Gender dissimilarity between subject and object facilitates online-comprehension of agent–patient–relations in German: An eye-tracking study with 6- to 10-year-old monolingual children

We used eye-tracking to investigate if and when children show an incremental bias to assume that the first noun phrase in a sentence is the agent (first-NP-as-agent bias) while processing the meaning of English active and passive transitive sentences. We also investigated whether children can override this bias to successfully distinguish active from passive sentences, after processing the remainder of the sentence frame. For this second question we used eye-tracking (Study 1) and forced-choice pointing (Study 2). For both studies, we used a paradigm in which participants simultaneously saw two novel actions with reversed agent-patient relations while listening to active and passive sentences. We compared English-speaking 25-month-olds and 41-month-olds in between-subjects sentence structure conditions (Active Transitive Condition vs. Passive Condition). A permutation analysis found that both age groups showed a bias to incrementally map the first noun in a sentence onto an agent role. Regarding the second question, 25-month-olds showed some evidence of distinguishing the two structures in the eye-tracking study. However, this only reached significance very briefly and nearly 4800 ms after the onset of the second noun phrase. Moreover, 25-month-olds did not distinguish active from passive sentences in the forced choice pointing task. In contrast, the 41-month-old children clearly reanalysed their initial first-NP-as-agent bias to the extent that they distinguished between active and passive sentences both in the eye-tracking data and in the pointing task. The results are discussed in relation to the development of syntactic (re)parsing.

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Prominence of gender cues in the assignment of thematic roles in German

Applied Psycholinguistics ◽

10.1017/s014271641700008x ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 38 (5) ◽

pp. 1133-1172 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

YULIA ESAULOVA ◽

CHIARA REALI ◽

LISA VON STOCKHAUSEN

Keyword(s):

Eye Tracking ◽

Gender Bias ◽

Relative Clause ◽

Relative Clauses ◽

Situation Model ◽

Grammatical Gender ◽

Thematic Roles ◽

Opposite Pattern ◽

Subject And Object ◽

Feminine Role

ABSTRACTTwo eye-tracking experiments examined influences of grammatical and stereotypical gender cues on the assignment of thematic roles in German. Participants (N1 = 32, N2 = 40) read sentences with subject- and object-extracted relative clauses, where thematic agents and patients remained ambiguous until the end of the relative clause. The results reveal a linguistic gender bias: agent roles are assigned more easily to grammatically masculine than feminine role nouns and stereotypically neutral than female ones. The opposite pattern is observed in the assignment of patient roles for stereotypical but not grammatical gender. The findings are discussed within the framework of situation model theories as well as in constraint-based and similarity-based interference accounts, while gender is viewed as a dimension of prominence.

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Planning of active and passive voice in German

Proceedings of 11th International Conference of Experimental Linguistics ◽

10.36505/exling-2020/11/0043/000458 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Judith Schlenter ◽

Yulia Esaulova ◽

Elyesa Seidel ◽

Martina Penke

Keyword(s):

Eye Tracking ◽

Eye Gaze ◽

Passive Voice ◽

Case Marking ◽

Sentence Planning ◽

Subject And Object ◽

Active Sentence

This eye-tracking experiment investigated how morphological case affects German speakers’ descriptions of transitive events, specifically whether explicit case marking modulates speakers’ structural choices. To increase the production of non-canonical structures (passive, patient-initial active), we primed patients in event scenes with a red dot. Subject and object case in German are unambiguously marked on masculine nouns but not on feminine nouns. If explicit case marking requires more structural planning, we should find an effect of gender. For feminine nouns, speakers may start with the cued patient and continue with a passive or a patient-initial active sentence. However, analyses of syntactic choice, speech onset times and eye gaze revealed that gender and thus case marking had no effect on sentence planning

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An Eye-Tracking Study on Audiovisual Speech Perception Strategies Adopted by Normal-Hearing and Deaf Adults Under Different Language Familiarities

Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research ◽

10.1044/2020_jslhr-19-00223 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 63 (7) ◽

pp. 2245-2254 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jianrong Wang ◽

Yumeng Zhu ◽

Yu Chen ◽

Abdilbar Mamat ◽

Mei Yu ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Speech Perception ◽

Eye Tracking ◽

Normal Hearing ◽

Audiovisual Speech ◽

Audiovisual Speech Perception ◽

Allocation Pattern ◽

Deaf Adults ◽

Bilingual Speaker ◽

Primary Hypothesis ◽

Standard Chinese

Purpose The primary purpose of this study was to explore the audiovisual speech perception strategies.80.23.47 adopted by normal-hearing and deaf people in processing familiar and unfamiliar languages. Our primary hypothesis was that they would adopt different perception strategies due to different sensory experiences at an early age, limitations of the physical device, and the developmental gap of language, and others. Method Thirty normal-hearing adults and 33 prelingually deaf adults participated in the study. They were asked to perform judgment and listening tasks while watching videos of a Uygur–Mandarin bilingual speaker in a familiar language (Standard Chinese) or an unfamiliar language (Modern Uygur) while their eye movements were recorded by eye-tracking technology. Results Task had a slight influence on the distribution of selective attention, whereas subject and language had significant influences. To be specific, the normal-hearing and the d10eaf participants mainly gazed at the speaker's eyes and mouth, respectively, in the experiment; moreover, while the normal-hearing participants had to stare longer at the speaker's mouth when they confronted with the unfamiliar language Modern Uygur, the deaf participant did not change their attention allocation pattern when perceiving the two languages. Conclusions Normal-hearing and deaf adults adopt different audiovisual speech perception strategies: Normal-hearing adults mainly look at the eyes, and deaf adults mainly look at the mouth. Additionally, language and task can also modulate the speech perception strategy.

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Activation and Persistence of Implicit Causality Information in Spoken Language Comprehension

Experimental Psychology (formerly Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie) ◽

10.1027/1618-3169/a000002 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 57 (1) ◽

pp. 5-16 ◽

Cited By ~ 46

Author(s):

Pirita Pyykkönen ◽

Juhani Järvikivi

Keyword(s):

Eye Tracking ◽

Language Comprehension ◽

Spoken Language ◽

Visual World ◽

Implicit Causality ◽

Causality Information ◽

Spoken Language Comprehension

A visual world eye-tracking study investigated the activation and persistence of implicit causality information in spoken language comprehension. We showed that people infer the implicit causality of verbs as soon as they encounter such verbs in discourse, as is predicted by proponents of the immediate focusing account ( Greene & McKoon, 1995 ; Koornneef & Van Berkum, 2006 ; Van Berkum, Koornneef, Otten, & Nieuwland, 2007 ). Interestingly, we observed activation of implicit causality information even before people encountered the causal conjunction. However, while implicit causality information was persistent as the discourse unfolded, it did not have a privileged role as a focusing cue immediately at the ambiguous pronoun when people were resolving its antecedent. Instead, our study indicated that implicit causality does not affect all referents to the same extent, rather it interacts with other cues in the discourse, especially when one of the referents is already prominently in focus.

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