The Role of Fundamental Frequency and Temporal Envelope in Processing Sentences with Temporary Syntactic Ambiguities.

Previous experiments have demonstrated the impact of speech prosody on syntactic processing. The present study was designed to examine how listeners use specific acoustic properties of prosody for grammatical interpretation. We investigated the independent contributions of two acoustic properties associated with the pitch and rhythmic properties of speech; the fundamental frequency and temporal envelope, respectively. The effect of degrading these prosodic components was examined by testing listeners' ability to parse early-closure garden-path sentences. A second aim was to investigate how effects of prosody interact with semantic effects of sentence plausibility. Using a task that required both a comprehension and a production response, we were able to determine that degradation of the speech envelope more consistently affects syntactic processing than degradation of the fundamental frequency. These effects are exacerbated in sentences with plausible misinterpretations, showing that prosodic degradation interacts with contextual cues to sentence interpretation.

We both say tomato: Intact lexical alignment in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

In people with schizophrenia and related disorders, impairments in communication and social functioning can negatively impact social interactions and quality of life. In the present study, we investigated the cognitive basis of a specific aspect of linguistic communication-lexical alignment-in people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. We probed lexical alignment as participants played a collaborative picture-naming game with the experimenter, in which the two players alternated between naming a dual-name picture (e.g., rabbit/bunny) and listening to their partner name a picture. We found evidence of lexical alignment in all three groups, with no differences between the patient groups and the controls. We argue that these typical patterns of lexical alignment in patients were supported by preserved-and in some cases increased-bottom-up mechanisms, which balanced out impairments in top-down perspective-taking.

Impairments in Probabilistic Prediction and Bayesian Learning Can Explain Reduced Neural Semantic Priming in Schizophrenia.

It has been proposed that abnormalities in probabilistic prediction and dynamic belief updating explain the multiple features of schizophrenia. Here, we used electroencephalography (EEG) to ask whether these abnormalities can account for the well-established reduction in semantic priming observed in schizophrenia under nonautomatic conditions. We isolated predictive contributions to the neural semantic priming effect by manipulating the prime's predictive validity and minimizing retroactive semantic matching mechanisms. We additionally examined the link between prediction and learning using a Bayesian model that probed dynamic belief updating as participants adapted to the increase in predictive validity. We found that patients were less likely than healthy controls to use the prime to predictively facilitate semantic processing on the target, resulting in a reduced N400 effect. Moreover, the trial-by-trial output of our Bayesian computational model explained between-group differences in trial-by-trial N400 amplitudes as participants transitioned from conditions of lower to higher predictive validity. These findings suggest that, compared with healthy controls, people with schizophrenia are less able to mobilize predictive mechanisms to facilitate processing at the earliest stages of accessing the meanings of incoming words. This deficit may be linked to a failure to adapt to changes in the broader environment. This reciprocal relationship between impairments in probabilistic prediction and Bayesian learning/adaptation may drive a vicious cycle that maintains cognitive disturbances in schizophrenia.

Syntactic Priming As a Test of Argument Structure: A Self-paced Reading Experiment.

Using data from a behavioral structural priming experiment, we test two competing theoretical approaches to argument structure, which attribute different configurations to (in)transitive structures. These approaches make different claims about the relationship between unergatives and transitive structures selecting either a DP complement or a small clause complement in structurally unambiguous sentences, thus making different predictions about priming relations between them. Using statistical tools that combine a factorial 6 × 6 within subjects ANOVA, a mixed effects ANCOVA and a linear mixed effects regression model, we report syntactic priming effects in comprehension, which suggest a stronger predictive contribution of a model that supports an interpretive semantics view of syntax, whereby syntactic structures do not necessarily reflect argument/event structure in semantically unambiguous configurations. They also contribute novel experimental evidence that correlate representational complexity with language processing in the mind and brain. Our study further upholds the validity of combining quantitative methods and theoretical approaches to linguistics for advancing our knowledge of syntactic phenomena.