scholarly journals ERPs and task effects in the auditory processing of gender agreement and semantics in French

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phaedra Royle ◽  
John E. Drury ◽  
Karsten Steinhauer

We investigated task effects on violation ERP responses to Noun-Adjective gender mismatches and lexical/conceptual semantic mismatches in a combined auditory/visual paradigm in French. Participants listened to sentences while viewing pictures of objects. This paradigm was designed to investigate language processing in special populations (e.g., children) who may not be able to read or to provide stable behavioural judgment data. Our main goal was to determine how ERP responses to our target violations might differ depending on whether participants performed a judgment task (Task) versus listening for comprehension (No-Task). Characterizing the influence of the presence versus absence of judgment tasks on violation ERP responses allows us to meaningfully interpret data obtained using this paradigm without a behavioural task and relate them to judgment-based paradigms in the ERP literature. We replicated previously observed ERP patterns for semantic and gender mismatches, and found that the task especially affected the later P600 component.

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 107-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah A. Hall ◽  
Mark P. Haggard ◽  
Michael A. Akeroyd ◽  
A. Quentin Summerfield ◽  
Alan R. Palmer ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-208
Author(s):  
Irma Alarcón

The present study investigates whether advanced proficiency-matched early and late bilinguals display gender agreement processing quantitatively and qualitatively similar to that of native speakers of Spanish. To address this issue, a timed grammaticality judgment task was used to analyze the effects on accuracy and reaction times of grammatical gender, morphology, and gender congruency of the article and adjective within a noun phrase. Overall results indicated no significant statistical differences between the native speakers and the two bilingual groups. Both early and late bilinguals displayed similar grammatical gender knowledge in their underlying grammars. A detailed examination of the congruency effect, however, revealed that the native speakers, not the bilinguals, displayed sensitivity to gender agreement violations. Moreover, the native and heritage speakers pattern together in accuracy and directionality of gender agreement processing: both were less accurate with incongruent articles than with incongruent adjectives, while the second language learners were equally accurate in both agreement domains. Despite having internalized gender in their implicit grammars, the late bilinguals did not show native-like patterns in real time processing. The present findings suggest that, for high proficiency speakers, there is a distinct advantage for early over late bilinguals in achieving native-like gender lexical access and retrieval. Therefore, age of acquisition, in conjunction with learning context, might be the best predictor of native-like gender agreement processing at advanced and near-native proficiency levels.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanja Kupisch ◽  
Deniz Akpinar ◽  
Antje Stöhr

This paper is concerned with gender marking in adult French. Four groups of subjects are compared: German-French simultaneous bilinguals (2L1ers) who grew up in France, German-French 2L1ers who grew up in Germany, advanced second language learners (L2ers) who are resident either in France or in Germany at the time of testing. The major goal of the study is to investigate whether differences in input conditions (acquisition in a minority vs. a majority language context) and differences in age of onset affect gender assignment and gender agreement in the same way or differently. Furthermore, we investigate whether successful acquisition of gender is dependent on influence from German. Two experiments, an acceptability judgment task and an elicited production task, are carried out. Results show successful acquisition of agreement in all groups. By contrast, gender assignment may be mildly affected if French is acquired in a minority language context or as an L2.


2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (12) ◽  
pp. 4417-4432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carola de Beer ◽  
Jan P. de Ruiter ◽  
Martina Hielscher-Fastabend ◽  
Katharina Hogrefe

Purpose People with aphasia (PWA) use different kinds of gesture spontaneously when they communicate. Although there is evidence that the nature of the communicative task influences the linguistic performance of PWA, so far little is known about the influence of the communicative task on the production of gestures by PWA. We aimed to investigate the influence of varying communicative constraints on the production of gesture and spoken expression by PWA in comparison to persons without language impairment. Method Twenty-six PWA with varying aphasia severities and 26 control participants (CP) without language impairment participated in the study. Spoken expression and gesture production were investigated in 2 different tasks: (a) spontaneous conversation about topics of daily living and (b) a cartoon narration task, that is, retellings of short cartoon clips. The frequencies of words and gestures as well as of different gesture types produced by the participants were analyzed and tested for potential effects of group and task. Results Main results for task effects revealed that PWA and CP used more iconic gestures and pantomimes in the cartoon narration task than in spontaneous conversation. Metaphoric gestures, deictic gestures, number gestures, and emblems were more frequently used in spontaneous conversation than in cartoon narrations by both participant groups. Group effects show that, in both tasks, PWA's gesture-to-word ratios were higher than those for the CP. Furthermore, PWA produced more interactive gestures than the CP in both tasks, as well as more number gestures and pantomimes in spontaneous conversation. Conclusions The current results suggest that PWA use gestures to compensate for their verbal limitations under varying communicative constraints. The properties of the communicative task influence the use of different gesture types in people with and without aphasia. Thus, the influence of communicative constraints needs to be considered when assessing PWA's multimodal communicative abilities.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hansika Kapoor ◽  
Azizuddin Khan
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Timnit Gebru

This chapter discusses the role of race and gender in artificial intelligence (AI). The rapid permeation of AI into society has not been accompanied by a thorough investigation of the sociopolitical issues that cause certain groups of people to be harmed rather than advantaged by it. For instance, recent studies have shown that commercial automated facial analysis systems have much higher error rates for dark-skinned women, while having minimal errors on light-skinned men. Moreover, a 2016 ProPublica investigation uncovered that machine learning–based tools that assess crime recidivism rates in the United States are biased against African Americans. Other studies show that natural language–processing tools trained on news articles exhibit societal biases. While many technical solutions have been proposed to alleviate bias in machine learning systems, a holistic and multifaceted approach must be taken. This includes standardization bodies determining what types of systems can be used in which scenarios, making sure that automated decision tools are created by people from diverse backgrounds, and understanding the historical and political factors that disadvantage certain groups who are subjected to these tools.


Author(s):  
Mattson Ogg ◽  
L. Robert Slevc

Music and language are uniquely human forms of communication. What neural structures facilitate these abilities? This chapter conducts a review of music and language processing that follows these acoustic signals as they ascend the auditory pathway from the brainstem to auditory cortex and on to more specialized cortical regions. Acoustic, neural, and cognitive mechanisms are identified where processing demands from both domains might overlap, with an eye to examples of experience-dependent cortical plasticity, which are taken as strong evidence for common neural substrates. Following an introduction describing how understanding musical processing informs linguistic or auditory processing more generally, findings regarding the major components (and parallels) of music and language research are reviewed: pitch perception, syntax and harmonic structural processing, semantics, timbre and speaker identification, attending in auditory scenes, and rhythm. Overall, the strongest evidence that currently exists for neural overlap (and cross-domain, experience-dependent plasticity) is in the brainstem, followed by auditory cortex, with evidence and the potential for overlap becoming less apparent as the mechanisms involved in music and speech perception become more specialized and distinct at higher levels of processing.


Probus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-127
Author(s):  
Bradley Hoot ◽  
Tania Leal

AbstractLinguists have keenly studied the realization of focus – the part of the sentence introducing new information – because it involves the interaction of different linguistic modules. Syntacticians have argued that Spanish uses word order for information-structural purposes, marking focused constituents via rightmost movement. However, recent studies have challenged this claim. To contribute sentence-processing evidence, we conducted a self-paced reading task and a judgment task with Mexican and Catalonian Spanish speakers. We found that movement to final position can signal focus in Spanish, in contrast to the aforementioned work. We contextualize our results within the literature, identifying three basic facts that theories of Spanish focus and theories of language processing should explain, and advance a fourth: that mismatches in information-structural expectations can induce processing delays. Finally, we propose that some differences in the existing experimental results may stem from methodological differences.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Theres Grüter ◽  
Hannah Rohde

Abstract This study examines the use of discourse-level information to create expectations about reference in real-time processing, testing whether patterns previously observed among native speakers of English generalize to nonnative speakers. Findings from a visual-world eye-tracking experiment show that native (L1; N = 53) but not nonnative (L2; N = 52) listeners’ proactive coreference expectations are modulated by grammatical aspect in transfer-of-possession events. Results from an offline judgment task show these L2 participants did not differ from L1 speakers in their interpretation of aspect marking on transfer-of-possession predicates in English, indicating it is not lack of linguistic knowledge but utilization of this knowledge in real-time processing that distinguishes the groups. English proficiency, although varying substantially within the L2 group, did not modulate L2 listeners’ use of grammatical aspect for reference processing. These findings contribute to the broader endeavor of delineating the role of prediction in human language processing in general, and in the processing of discourse-level information among L2 users in particular.


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