Shared neural representations of syntax during online dyadic communication.

When people communicate, they come to see the world in a similar way to each other by aligning their mental representations at such levels as syntax. Syntax is an essential feature of human language that distinguishes humans from other non-human animals. However, whether and how communicators share neural representations of syntax is not well understood. Here we addressed this issue by measuring the brain activity of both communicators in a series of dyadic communication contexts, by using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)-based hyperscanning. Two communicators alternatively spoke sentences either with the same or with different syntactic structures. Results showed a significantly higher-level increase of interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) at right posterior superior temporal cortex when communicators produced the same syntactic structures as each other compared to when they produced different syntactic structures. These increases of INS correlated significantly with communication quality. Our findings provide initial evidence for shared neural representations of syntax between communicators.

Inhibitory control and lexical alignment in children with an autism spectrum disorder.

BACKGROUND: Two experiments investigated the contribution of conflict inhibition to pragmatic deficits in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Typical adults' tendency to reuse interlocutors' referential choices (lexical alignment) implicates communicative perspective-taking, which is regulated by conflict inhibition. We examined whether children with ASD spontaneously lexically aligned, and whether conflict inhibition mediated alignment. METHODS: Children with ASD and chronological- and verbal-age-matched typically developing controls played a picture-naming game. We manipulated whether the experimenter used a preferred or dispreferred name for each picture, and examined whether children subsequently used the same name. RESULTS: Children with ASD spontaneously lexically aligned, to the same extent as typically developing controls. Alignment was unrelated to conflict inhibition in both groups. CONCLUSIONS: Children with ASD's referential communication is robust to impairments in conflict inhibition under some circumstances. Their pragmatic deficits may be mitigated in a highly structured interaction.

Structural priming and the representation of language.

Structural priming offers a powerful method for experimentally investigating the mental representation of linguistic structure. We clarify the nature of our proposal, justify the versatility of priming, consider alternative approaches, and discuss how our specific account can be extended to new questions as part of an interdisciplinary programme integrating linguistics and psychology as part of the cognitive sciences of language.

An experimental approach to linguistic representation.

Within the cognitive sciences, most researchers assume that it is the job of linguists to investigate how language is represented, and that they do so largely by building theories based on explicit judgments about patterns of acceptability - whereas it is the task of psychologists to determine how language is processed, and that in doing so, they do not typically question the linguists' representational assumptions. We challenge this division of labor by arguing that structural priming provides an implicit method of investigating linguistic representations that should end the current reliance on acceptability judgments. Moreover, structural priming has now reached sufficient methodological maturity to provide substantial evidence about such representations. We argue that evidence from speakers' tendency to repeat their own and others' structural choices supports a linguistic architecture involving a single shallow level of syntax connected to a semantic level containing information about quantification, thematic relations, and information structure, as well as to a phonological level. Many of the linguistic distinctions often used to support complex (or multilevel) syntactic structure are instead captured by semantics; however, the syntactic level includes some specification of "missing" elements that are not realized at the phonological level. We also show that structural priming provides evidence about the consistency of representations across languages and about language development. In sum, we propose that structural priming provides a new basis for understanding the nature of language.

The effects of semantic similarity on Mandarin speakers' referential expressions.

Previous research has found apparently contradictory effects of a semantically similar competitor on how people refer to previously mentioned entities. To address this issue, we conducted two picture-description experiments in spoken Mandarin. In Experiment 1, participants saw pictures and heard sentences referring to both the target referent and a competitor, and then described actions involving only the target referent. They produced fewer omissions and more repeated noun phrases when the competitor was semantically similar to the target referent than otherwise. In Experiment 2, participants saw introductory pictures and heard sentences referring to only the target referent, and then described actions involving both the target referent and a competitor. They produced more omissions and fewer pronouns when the competitor was semantically similar to the target referent than otherwise. We interpret the results in terms of the representation of discourse entities and the stages of language production.

Is children's acquisition of the passive a staged process? Evidence from six- and nine-year-olds' production of passives.

We report a syntactic priming experiment that examined whether children's acquisition of the passive is a staged process, with acquisition of constituent structure preceding acquisition of thematic role mappings. Six-year-olds and nine-year-olds described transitive actions after hearing active and passive prime descriptions involving the same or different thematic roles. Both groups showed a strong tendency to reuse in their own description the syntactic structure they had just heard, including well-formed passives after passive primes, irrespective of whether thematic roles were repeated between prime and target. However, following passive primes, six-year-olds but not nine-year-olds also produced reversed passives, with well-formed constituent structure but incorrect thematic role mappings. These results suggest that by six, children have mastered the constituent structure of the passive; however, they have not yet mastered the non-canonical thematic role mapping. By nine, children have mastered both the syntactic and thematic dimensions of this structure.

Autistic children's language imitation shows reduced sensitivity to ostracism.

In dialogue, speakers tend to imitate, or align with, a partner's language choices. Higher levels of alignment facilitate communication and can be elicited by affiliation goals. Since autistic children have interaction and communication impairments, we investigated whether a failure to display affiliative language imitation contributes to their conversational difficulties. We measured autistic children's lexical alignment with a partner, following an ostracism manipulation which induces affiliative motivation in typical adults and children. While autistic children demonstrated lexical alignment, we observed no affiliative influence on ostracised children's tendency to align, relative to controls. Our results suggest that increased language imitation-a potentially valuable form of social adaptation-is unavailable to autistic children, which may reflect their impaired affective understanding.

Co-activation of syntax in bilingual language production.

We report four experiments that examined whether bilinguals' production of one language is affected by the syntactic properties of their other language. Greek-English and English-Greek highly proficient fluent bilinguals produced sentence completions following subject nouns whose translation had either the same or different number. We manipulated whether participants produced completions in the same language as the subject (the source language; one-language production) or the other language (the non-source language; two-language production), and whether they used only one language or both languages within the experimental session. The results demonstrated that the grammar systems of both languages were activated during both one-language and two-language production. The effects of the non-source language were particularly enhanced in two-language utterances, when both languages were used in the experiment, and when it was the bilinguals' native language. We interpret our results in terms of a model of bilingual sentence production.

Speakers extrapolate community-level knowledge from individual linguistic encounters.

Speakers' lexical choices are affected by interpersonal-level influences, like a tendency to reuse an interlocutor's words. Here, we examined how those choices are additionally affected by community-level factors, like whether the interlocutor is from their own or another speech community (in-community vs. out-community partner), and how such interpersonal experiences contribute to the acquisition of community-level linguistic knowledge. Our three experiments tested (i) how speakers' lexical choices varied depending on their partner's choices and speech community, and (ii) how speakers' extrapolation of these choices to a subsequent partner was influenced by their partners' speech communities. In Experiment 1, Spanish participants played two sessions of an online picture-matching-and-naming task, encountering the same pictures but different confederates in each session. The first confederate was either an in-community partner (Spanish) or an out-community partner (Latin American); the second confederate was either from the same community as the first confederate or not. Participants' referential choices in Session 1 were influenced by their partner's choices, but not by their community. However, participants' likelihood to subsequently maintain these choices was affected by their partners' communities. Experiment 2 replicated this pattern in Mexicans, and Experiment 3 confirmed that these results were driven by confederates' communities, rather than perceived linguistic status. Our results suggest that speakers encode speech community information during dialogue and store it to inform future contexts of language use, even when it has not affected their choices during that particular encounter. Thus, speakers learn community-level knowledge by extrapolating linguistic information from interpersonal-level experiences.

Does it pay to imitate? No evidence for social gains from lexical imitation.

According to an influential hypothesis, people imitate motor movements to foster social interactions. Could imitation of language serve a similar function? We investigated this question in two pre-registered experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to alternate naming pictures and matching pictures to a name provided by a partner. Crucially, and unknown to participants, the partner was in fact a computer program which in one group produced the same names as previously used by the participant, and in the other group consistently produced different names. We found no difference in how the two groups evaluated the partner or the interaction and no difference in their willingness to cooperate with the partner. In Experiment 2, we made the task more similar to natural interactions by adding a stage in which a participant and the partner introduced themselves to each other and included a measure of the participant's autistic traits. Once again, we found no effects of being imitated. We discuss how these null results may inform imitation research.

Children show selectively increased language imitation after experiencing ostracism.

When threatened with ostracism, children attempt to strengthen social relationships by engaging in affiliative behaviors such as imitation. We investigated whether an experience of ostracism influenced the extent to which children imitated a partner's language use. In two experiments, 7- to 12-year-old children either experienced ostracism or did not experience ostracism in a virtual ball-throwing game before playing a picture-matching game with a partner. We measured children's tendency to imitate, or align with, their partner's language choices during the picture-matching game. Children showed a strong tendency to spontaneously align with their partner's lexical and grammatical choices. Crucially, their likelihood of lexical alignment was modulated by whether they had experienced ostracism. We found no effect of ostracism on syntactic alignment. These findings offer the first demonstration that ostracism selectively influences children's language use. They highlight the role of social-affective factors in children's communicative development, and show that the link between ostracism and imitation is broadly based, and extends beyond motor behaviors to the domain of language. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Lexical entrainment reflects a stable individual trait: Implications for individual differences in language processing.

Language use is intrinsically variable, such that the words we use vary widely across speakers and communicative situations. For instance, we can call the same entity refrigerator or fridge. However, attempts to understand individual differences in how we process language have made surprisingly little progress, perhaps because most psycholinguistic instruments are better-suited to experimental comparisons than differential analyses. In particular, investigations of individual differences require instruments that have high test-retest reliability, such that they consistently distinguish between individuals across measurement sessions. Here, we established the reliability of an instrument measuring lexical entrainment, or the tendency to use a name that a partner has used before (e.g., using refrigerator after a partner used refrigerator), which is a key phenomenon for the psycholinguistics of dialogue. Online participants completed two sessions of a picture matching-and-naming task, using different pictures and different (scripted) partners in each session. Entrainment was measured as the proportion of trials on which participants followed their partner in using a low-frequency name, and we assessed reliability by comparing entrainment scores across sessions. The estimated reliability was substantial, both when sessions were separated by minutes and when sessions were a week apart. These results suggest that our instrument is well-suited for differential analyses, opening new avenues for understanding language variability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Speakers' use of agency and visual context in spatial descriptions.

When speakers describe the world, they typically do so from their own perspective. However, they are able to adopt a different perspective, and sometimes do so even when they are not communicating with someone who has a different perspective from their own. In three experiments, we investigated the factors that might lead speakers to adopt a non-self-perspective. Participants described how objects were located in scenes that contained no other entity, a person, or a symmetrical plant. They were more likely to adopt a non-self-perspective (e.g., using to the left to refer to an object on their own right) if the scene contained a person facing them than a person facing away or a plant, and if it contained a person who could see (and potentially act on) the object than a person who could not, even when that person showed no intention to act. Our results suggest that speakers can put themselves in the shoes of another potential agent and use a simulation of that agent's perspective as the basis for formulating their descriptions.

How do phonology and orthography feed back to influence syntactic encoding in language production? Evidence from structural priming in Mandarin.

Do speakers make use of a word's phonological and orthographic forms to determine the syntactic structure of a sentence? We reported two Mandarin structural priming experiments involving homophones to investigate word-form feedback on syntactic encoding. Participants tended to reuse the syntactic structure across sentences; such a structural priming effect was enhanced when the prime and target sentences used homophone verbs (the homophone boost), regardless of whether the homophones were heterographic (homophones written in different character; Experiments 1 and 2) or homographic (homophones written in the same character; Experiment 2). Critically, the homophone boost was comparable between homographic and heterographic homophone primes (Experiment 2). Hence unlike phonology, orthography appears to play a minimal role in mediating structural priming in production. We suggest that the homophone boost results from lemma associations between homophones that develop due to phonological identity between homophones early during language learning; such associations stabilise before literacy acquisition, thus limiting the influence of orthographic identity on lemma association between homophones and in turn on structural priming in language production.

Dyslexic and nondyslexic reading fluency: rapid automatized naming and the importance of continuous lists.

Rapid automatized naming (RAN; Denckla & Rudel, 1976) tasks are consistent predictors of fluency that also discriminate between dyslexic and nondyslexic reading groups. The component processes of RAN that are responsible for its relationship with reading ability remain underspecified, however. We report a study on dyslexic and nondyslexic adult groups that experimentally manipulated RAN formats to elucidate how different components of RAN differentially influence dyslexic and nondyslexic performance. The dyslexic group showed a pervasive deficit in rapid access of individually presented items. Additionally, they showed a significant impairment when multiple items were presented, whereas nondyslexic readers showed marginal facilitation for this format. We discuss the implications of these findings with respect to reading-group differences in reading fluency.

Interaction Promotes the Adaptation of Referential Conventions to the Communicative Context.

Coordination between speakers in dialogue requires balancing repetition and change, the old and the new. Interlocutors tend to reuse established forms, relying on communicative precedents. Yet linguistic interaction also necessitates adaptation to changing contexts or dynamic tasks, which might favor abandoning existing precedents in favor of better communicative alternatives. We explored this tension using a maze game task in which individual participants and interacting pairs had to describe figures and their positions in one of two possible maze types: a regular maze, in which the grid-like structure of the maze is highlighted, and an irregular maze, in which specific parts of the maze are salient. Participants repeated this task several times. Both individuals and interacting pairs were affected by the different maze layouts, initially using more idiosyncratic description schemes for irregular mazes and more systematic schemes for regular mazes. Interacting pairs, but not individuals, abandoned their unsystematic initial descriptions in favor of a more systematic approach, which was better adapted for repeated interaction. Our results show communicative conventions are initially shaped by context, but interaction opens up the possibility for change if better alternatives are available.

Language experience modulates bilingual language control: The effect of proficiency, age of acquisition, and exposure on language switching.

The ability to selectively access two languages characterises the bilingual everyday experience. Previous studies showed the role of second language (L2) proficiency, as a proxy for dominance, on language control. However, the role of other aspects of the bilingual experience - such as age of acquisition and daily exposure - are relatively unexplored. In this study, we used a cued language switching task to examine language switching and mixing in two groups of highly proficient bilinguals with different linguistic backgrounds, to understand how the ability to control languages is shaped by linguistic experience. Our analysis shows that the ability to switch between languages is not only modulated by L2 proficiency, but also by daily L2 exposure. Daily L2 exposure also affects language mixing. Finally, L2 age of acquisition predicts naming latencies in the L2. Together, these findings show that language dominance is characterised by multiple aspects of the bilingual experience, which modulate language control.

Priming sentence comprehension in aphasia: Effects of lexically independent and specific structural priming.

PURPOSE: Impaired message-structure mapping results in deficits in both sentence production and comprehension in aphasia. Structural priming has been shown to facilitate syntactic production for persons with aphasia (PWA). However, it remains unknown if structural priming is also effective in sentence comprehension. We examined if PWA show preserved and lasting structural priming effects during interpretation of syntactically ambiguous sentences and if the priming effects occur independently of or in conjunction with lexical (verb) information. METHODS: Eighteen PWA and 20 healthy older adults (HOA) completed a written sentence-picture matching task involving the interpretation of prepositional phrases (PP; the chef is poking the solider with an umbrella) that were ambiguous between high (verb modifier) and low attachment (object noun modifier). Only one interpretation was possible for prime sentences, while both interpretations were possible for target sentences. In Experiment 1, the target was presented immediately after the prime (0-lag). In Experiment 2, two filler items intervened between the prime and the target (2-lag). Within each experiment, the verb was repeated for half of the prime-target pairs, while different verbs were used for the other half. Participants' off-line picture matching choices and response times were measured. RESULTS: After reading a prime sentence with a particular interpretation, HOA and PWA tended to interpret an ambiguous PP in a target sentence in the same way and with faster response times. Importantly, both groups continued to show this priming effect over a lag (Experiment 2), although the effect was not as reliable in response times. However, neither group showed lexical (verb-specific) boost on priming, deviating from robust lexical boost seen in the young adults of prior studies. CONCLUSIONS: PWA demonstrate abstract (lexically-independent) structural priming in the absence of a lexically-specific boost. Abstract priming is preserved in aphasia, effectively facilitating not only immediate but also longer-lasting structure-message mapping during sentence comprehension.

Does language similarity affect representational integration?

Previous studies have suggested that multilingual speakers do not represent their languages entirely separately but instead share some representations across languages. To determine whether sharing is affected by language similarity, we investigated whether participants' tendency to repeat syntax across languages was affected by language similarity. In three cross-linguistic structural priming experiments, trilingual Mandarin-Cantonese-English participants heard a sentence in Cantonese or English (which they matched to a picture) and then described a dative event in Mandarin. When prime and target sentences involved different actions (Experiment 1), structural priming was unaffected by language similarity. But when prime and target involved the same action (Experiments 2 and 3), priming was stronger between related languages (i.e., Cantonese to Mandarin) than unrelated languages (i.e., English to Mandarin). Similar languages are not more integrated than dissimilar languages overall, but the representations that connect lexical and syntactic information are more closely integrated.

Visual deficits in developmental dyslexia: relationships between non-linguistic visual tasks and their contribution to components of reading.

Developmental dyslexia is often characterized by a visual deficit, but the nature of this impairment and how it relates to reading ability is disputed (Brain 2003; 126: 841-865). In order to investigate this issue, we compared groups of adults with and without dyslexia on the Ternus, visual-search and symbols tasks. Dyslexic readers yielded more errors on the visual-search and symbols tasks compared with non-dyslexic readers. A positive correlation between visual-search and symbols task performance suggests a common mechanism shared by these tasks. Performance on the visual-search and symbols tasks also correlated with non-word reading and rapid automatized naming measures, and visual search contributed independent variance to non-word reading. The Ternus task did not discriminate reading groups nor contributed significant variance to reading measures. We consider how visual-attention processes might underlie specific component reading measures.