Authors:Knowlton; Tyler Zarushttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-8207-0656
,
Halberda, Justinhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-5619-3249
,
Pietroski, Paul
,
Lidz, Jeffreyhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-8829-1495 Abstract: Though each and every are both distributive universal quantifiers, a common theme in linguistic and psycholinguistic investigations into them has been that each is somehow more individualistic than every. We offer a novel explanation for this generalization: each has a first-order meaning which serves as an internalized instruction to cognition to build a thought that calls for representing the (restricted) domain as a series of individuals; by contrast, every has a second-order meaning which serves as an instruction to build a thought that calls for grouping the domain. In support of this view, we show that these distinct meanings invite the use of distinct verification strategies, using a novel paradigm. In two experiments, participants who had been asked to verify sentences like each/every circle is green were subsequently given a change detection task. Those who evaluated each-sentences were better able to detect the change,... PubDate: Thu, 14 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Pagmar; Davidhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-6665-7502
,
Arvidsson, Carolinehttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-5503-2657
,
Nilsson Gerholm, Tovehttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-7095-0525
,
Uddén, Juliahttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-6672-1298 Abstract: A language user must rely on several different abilities to carry out a conversation, e.g., the ability to acknowledge the conversational contributions of others, to respond appropriately, to stay on topic, etc. There are many aspects of the development of conversational conduct that are yet unknown. In this study, the longitudinal development of conversational conduct, as in acknowledging one's interlocutor's previous turn, was traced from age 5;0 to 7;2. We also investigated whether conversational conduct was predicted by core language skill, executive functions, and specific pragmatic abilities. Previous findings of productive morphosyntactic accuracy were replicated, while findings concerning longitudinal receptive vocabulary were not. We also found connections between children's conversational responses and executive functions, working memory, and the comprehension of conversational implicatures. The results suggest that conversational conduct is dependent on inferring... PubDate: Thu, 14 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Slim; Mieke Sarahhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-7494-2792
,
Lauwers, Peterhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-6495-8977
,
Hartsuiker, Roberthttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-3680-6765 Abstract: Language comprehension involves the derivation of the meaning of sentences by combining the meanings of their parts. In some cases, this can lead to ambiguity. A sentence like Every hiker climbed a hill allows two logical representations: One that specifies that every hiker climbed a different hill and one that specifies that every hiker climbed the same hill. The interpretations of such sentences can be primed: Exposure to a particular reading increases the likelihood that the same reading will be assigned to a subsequent similar sentence. Feiman and Snedeker (2016) observed that such priming is not modulated by overlap of the verb between prime and target. This indicates that mental logical representations specify the compositional structure of the sentence meaning without conceptual meaning content. We conducted a close replication of Feiman and Snedeker’s experiment in Dutch and found no verb-independent priming. Moreover, a comparison with a previous, within-verb... PubDate: Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Chromý; Janhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-6646-8026
,
Brand, James Liamhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-2853-9169
,
Laurinavichyute, Annahttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-3150-0206
,
Lacina, Radimhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-7534-6204 Abstract: Number agreement attraction in comprehension is a phenomenon that has been documented in various typologically diverse languages. This evidence has led to claims about the cross-linguistic uniformity of agreement attraction effects and its independence from the grammatical features of a particular language. However, recent research has shown that in Czech, number agreement attraction effects are either absent or negligible in size. This directly contradicts the cross-linguistic uniformity hypothesis. The current paper aims to further corroborate this finding and presents a direct experimental comparison of Czech and English. Two comparable self-paced reading experiments were conducted using stimuli that were translation equivalents in Czech and English. Our analyses demonstrate a preference for the null model in Czech (no agreement attraction), unlike in English, where an interaction between verb number and attractor number was preferred. Moreover, when we compare the data from... PubDate: Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Schmitz; Dominichttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0636-5249
,
Schneider, Viktoriahttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-0557-4658
,
Esser, Janinahttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-4298-9465 Abstract: Findings of previous behavioural studies suggest that the semantic nature of what is known as the ‘masculine generic’ in Modern Standard German is indeed not generic but biased towards a masculine reading. Such findings are the cause of debates within and outside linguistic research, as they run counter to the grammarian assumption that the masculine generic form is gender-neutral. The present paper aims to explore the semantics of masculine generics, relating them to those of masculine and feminine explicit counterparts. To achieve this aim, an approach novel to this area of linguistic research is made use of: discriminative learning. Analysing semantic vectors obtained via naive discriminative learning, semantic measures calculated via linear ... PubDate: Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Valenzuela; Javierhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-0007-7943
,
Alcaraz-Carrión, Danielhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-5325-431X Abstract: There is great deal of evidence, both linguistic and psycholinguistic, that time is structured with the help of space. This relationship has also been found in gesture studies: the gestures produced when uttering temporal expressions exhibit very clear and structured spatial properties. The question that remains, though, is whether these co-speech spatial gestures accompanying temporal expressions are the same as the spatial gestures produced with spatial expressions. Do we produce spatial gestures more frequently when uttering purely spatial expressions than when we are using temporal expressions' Are the characteristics of those spatial gestures equivalent in terms of parameters such as axis or directionality' What do these similarities or differences tell us about the use of space in time' The present study examines one grammatical construction (From X to Y) which can be used both for space and for time, and examines the gestural patterns associated with each of these different... PubDate: Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Tibblin; Juliahttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-5029-6485
,
Granfeldt, Jonashttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-5708-9689
,
van de Weijer, Joosthttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-9843-3143
,
Gygax, Pascalhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-4151-8255 Abstract: Despite the increased use of different types of gender-fair forms in French, studies investigating how they are interpreted when presented in a sentence remain few. To fill this gap, we conducted a pre-registered study using a timed sentence evaluation task to examine the possibility of speakers’ establishing an anaphoric relationship between a gendered anaphoric expression (femmes ‘women’ or hommes ‘men’) and non-stereotyped role nouns as antecedents. The antecedents were presented in their masculine form or in one out of three different gender-fair forms (complete double forms: les voisines et voisins ‘the neighbours.FEM and neighbours.MASC’, contracted double forms: les voisin·es ‘the neighbours.MASC·FEM’, or gender-neutral forms: le voisinage ‘the neighbourhood’). In line with previous findings, the masculine form led to a male bias in the participants’ mental representations of gender. All three examined... PubDate: Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Ambridge; Ben
,
Arnon, Inbal
,
Bekman, Dani Abstract: Several recent experimental studies have investigated the hypothesis that the passive construction is associated with the semantics “[B] (mapped onto the surface [passive] subject) is in a state or circumstance characterized by [A] (mapped onto the by-object or an understood argument) having acted upon it”. (Pinker, Lebeaux & Frost, 1987). In the present work, we extend this method to a new language, Hebrew, and conduct a Bayesian mixed-effects meta-analytic synthesis which draws together the findings of similar studies conducted for English, Indonesian, Mandarin and Balinese. For Hebrew, we found that native adult speakers’ (N=60) acceptability ratings for passives with each of 56 different verbs were significantly predicted by verb-semantic-affectedness ratings provided by a separate group of 16 native adult speakers. Both for Hebrew and across languages, we found that (a) these semantic-affectedness ratings predict verbs’ acceptability in both passive and non-passive constructions,... PubDate: Thu, 20 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Foppolo; Francescahttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-5044-7834
,
Mazzaggio, Gretahttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-8019-7066
,
Franco, Ludovicohttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-8261-4748
,
Manzini, Maria Ritahttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-5288-4210 Abstract: The present paper focuses on pseudopartitive constructions headed by quantifier, collective, or container nouns (like a lot of senators, a group of students, a bottle of pills) followed by a singular or a plural verb. We compared these structures with superficially similar adnominal structures of the form NP1[−PL] prep NP2[PL] (e.g., the level of the lakes is/are) in Italian in an acceptability judgment study (Experiment 1), a forced-choice task (Experiment 2), and an eye tracking reading study (Experiment 3). Two major findings were consistent across all studies. First, verb agreement in pseudopartitives always patterned differently from controls. Second, albeit an overall preference for singular verbs was observed, a gradient difference emerged between adnominal controls and pseudopartitives, and among pseudopartitives headed by different nouns. We explain such variability in terms of the availability of a measure interpretation (e.g., pills... PubDate: Thu, 20 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Mertzen; Danielahttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-4471-9255
,
Paape, Dariohttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-7148-5258
,
Dillon, Brianhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-3574-3889
,
Engbert, Ralfhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-2909-5811
,
Vasishth, Shravanhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-2027-1994
,
Vasishth, Shravanhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-2027-1994 Abstract: A long-standing debate in the sentence processing literature concerns the time course of syntactic and semantic information processing in online sentence comprehension. The default assumption in cue-based models of parsing is that syntactic and semantic retrieval cues simultaneously guide dependency resolution. When retrieval cues match multiple items in memory, this leads to similarity-based interference. Both semantic and syntactic interference have been shown to occur in English. However, the relative timing of syntactic vs. semantic interference remains unclear. In this cross-linguistic investigation of the time course of syntactic vs. semantic interference, the data from two eye-tracking during reading experiments (English and German) suggest that the two types of interference can in principle arise simultaneously during retrieval. However, the data also indicate that semantic cues are evaluated with a small timing lag in German compared to English. This cross-linguistic... PubDate: Thu, 1 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000
Authors:Beltrama; Andreahttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-0643-2424
,
Papafragou, Annahttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-5435-1058 Abstract: Listeners systematically extract two types of information from linguistic utterances: information about the world, and information about the speaker – i.e., their social background and personality. While both varieties of content have been widely investigated across different approaches to the study of language, research in pragmatics has mostly focused on the former kind. Here we ask how listeners reason about a speaker’s conversational choices to form an impression about their personality. In three experiments, we show that a speaker’s adherence to, or violation of, the pragmatic principles of Relevance and Informativeness, as well as the reasons underlying these violations, affect the evaluation of the speaker’s personality along the core social dimensions of Warmth and Competence. These findings highlight the value of enriching work in pragmatics with insights from sociolinguistics and social psychology about how people reason about human speech to draw inferences about... PubDate: Fri, 26 May 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Boyce; Veronicahttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-8890-2775
,
Levy, Rogerhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-4493-8864 Abstract: Behavioral measures of word-by-word reading time provide experimental evidence to test theories of language processing. A-maze is a recent method for measuring incremental sentence processing that can localize slowdowns related to syntactic ambiguities in individual sentences. We adapted A-maze for use on longer passages and tested it on the Natural Stories corpus. Participants were able to comprehend these longer text passages that they read via the Maze task. Moreover, the Maze task yielded useable reaction time data with word predictability effects that were linearly related to surprisal, the same pattern found with other incremental methods. Crucially, Maze reaction times show a tight relationship with properties of the current word, with little spillover of effects from previous words. This superior localization is an advantage of Maze compared with other methods. Overall, we expanded the scope of experimental materials, and thus theoretical questions, that can be studied... PubDate: Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Kobrock; Kristinahttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-1635-157X
,
Roettger, Timo B.https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1400-2739 Abstract: Replications are an integral part of cumulative experimental science. Yet many scientific disciplines do not replicate much because novel confirmatory findings are valued over direct replications. To provide a systematic assessment of the replication landscape in experimental linguistics, the present study estimated replication rates for over 50,000 articles across 98 journals. We used automatic string matching using the Web of Science combined with in-depth manual inspections of 274 papers. The median rate of mentioning the search string “replicat*” was as low as 1.7%. Subsequent manual analyses of articles containing the search string revealed that only 4% of these contained a direct replication, i.e., a study that aims to arrive at the same scientific conclusions as an initial study by using exactly the same methodology. Less than half of these direct replications were performed by independent researchers. Thus our data suggest that only 1 in 1250 experimental linguistic... PubDate: Thu, 30 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Lyu; Jun
,
Kaiser, Elsi Abstract: This study investigates the real-time processing of Chinese reflexives ziji and ta-ziji in discourse when multiple constraints are involved. Our primary goal is to examine the time course of syntactic and non-syntactic constraints in reflexive resolution. The Syntactic Filter Hypothesis argues that syntactic cues are prioritized at the early stages of processing, in contrast to the Multiple Constraints Hypothesis which posits that at this stage all streams of information can be recruited. The results of two self-paced reading experiments show that in neutral contexts where no antecedent is discourse-prominent, syntactic locality and verb semantics immediately impact real-time processing of ziji and ta-ziji. Crucially, participants’ processing patterns are also influenced at an early stage by the discourse topical status of the non-local antecedents. Overall, these findings suggest that syntax, verb semantics, and discourse prominence all play important... PubDate: Thu, 2 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000
Authors:Schertz; Jessamyn Abstract: This work tests the relative role of perception- and production-based predictors, and the relationship between them, in imitation of artificial accents varying in voice onset time (VOT), using a paradigm designed to target distinct sub-processes of imitation. We examined how explicit imitation of sentences differing systematically in voice onset time (VOT) was influenced by the type of VOT manipulation (lengthened vs. shortened) and by the presence vs. absence of voice-related variability in exposure. In contrast to previous work, participants imitated shortened as well as lengthened VOT, albeit with both qualitative and quantitative differences across the two manipulation types. The presence of voice-related variability inhibited imitation, but this inhibition was mitigated by a preceding session with no voice-related variability (i.e., sentences were acoustically identical except for VOT). We then tested the extent to which individual performance on the accent imitation task... PubDate: Thu, 2 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000
Authors:Duff; John
,
Anand, Pranav
,
Brasoveanu, Adrian
,
Rysling, Amanda Abstract: Studies on the reading of appositive relative clauses (ARCs) have found that ARCs seem to exhibit less influence in later parsing and decision-making than similar constructions (Dillon et al. 2014, 2017), a pattern we call discounting. Existing accounts often link discounting to the status of ARCs as independent segments in systems of pragmatic representation. This would predict discounting for other constructions as well. In this study, we test that prediction by investigating the reading of direct discourse speech reports and causal adjuncts in English. Diagnostics supplied by the theoretical literature show that these constructions contribute the same independent segments as ARCs in two different systems of pragmatic organization: direct discourse reports contribute an independent speech act, and causal adjuncts contribute their own discourse units. Nevertheless, in a series of five experiments, we find no evidence of ARC-like discounting for either. We conclude that... PubDate: Thu, 23 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Cremers; Alexandre
,
Fricke, Lea
,
Onea, Edgar Abstract: Truth-value judgments are one of the most common measures in experimental semantics and pragmatics, yet there is no standardized way to elicit such judgments. Despite anecdotal remarks on how proper choice of prompts or response options could help disentangle pragmatic from semantic effects, little is known regarding the relation between parameters of the task and what it actually measures. We tested a range of prompts and two response options for their sensitivity to truth of the target sentence, prior evidence, and the interaction between these two factors. We found that participants attribute high value to true statements, even when they are not backed by evidence. Moreover, our results confirm that prompts vary wildly in their sensitivity to pragmatic factors, and should allow researchers to make an informed choice depending on what they want to test. There was no difference between the results generated by the response options, although the Likert... PubDate: Thu, 23 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Politzer-Ahles; Stephen
,
Pan, Lei
,
Lin, Jueyao
,
Lee, Ka Keung Abstract: The present study tested whether listeners hearing one form of a morpheme activate other forms of the same morpheme. Listeners performed lexical decisions while hearing Mandarin monosyllables; crucially, critical targets could be primed by related syllables that occurred 18–52 trials earlier (long-lag priming). The use of long-lag priming ensures that any facilitation effects are due to morphological relatedness and not to semantic or form relationships, which do not prime lexical decisions at long lags. Across three experiments (total N = 458), we consistently found that lexical decisions were primed when the same pronunciation of a morpheme occurred as prime and target (e.g., shiL – shiL) but were not primed when two different variants of the same morpheme occurred as prime and target (e.g., shiR – shiL, where both of these syllables are potential pronunciations of the same morpheme). In other words, we observed identity... PubDate: Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Schwab; Juliane Abstract: The illusory licensing of negative polarity items has been an insightful phenomenon for accounts of human sentence processing, as its extreme selectivity has proven problematic to explain in terms of parsing principles that underlie the establishment of other item-to-item dependencies. Using speeded acceptability judgments, I provide novel experimental evidence that the NPI illusion may be restricted to a particular type of NPI—illusory licensing was replicated for German jemals 'ever', but was not confirmed for the attenuating NPI so recht 'really'. I argue that this finding challenges all current accounts of the NPI illusion, and propose an explanation that purports an interaction between a scalar NPI licensing mechanism and scalar properties of the illusory licensing context as the source of the NPI illusion. PubDate: Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Bader; Markus
,
Meng, Michael Abstract: Prior research has shown that sentences with noncanonical argument order (e.g., patient-before- agent instead of agent-before-patient order) are associated with additional online processing difficulty, but that this difficulty can be alleviated if the discourse context licenses noncanonical order. Other studies demonstrated that noncanonical sentences are prone to misinterpretation effects: comprehenders sometimes seem to form interpretations with incorrect assignments of semantic roles to argument NPs. However, those studies tested noncanonical sentences in isolation. To further clarify the source of misinterpretation effects, we designed three experiments that investigated how discourse properties licensing noncanonical order affect online processing and final interpretation. All experiments tested unambiguous active declarative sentences in German with agentive verbs and two arguments, probing both online processing difficulty (using selfpaced reading)... PubDate: Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +000
Authors:Giskes; Anna
,
Kush, Dave Abstract: When comprehenders predict a specific lexical noun in a highly constraining context, they also activate the grammatical features, such as gender, of that noun. Evidence for such lexically mediated prediction comes from ERP studies that show that comprehenders are surprised by adjectives and determiners that mismatch the features of a highly predictable noun. In this study, we investigated whether comprehenders can (i) predict an abstract noun phrase in an upcoming argument position (without pre-activating a specific lexical item) and (ii) assign morphosyntactic features to the head noun of that phrase. To do so we used the processing of Dutch cataphors as a test case. We tested whether seeing a cataphor in a preposed clause triggered a prediction of a feature-matching antecedent NP in main subject position. If comprehenders predicted a feature-matching subject, we reasoned that they should also expect an agreeing main verb, which comes before the subject because Dutch is a... PubDate: Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +000
Open Access journal
