The effects of age and verbal ability on word predictability in reading.

Increased predictability effects in older compared to younger adults have been mostly observed in late eye-movement measures during reading. However, it is unclear whether and how these effects may be related to verbal ability, which typically improves with age. Past studies have shown that verbal abilities modulate the predictability effect. Here, we aimed to replicate predictability effects in younger and older adults in a sentence reading paradigm and to investigate how verbal ability modulates the predictability effect. We monitored 26 younger and 27 older adults' eye movements as they read sentences with target words varying in predictability and examined the impact of age and verbal ability, as reflected in vocabulary and print exposure measures. Replicating previous studies, we found that older adults relied more heavily on contextual information in their anticipation of upcoming input in one late measure. In one early measure (first-fixation duration), participants with higher scores in verbal ability showed greater predictability effects, whereas the predictability effect was virtually absent in those with low scores. In one late measure (regression-path duration), age interacted with predictability. However, verbal ability, when included as a covariate in this model, could not account for the age-related increases in predictability effects. Collectively, our findings indicate that verbal ability influences predictability effects in early processing stages, suggesting facilitation of initial word processing and that some aspect of aging other than verbal ability influences predictability effects in late measures. The latter finding most likely reflects a shift toward integrative controlled processes with age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Individual Differences in Verb Bias Sensitivity in Children and Adults With Developmental Language Disorder.

A number of experiments support the hypothetical utility of statistical information for language learning and processing among both children and adults. However, tasks in these studies are often very general, and only a few include populations with developmental language disorder (DLD). We wanted to determine whether a stronger relationship might be shown when the measure of statistical learning is chosen for its relevance to the language task when including a substantial number of participants with DLD. The language ability we measured was sensitivity to verb bias - the likelihood of a verb to appear with a certain argument or interpretation. A previous study showed adults with DLD were less sensitive to verb bias than their typical peers. Verb bias sensitivity had not yet been tested in children with DLD. In Study 1, 49 children, ages 7-9 years, 17 of whom were classified as having DLD, completed a task designed to measure sensitivity to verb bias through implicit and explicit measures. We found children with and without DLD showed sensitivity to verb bias in implicit but not explicit measures, with no differences between groups. In Study 2, we used a multiverse approach to investigate whether individual differences in statistical learning predicted verb bias sensitivity in these participants as well as in a dataset of adult participants. Our analysis revealed no evidence of a relationship between statistical learning and verb bias sensitivity in children, which was not unexpected given we found no group differences in Study 1. Statistical learning predicted sensitivity to verb bias as measured through explicit measures in adults, though results were not robust. These findings suggest that verb bias may still be relatively unstable in school age children, and thus may not play the same role in sentence processing in children as in adults. It would also seem that individuals with DLD may not be using the same mechanisms during processing as their typically developing (TD) peers in adulthood. Thus, statistical information may differ in relevance for language processing in individuals with and without DLD.

Deficits in the Use of Verb Bias Information in Real-Time Processing by College Students With Developmental Language Disorder.

Purpose This study examined whether college students with developmental language disorder (DLD) showed similar sensitivity to verb bias information during real-time sentence processing as typically developing (TD) peers. Method Seventeen college students with DLD and 16 TD college students participated in a mouse-tracking experiment that utilized the visual world paradigm to examine real-time sentence processing. In experimental trials, participants chose 1 of 2 pictured interpretations of a sentence. Measures of interest were the choice of interpretation and the amount of competition from the unchosen picture as measured by mouse curvature. Results Choice of interpretation and mouse movements by college students with DLD suggested less sensitivity to verb bias information than their TD peers. Conclusion College students with DLD showed less evidence of sensitivity to verb bias information than their TD peers in this task. Their performance may reflect the use of compensatory processing strategies and may be related to poor comprehension abilities often observed in this population.

Lexical prediction in the aging brain: The effects of predictiveness and congruency on the N400 ERP component.

Although the N400 ERP component has been extensively studied in younger adults, the underlying mechanisms are still unclear. In older adults, N400 ERP studies have shown less efficient use of context compared to younger adults. Here, we asked whether the mechanisms underlying the N400 effect are the same in terms of predictiveness and congruency in younger and older adults. We used a simple picture-word matching task in which we crossed predictiveness and congruency. Our results indicate a three-way interaction between predictiveness, congruency, and age, in that, younger adults showed an N400 effect only in strongly constrained conditions; whereas, older adults showed an effect in both strongly- and weakly constrained conditions. This interaction was not modulated by language experience or cognitive decline. Our results support either two separate mechanisms (lexical access and integration) that run in parallel and are modulated by age or a common prediction error mechanism that changes with age.

Individual and Developmental Differences in Distributional Learning.

Purpose: This study examined whether children and adults with developmental language disorder (DLD) could use distributional information in an artificial language to learn about grammatical category membership similarly to their typically developing (TD) peers and whether developmental differences existed within and between DLD and TD groups. Method: Sixteen children ages 7-9 with DLD, 26 age-matched TD children, 17 college students with DLD, and 17 TD college students participated in this task. We used an artificial grammar learning paradigm in which participants had to use knowledge of category membership to determine the acceptability of test items that they had not heard during a training phase. Results: Individuals with DLD performed similarly to TD peers in distinguishing grammatical from ungrammatical combinations, with no differences between age groups. The order in which items were heard at test differentially affected child versus adult participants and showed a relation with attention and phonological working memory as well. Conclusion: Differences in ratings between grammatical and ungrammatical items in this task suggest that individuals with DLD can form grammatical categories from novel input and more broadly use distributional information. Differences in order effects suggest a developmental timeline for sensitivity to updating distributional information.

Dynamic competition account of men's perceptions of women's sexual interest.

This work applies a dynamic competition framework of decision making to the domain of sexual perception, which is linked theoretically and empirically to college men's risk for exhibiting sexual coercion and aggression toward female acquaintances. Within a mouse-tracking paradigm, 152 undergraduate men viewed full-body photographs of women who varied in affect (sexual interest or rejection), clothing style (provocative or conservative), and attractiveness, and decided whether each woman currently felt sexually interested or rejecting. Participants' mouse movements were recorded to capture competition dynamics during online processing (throughout the decisional process), and as an index of the final categorical decision (endpoint of the decisional process). Participants completed a measure of Rape-Supportive Attitudes (RSA), a well-established correlate of male-initiated sexual aggression toward female acquaintances. Mixed-effects analyses revealed greater curvature toward the incorrect response on conceptually incongruent trials (e.g., rejecting and dressed provocatively) than on congruent trials (e.g., rejecting and dressed conservatively). This suggests that the two decision alternatives are simultaneously active and compete continuously over time, consistent with a dynamic competition account. Congruence effects also emerged at the decisional endpoint; accuracy was typically lower when stimulus features were incongruent, rather than congruent. RSA potentiated online congruence effects (intermediate states of behavior) but not offline congruence effects (endpoint states of behavior). In a hierarchical regression analysis, online processing indices accounted for unique variability in RSA above and beyond offline accuracy rates. The process-based account of men's sexual-interest judgments ultimately may point to novel targets for prevention strategies designed to reduce acquaintance-initiated sexual aggression on college campuses.

Reaching into response selection: Stimulus and response similarity influence central operations.

To behave adaptively in complex and dynamic environments, one must link perception and action to satisfy internal states, a process known as response selection (RS). A largely unexplored topic in the study of RS is how interstimulus and interresponse similarity affect performance. To examine this issue, we manipulated stimulus similarity by using colors that were either similar or dissimilar and manipulated response similarity by having participants move a mouse cursor to locations that were either close together or far apart. Stimulus and response similarity produced an interaction such that the mouse trajectory showed the greatest curvature when both were similar, a result obtained under task conditions emphasizing speed and conditions emphasizing accuracy. These findings are inconsistent with symbolic look-up accounts of RS but are consistent with central codes incorporating metrical properties of both stimuli and responses. (PsycINFO Database Record

Reading span task performance, linguistic experience, and the processing of unexpected syntactic events.

Accounts of individual differences in online language processing ability often focus on the explanatory utility of verbal working memory, as measured by reading span tasks. Although variability in reading span task performance likely reflects individual differences in multiple underlying traits, skills, and processes, accumulating evidence suggests that reading span scores also reflect variability in the linguistic experiences of an individual. Here, through an individual differences approach, we first demonstrate that reading span scores correlate significantly with measures of the amount of experience an individual has had with written language (gauged by measures that provide "proxy estimates" of print exposure). We then explore the relationship between reading span scores and online language processing ability. Individuals with higher reading spans demonstrated greater sensitivity to violations of statistical regularities found in natural language-as evinced by higher reading times (RTs) on the disambiguating region of garden-path sentences-relative to their lower span counterparts. This result held after statistically controlling for individual differences in a non-linguistic operation span task. Taken together, these results suggest that accounts of individual differences in sentence processing can benefit from a stronger focus on experiential factors, especially when considered in relation to variability in perceptual and learning abilities that influence the amount of benefit gleaned from such experience.

Form-to-expectation matching effects on first-pass eye movement measures during reading.

Recent Electroencephalography/Magnetoencephalography (EEG/MEG) studies suggest that when contextual information is highly predictive of some property of a linguistic signal, expectations generated from context can be translated into surprisingly low-level estimates of the physical form-based properties likely to occur in subsequent portions of the unfolding signal. Whether form-based expectations are generated and assessed during natural reading, however, remains unclear. We monitored eye movements while participants read phonologically typical and atypical nouns in noun-predictive contexts (Experiment 1), demonstrating that when a noun is strongly expected, fixation durations on first-pass eye movement measures, including first fixation duration, gaze duration, and go-past times, are shorter for nouns with category typical form-based features. In Experiments 2 and 3, typical and atypical nouns were placed in sentential contexts normed to create expectations of variable strength for a noun. Context and typicality interacted significantly at gaze duration. These results suggest that during reading, form-based expectations that are translated from higher-level category-based expectancies can facilitate the processing of a word in context, and that their effect on lexical processing is graded based on the strength of category expectancy.

Rapid Expectation Adaptation during Syntactic Comprehension.

When we read or listen to language, we are faced with the challenge of inferring intended messages from noisy input. This challenge is exacerbated by considerable variability between and within speakers. Focusing on syntactic processing (parsing), we test the hypothesis that language comprehenders rapidly adapt to the syntactic statistics of novel linguistic environments (e.g., speakers or genres). Two self-paced reading experiments investigate changes in readers' syntactic expectations based on repeated exposure to sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguities (so-called "garden path sentences"). These sentences typically lead to a clear expectation violation signature when the temporary ambiguity is resolved to an a priori less expected structure (e.g., based on the statistics of the lexical context). We find that comprehenders rapidly adapt their syntactic expectations to converge towards the local statistics of novel environments. Specifically, repeated exposure to a priori unexpected structures can reduce, and even completely undo, their processing disadvantage (Experiment 1). The opposite is also observed: a priori expected structures become less expected (even eliciting garden paths) in environments where they are hardly ever observed (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that, when changes in syntactic statistics are to be expected (e.g., when entering a novel environment), comprehenders can rapidly adapt their expectations, thereby overcoming the processing disadvantage that mistaken expectations would otherwise cause. Our findings take a step towards unifying insights from research in expectation-based models of language processing, syntactic priming, and statistical learning.

Prediction, explanation, and the role of generative models in language processing.

We propose, following Clark, that generative models also play a central role in the perception and interpretation of linguistic signals. The data explanation approach provides a rationale for the role of prediction in language processing and unifies a number of phenomena, including multiple-cue integration, adaptation effects, and cortical responses to violations of linguistic expectations.

Phonological typicality influences sentence processing in predictive contexts: reply to Staub, Grant, Clifton, and Rayner (2009).

In 2 separate self-paced reading experiments, Farmer, Christiansen, and Monaghan (2006) found that the degree to which a word's phonology is typical of other words in its lexical category influences online processing of nouns and verbs in predictive contexts. Staub, Grant, Clifton, and Rayner (2009) failed to find an effect of phonological typicality when they combined stimuli from the separate experiments into a single experiment. We replicated Staub et al.'s experiment and found that the combination of stimulus sets affects the predictiveness of the syntactic context; this reduces the phonological typicality effect as the experiment proceeds, although the phonological typicality effect was still evident early in the experiment. Although an ambiguous context may diminish sensitivity to the probabilistic relationship between the sound of a word and its lexical category, phonological typicality does influence online sentence processing during normal reading when the syntactic context is predictive of the lexical category of upcoming words.

Hand in motion reveals mind in motion.

Recently, researchers have measured hand movements en route to choices on a screen to understand the dynamics of a broad range of psychological processes. We review this growing body of research and explain how manual action exposes the real-time unfolding of underlying cognitive processing. We describe how simple hand motions may be used to continuously index participants' tentative commitments to different choice alternatives during the evolution of a behavioral response. As such, hand-tracking can provide unusually high-fidelity, real-time motor traces of the mind. These motor traces cast novel theoretical and empirical light onto a wide range of phenomena and serve as a potential bridge between far-reaching areas of psychological science - from language, to high-level cognition and learning, to social cognitive processes.

Early occipital sensitivity to syntactic category is based on form typicality.

Syntactic factors can rapidly affect behavioral and neural responses during language processing; however, the mechanisms that allow this rapid extraction of syntactically relevant information remain poorly understood. We addressed this issue using magnetoencephalography and found that an unexpected word category (e.g., "The recently princess . . . ") elicits enhanced activity in visual cortex as early as 120 ms after exposure, and that this activity occurs as a function of the compatibility of a word's form with the form properties associated with a predicted word category. Because no sensitivity to linguistic factors has been previously reported for words in isolation at this stage of visual analysis, we propose that predictions about upcoming syntactic categories are translated into form-based estimates, which are made available to sensory cortices. This finding may be a key component to elucidating the mechanisms that allow the extreme rapidity and efficiency of language comprehension.

Gradiency and Visual Context in Syntactic Garden-Paths.

Through recording the streaming x, y coordinates of computer-mouse movements, we report evidence that visual context provides an immediate constraint on the resolution of syntactic ambiguity in the visual-world paradigm. This finding converges with previous eye-tracking results that support a constraint-based account of sentence processing, in which multiple partially-active syntactic alternatives compete against one another with the help of not only syntactic, semantic, and statistical factors, but also nonlinguistic factors such as visual context. Eye-tracking results in the visual-world paradigm are consistent with theories that posit limited interaction between context and syntax, but they are still consistent with related theories that allow immediate interaction but require serial pursuit of syntactic structures, such as the unrestricted race model. To tease apart the constraint-based and unrestricted-race accounts of sentence processing, the distribution of computer-mouse trajectories was analyzed for evidence of two populations of trials: those where only the correct parse was pursued and those where only the incorrect parse was pursued. We found no evidence of bimodality in the distribution of trajectory curvatures. Simulations with a constraint-based model produced trajectories that matched the human data. A nonlinguistic control study demonstrated the mouse-tracking paradigm's ability to elicit bimodal distributions of trajectory curvatures in certain experimental conditions. With effects of context posing a challenge for syntax-first models, and the absence of bimodality in the distribution of garden-path magnitude posing a challenge for unrestricted-race models, these converging methods support the constraint-based theory's account that the reason diverse contextual factors are able to bias one or another parse at the point of ambiguity is because those syntactic alternatives are continually partially-active in parallel, not discretely winnowed.

Tracking the continuity of language comprehension: computer mouse trajectories suggest parallel syntactic processing.

Although several theories of online syntactic processing assume the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, the continuous and non-ballistic properties of computer mouse movements are exploited, by recording their streaming x, y coordinates to procure evidence regarding parallel versus serial processing. Participants heard structurally ambiguous sentences while viewing scenes with properties either supporting or not supporting the difficult modifier interpretation. The curvatures of the elicited trajectories revealed both an effect of visual context and graded competition between simultaneously active syntactic representations. The results are discussed in the context of 3 major groups of theories within the domain of sentence processing.

Phonological typicality influences on-line sentence comprehension.

Since Saussure, the relationship between the sound and the meaning of words has been regarded as largely arbitrary. Here, however, we show that a probabilistic relationship exists between the sound of a word and its lexical category. Corpus analyses of nouns and verbs indicate that the phonological properties of the individual words in these two lexical categories form relatively separate and coherent clusters, with some nouns sounding more typical of the noun category than others and likewise for verbs. Additional analyses reveal that the phonological properties of nouns and verbs affect lexical access, and we also demonstrate the influence of such properties during the on-line processing of both simple unambiguous and syntactically ambiguous sentences. Thus, although the sound of a word may not provide cues to its specific meaning, phonological typicality, the degree to which the sound properties of an individual word are typical of other words in its lexical category, affects both word- and sentence-level language processing. The findings are consistent with a perspective on language comprehension in which sensitivity to multiple syntactic constraints in adulthood emerges as a product of language-development processes that are driven by the integration of multiple cues to linguistic structure, including phonological typicality.