results indicate that a subset of children with SLI perform well below ceiling on reversible sentences with three key words and simple syntactic structure. For these children, weak verbal short-term memory appears to impair comprehension of spoken sentences. In contrast to the general finding that rule-learning benefits from variable input, these children seem to do best if given repeated exposure to the same nouns used with a given sentence frame. Generalisation to other sentences using the same syntactic frame may be more effective if preceded by such item-specific learning.

Syntactic flexibility and planning scope: the effect of verb bias on advance planning during sentence recall

In sentence production, grammatical advance planning scope depends on contextual factors (e.g., time pressure), linguistic factors (e.g., ease of structural processing), and cognitive factors (e.g., production speed). The present study tests the influence of the availability of multiple syntactic alternatives (i.e., syntactic flexibility) on the scope of advance planning during the recall of Dutch dative phrases. We manipulated syntactic flexibility by using verbs with a strong bias or a weak bias toward one structural alternative in sentence frames accepting both verbs (e.g., strong/weak bias: De ober schotelt/serveert de klant de maaltijd [voor] “The waiter dishes out/serves the customer the meal”). To assess lexical planning scope, we varied the frequency of the first post-verbal noun (N1, Experiment 1) or the second post-verbal noun (N2, Experiment 2). In each experiment, 36 speakers produced the verb phrases in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm. On each trial, they read a sentence presented one word at a time, performed a short distractor task, and then saw a sentence preamble (e.g., De ober…) which they had to complete to form the presented sentence. Onset latencies were compared using linear mixed effects models. N1 frequency did not produce any effects. N2 frequency only affected sentence onsets in the weak verb bias condition and especially in slow speakers. These findings highlight the dependency of planning scope during sentence recall on the grammatical properties of the verb and the frequency of post-verbal nouns. Implications for utterance planning in everyday speech are discussed.

Acquisition of sentence frame discrimination using the iPad™ as a speech generating device in young children with developmental disabilities

This study evaluated the use of the iPad™ and application Proloqu2Go as a speech generating device (SGD) for the acquisition of a tact (labeling) repertoire in three preschool aged children with Autism Spectrum Disorder or developmental delay. Additionally, discrimination between picture icons and sentence frames were investigated. Using a five second time delay, with full physical prompts, participants were taught to label four items using the carrier phrases “I see” and “I have”. Following the acquisition of those frames in isolation, training on discriminating between those frames was introduced. The results indicate that the training procedures were effective for this purpose, thus contributing to the already existing literature on the use of handheld computing devices as SGD.

Producing Speech with a Newly Learned Morphosyntax and Vocabulary: An Magnetoencephalography Study

Ten participants learned a miniature language (Anigram), which they later employed to verbally describe a pictured event. Using magnetoencephalography, the cortical dynamics of sentence production in Anigram was compared with that in the native tongue from the preparation phase up to the production of the final word. At the preparation phase, a cartoon image with two animals prompted the participants to plan either the corresponding simple sentence (e.g., "the bear hits the lion") or a grammar-free list of the two nouns ("the bear, the lion"). For the newly learned language, this stage induced stronger left angular and adjacent inferior parietal activations than for the native language, likely reflecting a higher load on lexical retrieval and STM storage. The preparation phase was followed by a cloze task where the participants were prompted to produce the last word of the sentence or word sequence. Production of the sentence-final word required retrieval of rule-based inflectional morphology and was accompanied by increased activation of the left middle superior temporal cortex that did not differ between the two languages. Activation of the right temporal cortex during the cloze task suggested that this area plays a role in integrating word meanings into the sentence frame. The present results indicate that, after just a few days of exposure, the newly learned language harnesses the neural resources for multiword production much the same way as the native tongue and that the left and right temporal cortices seem to have functionally different roles in this processing.

Assessing Plural Morphology in Children Acquiring /S/-Leniting Dialects of Spanish

To examine the production of plural morphology in children acquiring a dialect of Spanish with syllable-final /s/ lenition with the goal of comparing how plural marker omissions in the speech of these children compare with plural marker omissions in children with language impairment acquiring other varieties of Spanish. Three production tasks were administered to children. A repetition task was used to examine children's production of the plural marker in plural noun phrases, and 2 Berko-style tasks evaluated children's production of the plural marker in bare nouns. Behavior on these tasks was compared with plural marker comprehension for each individual child. There was a correlation between children's comprehension of the plural marker and their production of the plural marker on plural noun phrases in the repetition task but not between comprehension and production of the plural marker on bare nouns in the Berko-style tasks. Assessments of plural morphology as a clinical marker of language impairment in Spanish-speaking children may be problematic, especially in children acquiring dialects of Spanish with /s/ lenition, such as those originating in Chile, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Central America. Instead, for children acquiring /s/-leniting dialects of Spanish, assessments of the plural marker in noun phrases produced within a sentence frame may be a better indicator of acquisition than traditional Berko-style tasks that elicit bare nouns.

Encoding time and the mirror effect in recognition memory: Evidence from eyetracking

Abstract Low-frequency (LF) words have higher hit rates and lower false alarm rates than high-frequency (HF) words in recognition memory, a phenomenon termed the mirror effect . Visual word recognition latencies are longer for LF words. We examined the relationship between eye fixation durations during study and later recognition memory for individual words to test whether (1) increased fixation time on a word is associated with better memory, and (2) increased fixation times on LF words can account for their hit rate advantage. In Experiments 1 and 2, words of various frequencies were presented in lists in an intentional study design. In Experiment 3, HF and LF critical words were presented in matched sentence frames in an incidental study design. In all cases, the standard frequency effect on eye movements emerged, with longer reading times for lower frequency words. At test, studied words and new words from each frequency class were presented. The hit rate portion of the mirror effect was evident in all experiments. The time spent fixating a word did predict memory performance in the intentional encoding experiments, but critically, the frequency effect on hit rates was independent of this effect. Time spent fixating a word during incidental encoding did not predict later memory performance. These results suggest that the hit rate advantage for LF words is not due to the additional time spent on these words at encoding, which is consistent with retrieval-stage models of the mirror effect.

Growth of Finiteness in the Third Year of Life: Replication and Predictive Validity

The authors of this study investigated the validity of tense and agreement productivity (TAP) scoring in diverse sentence frames obtained during conversational language sampling as an alternative measure of finiteness for use with young children. Longitudinal language samples were used to model TAP growth from 21 to 30 months of age for 37 typically developing toddlers. Empirical Bayes (EB) linear and quadratic growth coefficients and child sex were then used to predict elicited grammar composite scores on the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI; Rice & Wexler, 2001) at 36 months. A random-effects quadratic model with no intercept best characterized TAP growth, replicating the findings of Rispoli, Hadley, and Holt (2009). The combined regression model was significant, with the 3 variables accounting for 55.5% of the variance in the TEGI composite scores. These findings establish TAP growth as a valid metric of finiteness in the 3rd year of life. Developmental and theoretical implications are discussed.

Creating Opportunities for Students to Show What They Know: The Role of Scaffolding in Assessment Tasks

This study examines the ways in which teachers provide students with written scaffolds in assessment tasks and the impact of these on students’ abilities to demonstrate a core disciplinary proficiency—constructing evidence-based explanations. Data include 76 assessment tasks designed by 33 science teachers and 707 samples of student work. We found five types of scaffolding embedded in assessments that allowed students to make their reasoning explicit: (a) using contextualized phenomena, (b) rubrics, (c) checklists, (d) sentence frames, and (e) encouraging students to draw explanatory models in combination with written explanation. Analyses showed that all five forms of scaffolding were significantly associated with the quality of student explanation even when controlling for teacher variance and student background. Providing contextualized phenomena had the greatest impact on the quality of student explanations, both by itself and in combination with other scaffolding. The results indicate that strategic combinations of scaffolds can prompt students across all achievement levels to more readily use what they know to produce evidence-based explanations, but that the scaffolding must be of high quality.

Once upon a time, there was a fabulous funambulist…: what children learn about the “high-level” vocabulary they encounter while listening to stories

Previous research has shown that listening to stories supports vocabulary growth in preschool and school-aged children and that lexical entries for even very difficult or rare words can be established if these are defined when they are first introduced. However, little is known about the nature of the lexical representations children form for the words they encounter while listening to stories, or whether these are sufficiently robust to support the child's own use of such “high-level” vocabulary. This study explored these questions by administering multiple assessments of children's knowledge about a set of newly-acquired vocabulary. Four- and six-year-old children were introduced to nine difficult new words (including nouns, verbs and adjectives) through three exposures to a story read by their class teacher. The story included a definition of each new word at its first encounter. Learning of the target vocabulary was assessed by means of two tests of semantic understanding—a forced choice picture-selection task and a definition production task—and a grammaticality judgment task, which asked children to choose between a syntactically-appropriate and syntactically-inappropriate usage of the word. Children in both age groups selected the correct pictorial representation and provided an appropriate definition for the target words in all three word classes significantly more often than they did for a matched set of non-exposed control words. However, only the older group was able to identify the syntactically-appropriate sentence frames in the grammaticality judgment task. Further analyses elucidate some of the components of the lexical representations children lay down when they hear difficult new vocabulary in stories and how different tests of word knowledge might overlap in their assessment of these components.

Word order, referential expression, and case cues to the acquisition of transitive sentences in Italian

In Study 1 we analyzed Italian child-directed-speech (CDS) and selected the three most frequent active transitive sentence frames used with overt subjects. In Study 2 we experimentally investigated how Italian-speaking children aged 2;6, 3;6, and 4;6 comprehended these orders with novel verbs when the cues of animacy, gender, and subject-verb agreement were neutralized. For each trial, children chose between two videos (e.g., horse acting on cat versus cat acting on horse), both involving the same action. The children aged 2;6 comprehended S + object-pronoun + V (soprov) significantly better than S + V + object-noun (svonoun ). We explain this in terms of cue collaboration between a low cost cue (case) and the first argument = agent cue which we found to be reliable 76% of the time. The most difficult word order for all age groups was the object-pronoun + V + S (oprovs). We ascribe this difficulty to cue conflict between the two most frequent transitive frames found in CDS, namely V + object-noun and object-pronoun + V.

Sociolinguistic perceptions of Californian /æ/ backing

This paper investigates perceptions of a feature of the “California Vowel Shift” (Eckert, 2004): the backing of the TRAP vowel. The present study probes whether or not Californian and non-Californian listeners exhibit knowledge of TRAP backing's dialectal patterning in perception. An American English speaker's TRAP vowel was manipulated to create a 9-step continuum from /a/ to /æ/ in a sentence frame. 144 native U.S. listeners heard one of these steps, accompanied by orthographic information about the word spoken (e.g., the word was explicitly given as “blocked” or “blacked"). Listeners provided social categorizations of the speaker. Listeners were more likely to categorize the speaker as Californian when presented with TRAP orthography (e.g., “blacked") paired with a token on the continuum that was closer to /a/. 60 listeners participated in a phoneme categorization task using the same manipulated stimuli. When listeners were told that a speaker was from California, they were more likely to place the boundary between “blacked” and “blocked” closer to the /a/ end of the continuum than if told the speaker was from elsewhere. Together, these experiments indicate that listeners exhibit awareness of TRAP-backing's dialectal association with California, the top-down knowledge of which can affect lexical categorization.

Word length effects on novel words: Evidence from eye movements

The present study investigated the effects of word length on eye movement behavior during initial processing of novel words while reading. Adult skilled readers' eye movements were monitored as they read novel or known target words in sentence frames with neutral context preceding the target word. Comparable word length effects on all single-fixation measures for novel and known words suggested that both types of words were subject to similar initial encoding strategies. The impact of the absence of an existing lexical entry emerged in multiple first-pass fixation measures in the form of interactions between word length (long and short) and word type (novel and known). Specifically, readers spent significantly more first-pass time refixating long novel targets than short novel targets; however, the first-pass time spent refixating known controls did not differ as a function of length. Implications of these findings for models of eye movement control while reading, as well as for vocabulary acquisition in reading, are discussed.

Sentence Frames for Developing Academic Syntax

Sentence Frames for Developing Academic Syntax

Chinese learners’ acquisition of English word stress and factors affecting stress assignment

This study explores Chinese ESL learners’ acquisition of English word stress and compares the factors affecting their stress assignment with Guion et al.’s (2003) findings of three factors (syllable structure, lexical class, and phonologically similar words) affecting English speakers’ stress placement. Twenty Hong Kong advanced learners produced and perceived 40 real words and 40 pseudowords of varying syllable structures in noun and verb sentence frames. They also indicated words they considered to be phonologically similar to the pseudoword. The results show that the participants performed well in the tasks with real words, but there were asymmetrical abilities in the tasks involving pseudowords. Regarding the factors affecting the stress assignment, different from the findings by Guion et al., stress assignment was not significantly influenced by syllable structure or the stress patterns of phonologically similar real words. Only lexical class had an effect on main stress assignment.