Processing Control Information in a Nominal Control Construction: An Eye-Tracking Study.

In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined the processing of the nominal control construction. Participants' eye-movements were monitored while they read sentences that included either giver control nominals (e.g. promise in Luke's promise to Sophia to photograph himself) or recipient control nominals (e.g. plea in Luke's plea to Sophia to photograph herself). In order to examine both the initial access of control information, and its later use in on-line processing, we combined a manipulation of nominal control with a gender match/mismatch paradigm. Results showed that there was evidence of processing difficulty for giver control sentences (relative to recipient control sentences) at the point where the control dependency was initially created, suggesting that control information was accessed during the early parsing stages. This effect is attributed to a recency preference in the formation of control dependencies; the parser prefers to assign a recent antecedent to PRO. In addition, readers slowed down after reading a reflexive pronoun that mismatched with the gender of the antecedent indicated by the control nominal (e.g. Luke's promise to Sophia to photograph herself). The mismatch cost suggests that control information of the nominal control construction was used to constrain dependency formation involving a controller, PRO and a reflexive, confirming the use of control information in on-line interpretation.

Selectivity in L1 Attrition: Differential Object Marking in Spanish Near-Native Speakers of English.

Previous research has shown L1 attrition to be restricted to structures at the interfaces between syntax and pragmatics, but not to occur with syntactic properties that do not involve such interfaces ('Interface Hypothesis', Sorace and Filiaci in Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second Lang Res 22: 339-368, 2006). The present study tested possible L1 attrition effects on a syntax-semantics interface structure [Differential Object Marking (DOM) using the Spanish personal preposition] as well as the effects of recent L1 re-exposure on the potential attrition of these structures, using offline and eye-tracking measures. Participants included a group of native Spanish speakers experiencing attrition ('attriters'), a second group of attriters exposed exclusively to Spanish before they were tested, and a control group of Spanish monolinguals. The eye-tracking results showed very early sensitivity to DOM violations, which was of an equal magnitude across all groups. The off-line results also showed an equal sensitivity across groups. These results reveal that structures involving 'internal' interfaces like the DOM do not undergo attrition either at the processing or representational level.

When social hierarchy matters grammatically: Investigation of the processing of honorifics in Korean.

Korean grammar encodes relative social hierarchies among interlocutors in various ways. This study utilized honorific subject-verb agreement in Korean to investigate how social hierarchies are processed during sentence comprehension. The experimental results showed that honorific violations elicited processing difficulties. The use of an honorific verb with an unhonorifiable subject resulted in lower naturalness ratings, longer reading times, and elicited a P600, similar to effects observed with number, person, and gender agreement in Spanish or English. These findings suggest that social hierarchies have become integrated into grammar, constraining how native Korean speakers process sentences. However, the agreement between honorific subjects and verbs seems asymmetrical; the mismatch effect was smaller or absent when an honorifiable subject was not accompanied by an honorific verb, suggesting that while an honorific verb requires an honorifiable subject, the reverse is not necessarily true. The results indicate that the -si agreement in Korean is a form of morpho-syntactic agreement, despite its asymmetrical nature.

The real-time status of strong and weak islands.

In two eye-tracking reading experiments, we used a variant of the filled gap technique to investigate how strong and weak islands are processed on a moment-to-moment basis during comprehension. Experiment 1 provided a conceptual replication of previous studies showing that real time processing is sensitive to strong islands. In the absence of an island, readers experienced processing difficulty when a pronoun appeared in a position of a predicted gap, but this difficulty was absent when the pronoun appeared inside a strong island. Experiment 2 showed an analogous effect for weak islands: a processing cost was seen for a pronoun in the position of a predicted gap in a that-complement clause, but this cost was absent in a matched whether clause, which constitutes a weak island configuration. Overall, our results are compatible with the claim that active dependency formation is suspended, or reduced, in both weak and strong island structures.

Structural priming across cognitive domains: from simple arithmetic to relative-clause attachment.

In the two experiments reported here, we uncovered evidence for shared structural representations between arithmetic and language. Specifically, we primed subjects using mathematical equations either with or without parenthetical groupings, such as 80 - (9 + 1) × 5 or 80 - 9 + 1 × 5, and then presented a target sentence fragment, such as "The tourist guide mentioned the bells of the church that . . .," which subjects had to complete. When the mathematical equations were solved correctly, their structure influenced the noun phrase--for example, either "the bells of the church" or "the church," respectively--that subjects chose to attach their sentence completion to. These experiments provide the first demonstration of cross-domain structural priming from mathematics to language. They highlight the importance of global structural representations at a very high level of abstraction and have potentially far-reaching implications regarding the domain generality of structural representations.

Readers detect an low-level phonological violation between two parafoveal words.

In two eye-tracking studies we investigated whether readers can detect a violation of the phonological-grammatical convention for the indefinite article an to be followed by a word beginning with a vowel when these two words appear in the parafovea. Across two experiments participants read sentences in which the word an was followed by a parafoveal preview that was either correct (e.g. Icelandic), incorrect and represented a phonological violation (e.g. Mongolian), or incorrect without representing a phonological violation (e.g. Ethiopian), with this parafoveal preview changing to the target word as participants made a saccade into the space preceding an. Our data suggests that participants detected the phonological violation while the target word was still two words to the right of fixation, with participants making more regressions from the previewed word and having longer go-past times on this word when they received a violation preview as opposed to a non-violation preview. We argue that participants were attempting to perform aspects of sentence integration on the basis of low-level orthographic information from the previewed word.

Capitalization interacts with syntactic complexity.

We investigated whether readers use the low-level cue of proper noun capitalization in the parafovea to infer syntactic category, and whether this results in an early update of the representation of a sentence's syntactic structure. Participants read sentences containing either a subject relative or object relative clause, in which the relative clause's overt argument was a proper noun (e.g., The tall lanky guard who alerted Charlie/Charlie alerted to the danger was young) across three experiments. In Experiment 1 these sentences were presented in normal sentence casing or entirely in upper case. In Experiment 2 participants received either valid or invalid parafoveal previews of the relative clause. In Experiment 3 participants viewed relative clauses in only normal conditions. We hypothesized that we would observe relative clause effects (i.e., inflated fixation times for object relative clauses) while readers were still fixated on the word who, if readers use capitalization to infer a parafoveal word's syntactic class. This would constitute a syntactic parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Furthermore, we hypothesized that this effect should be influenced by sentence casing in Experiment 1 (with no cue for syntactic category being available in upper case sentences) but not by parafoveal preview validity of the target words. We observed syntactic parafoveal-on-foveal effects in Experiment 1 and 3, and a Bayesian analysis of the combined data from all three experiments. These effects seemed to be influenced more by noun capitalization than lexical processing. We discuss our findings in relation to models of eye movement control and sentence processing theories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The activation of contextually predictable words in syntactically illegal positions.

We present an eye-tracking study testing a hypothesis emerging from several theories of prediction during language processing, whereby predictable words should be skipped more than unpredictable words even in syntactically illegal positions. Participants read sentences in which a target word became predictable by a certain point (e.g., "bone" is 92% predictable given, "The dog buried his. . ."), with the next word actually being an intensifier (e.g., "really"), which a noun cannot follow. The target noun remained predictable to appear later in the sentence. We used the boundary paradigm to present the predictable noun or an alternative unpredictable noun (e.g., "food") directly after the intensifier, until participants moved beyond the intensifier, at which point the noun changed to a syntactically legal word. Participants also read sentences in which predictable or unpredictable nouns appeared in syntactically legal positions. A Bayesian linear-mixed model suggested a 5.7% predictability effect on skipping of nouns in syntactically legal positions, and a 3.1% predictability effect on skipping of nouns in illegal positions. We discuss our findings in relation to theories of lexical prediction during reading.

Proximity and Same Case Marking Do Not Increase Attraction Effect in Comprehension: Evidence From Eye-Tracking Experiments in Korean.

Previous studies have suggested that during the on-line sentence processing, relevant memory representations are directly accessed based on cues at retrieval (McElree et al., 2003). Under this hypothesis, retrieval cues activate any memory representation with matching features, leading to the so-called attraction effect. This predicts that attraction effects would be modulated by memory representation of a distractor. Here, we investigated this possibility, focusing on two factors (i.e., proximity to the retrieval point and the number of matching features) that would affect representation of a distractor in three Korean eye-tracking experiments. We predicted that if memory representation of a distractor decays over time, a distractor close to a retrieval point would lead to stronger attraction effects. We also predicted that a distractor would be more likely to lead to interference when it shares a higher number of matching features with the retrieval cues of a dependency, relative to the target of the dependency, due to multiple direct accesses based on multiple matching cues. However, the results did not show evidence that proximity of a distractor to the retrieval point enhanced attraction effects. Likewise, there was no evidence that a greater number of matching cues of a distractor alone would trigger more mis-retrieval, in contrast to a previous finding that a greater number of mismatching cues of a licit antecedent in addition to a greater number of matching cues of a distractor did so (Parker and Phillips, 2017). On the other hand, the results suggested that a distractor marked with nominative case was more likely to be mis-retrieved as the subject of a verb, compared to a distractor marked with a dative case, suggesting that the subject grammatical role is a critical cue for a subject-verb agreement. These results are best compatible with the hypothesis that retrieval cues are weighted, possibly depending on the nature of the dependency that is currently processed.

Processing Information During Regressions: An Application of the Reverse Boundary-Change Paradigm.

Although 10-15% of eye-movements during reading are regressions, we still know little about the information that is processed during regressive episodes. Here, we report an eye-movement study that uses what we call the reverse boundary change technique to examine the processing of lexical-semantic information during regressions, and to establish the role of this information during recovery from processing difficulty. In the critical condition of the experiment, an initially implausible sentence (e.g., There was an old house that John had ridden when he was a boy) was rendered plausible by changing a context word (house) to a lexical neighbor (horse) using a gaze-contingent display change, at the point where the reader's gaze crossed an invisible boundary further on in the sentence. Due to the initial implausibility of the sentence, readers often launched regressions from the later part of the sentence. However, despite this initial processing difficulty, reading was facilitated, relative to a condition where the display change did not occur (i.e., the word house remained on screen throughout the trial). This result implies that the relevant lexical semantic information was processed during the regression, and was used to aid recovery from the initial processing difficulty.

Determining the end of a musical turn: Effects of tonal cues.

Successful duetting requires that musicians coordinate their performance with their partners. In the case of turn-taking in improvised performance they need to be able to predict their partner's turn-end in order to accurately time their own entries. Here we investigate the cues used for accurate turn-end prediction in musical improvisations, focusing on the role of tonal structure. In a response-time task, participants more accurately determined the endings of (tonal) jazz than (non-tonal) free improvisation turns. Moreover, for the jazz improvisations, removing low frequency information (<2100Hz) - and hence obscuring the pitch relationships conveying tonality - reduced response accuracy, but removing high frequency information (>2100Hz) had no effect. Neither form of filtering affected response accuracy in the free improvisation condition. We therefore argue that tonal cues aided prediction accuracy for the jazz improvisations compared to the free improvisations. We compare our results with those from related speech research (De Ruiter et al., 2006), to draw comparisons between the structural function of tonality and linguistic syntax.

Semantic re-interpretation and garden path recovery.

Participant's eye-movements were recorded while they read locally ambiguous sentences. Evidence for processing difficulty was found when the interpretation of the initially preferred misanalysis clashed with that of the globally correct analysis, demonstrating the persistence of the earlier interpretation. Processing difficulty associated with the syntactic reanalysis was largely localised to the disambiguating region, with difficulty due to semantic persistence occurring later. The results show that semantic persistence is not limited to extreme cases of parse failure, and can occur even when reanalysis is relatively straightforward.

Heroin-related attentional bias and monthly frequency of heroin use are positively associated in attenders of a harm reduction service.

The relationship between heroin-related attentional bias (AB) and a proxy for dependence severity (monthly frequency of heroin use-injecting or inhaling) was measured in individuals attending a heroin harm reduction service. A flicker change blindness paradigm was employed in which change detection latencies were measured to either a heroin-related or to a neutral change made to a stimulus array containing an equal number of heroin-related and neutral words. Individuals given the heroin-related change to detect showed a positive relationship between heroin-related AB and the proxy for dependence severity; those given the neutral change showed a negative relationship. Both findings complement each other--and are consistent with the sending of more attention to heroin-related stimuli than neutral, the more severe is the dependence.

Predicting semantic features in Chinese: Evidence from ERPs.

This article reports two ERP studies that exploited the classifier system of Mandarin Chinese to investigate semantic prediction. In Mandarin, in certain contexts, a noun has to be preceded by a classifier, which has to match the noun in semantically-defined features. In both experiments, an N400 effect was elicited in response to a classifier that mismatched an up-coming predictable noun, relative to a matching classifier. Among the mismatching classifiers, the N400 effect was graded, being smaller for classifiers that were semantically related to the predicted word, relative to classifiers that were semantically unrelated to the predicted word. Given that the classifier occurred before the predicted word, this result shows that fine-grained semantic features of nouns can be pre-activated in advance of bottom-up input. The studies thus extend previous findings based on a more restricted range of highly grammaticalized features such as gender or animacy in Indo-European languages (Szewczyk & Schriefers, 2013; Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, & Hagoort, 2005; Wicha, Bates, Moreno, & Kutas, 2003).

Incremental comprehension of pitch relationships in written music: Evidence from eye movements.

To investigate how proficient pianists comprehend pitch relationships in written music when they first encounter it we conducted two experiments in which proficient pianists' eyes were tracked while they read and played single-line melodies. In Experiment 1, participants played at their own speed; in Experiment 2 they played with an external metronome. The melodies were either congruent or anomalous, with the anomaly involving one bar being shifted in pitch to alter the implied harmonic structure (e.g., non-resolution of a dominant). In both experiments, anomaly led to rapid disruption in participants' eye-movements in terms of regressions from the target bar, indicating that pianists process written pitch relationships online. This is particularly striking because in musical sight-reading eye movement behaviour is constrained by the concurrent performance. Both experiments also showed that anomaly induced pupil dilation. Together these results indicate that proficient pianists rapidly integrate the music that they read into the prior context, and that anomalies in terms of pitch relationships lead to processing difficulty. These findings parallel those of text reading, suggesting that structural processing involves similar constraints across domains.

Attraction Effects in Honorific Agreement in Korean.

Previous studies have suggested that sentence processing is mediated by content-addressable direct retrieval processes (McElree, 2000; McElree et al., 2003). However, the memory retrieval processes may differ as a function of the type of dependency. For example, while many studies have reported facilitatory intrusion effects associated with a structurally illicit antecedent during the processing of subject-verb number or person agreement and negative polarity items (Pearlmutter et al., 1999; Xiang et al., 2009; Dillon et al., 2013), studies investigating reflexives have not found consistent evidence of intrusion effects (Parker et al., 2015; Sturt and Kwon, 2015; cf. Nicol and Swinney, 1989; Sturt, 2003). Similarly, the memory retrieval processes could be also sensitive to cross-linguistic differences (cf. Lago et al., 2015). We report one self-paced reading experiment and one eye-tracking experiment that examine the processing of subject-verb honorific agreement, a dependency that is different from those that have been studied to date, in Korean, a typologically different language from those previously studied. The overall results suggest that the retrieval processes underlying the processing of subject-verb honorific agreement in Korean are susceptible to facilitatory intrusion effects from a structurally illicit but feature-matching subject, with a pattern that is similar to subject-verb agreement in English. In addition, the attraction effect was not limited to the ungrammatical sentences but was also found in grammatical sentences. The clear attraction effect in the grammatical sentences suggest that the attraction effect does not solely arise as the result of an error-driven process (cf. Wagers et al., 2009), but is likely also to result from general mechanisms of retrieval processes of activating of potential items in memory (Vasishth et al., 2008).

Processing coordinated structures: incrementality and connectedness.

We recorded participants' eye movements while they read sentences containing verb-phrase coordination. Results showed evidence of immediate processing disruption when a reflexive pronoun embedded in the conjoined verb phrase mismatched the sentence subject. We argue that this result is incompatible with models of human parsing that employ only bottom-up parsing procedures, even when flexible constituency is employed. Models need to incorporate a mechanism similar to the adjoining operation in Tree-Adjoining Grammar, in which one structure is inserted into another.

Ambiguity resolution analysis in incremental parsing of natural language.

Incremental parsing gains its importance in natural language processing and psycholinguistics because of its cognitive plausibility. Modeling the associated cognitive data structures, and their dynamics, can lead to a better understanding of the human parser. In earlier work, we have introduced a recursive neural network (RNN) capable of performing syntactic ambiguity resolution in incremental parsing. In this paper, we report a systematic analysis of the behavior of the network that allows us to gain important insights about the kind of information that is exploited to resolve different forms of ambiguity. In attachment ambiguities, in which a new phrase can be attached at more than one point in the syntactic left context, we found that learning from examples allows us to predict the location of the attachment point with high accuracy, while the discrimination amongst alternative syntactic structures with the same attachment point is slightly better than making a decision purely based on frequencies. We also introduce several new ideas to enhance the architectural design, obtaining significant improvements of prediction accuracy, up to 25% error reduction on the same dataset used in previous work. Finally, we report large scale experiments on the entire Wall Street Journal section of the Penn Treebank. The best prediction accuracy of the model on this large dataset is 87.6%, a relative error reduction larger than 50% compared to previous results.

The processing of raising and nominal control: an eye-tracking study.

According to some views of sentence processing, the memory retrieval processes involved in dependency formation may differ as a function of the type of dependency involved. For example, using closely matched materials in a single experiment, Dillon et al. (2013) found evidence for retrieval interference in subject-verb agreement, but not in reflexive-antecedent agreement. We report four eye-tracking experiments that examine examine reflexive-antecedent dependencies, combined with raising (e.g., "John seemed to Tom to be kind to himself…"), or nominal control (e.g., "John's agreement with Tom to be kind to himself…"). We hypothesized that dependencies involving raising would (a) be processed more quickly, and (b) be less subject to retrieval interference, relative to those involving nominal control. This is due to the fact that the interpretation of raising is structurally constrained, while the interpretation of nominal control depends crucially on lexical properties of the control nominal. The results showed evidence of interference when the reflexive-antecedent dependency was mediated by raising or nominal control, but very little evidence that could be interpreted in terms of interference for direct reflexive-antecedent dependencies that did not involve raising or control. However, there was no evidence either for greater interference, or for quicker dependency formation, for raising than for nominal control.

Learning first-pass structural attachment preferences with dynamic grammars and recursive neural networks.

One of the central problems in the study of human language processing is ambiguity resolution: how do people resolve the extremely pervasive ambiguity of the language they encounter? One possible answer to this question is suggested by experience-based models, which claim that people typically resolve ambiguities in a way which has been successful in the past. In order to determine the course of action that has been "successful in the past" when faced with some ambiguity, it is necessary to generalize over past experience. In this paper, we will present a computational experience-based model, which learns to generalize over linguistic experience from exposure to syntactic structures in a corpus. The model is a hybrid system, which uses symbolic grammars to build and represent syntactic structures, and neural networks to rank these structures on the basis of its experience. We use a dynamic grammar, which provides a very tight correspondence between grammatical derivations and incremental processing, and recursive neural networks, which are able to deal with the complex hierarchical structures produced by the grammar. We demonstrate that the model reproduces a number of the structural preferences found in the experimental psycholinguistics literature, and also performs well on unrestricted text.