scholarly journals Three-year-olds are sensitive to semantic prominence during online language comprehension: A visual world study of pronoun resolution

2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pirita Pyykkönen ◽  
Danielle Matthews ◽  
Juhani Järvikivi
Keyword(s):  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Pronoun Resolution

Activation and Persistence of Implicit Causality Information in Spoken Language Comprehension

2010 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-16 ◽  
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.

Spoken language comprehension: insights from eye movements

2007 ◽  
pp. 308-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Tanenhaus
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Language Production ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Response Measure ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Spoken Language Processing ◽  
Spoken Language Comprehension

Recently, eye movements have become a widely used response measure for studying spoken language processing in both adults and children, in situations where participants comprehend and generate utterances about a circumscribed “Visual World” while fixation is monitored, typically using a free-view eye-tracker. Psycholinguists now use the Visual World eye-movement method to study both language production and language comprehension, in studies that run the gamut of current topics in language processing. Eye movements are a response measure of choice for addressing many classic questions about spoken language processing in psycholinguistics. This article reviews the burgeoning Visual World literature on language comprehension, highlighting some of the seminal studies and examining how the Visual World approach has contributed new insights to our understanding of spoken word recognition, parsing, reference resolution, and interactive conversation. It considers some of the methodological issues that come to the fore when psycholinguists use eye movements to examine spoken language comprehension.

scholarly journals Error-based structure prediction in language comprehension: evidence from verb bias effect in a visual-world structural priming paradigm for Mandarin Chinese

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuemei Chen ◽  
Suiping Wang ◽  
Robert Hartsuiker
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Prediction Error ◽  
Structure Prediction ◽  
Time Windows ◽  
Critical Time ◽  
Structural Priming ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Verb Bias

Structural priming studies in production have demonstrated stronger priming effects for unexpected sentence structures (inverse preference effect). This is consistent with error-based implicit learning accounts that assume learning depends on prediction error. Such prediction error can be verb-specific, leading to strong priming when a verb that is for instance biased towards the prepositional object (PO) structure occurs with an unexpected double object (DO) structure. However, it is unclear whether this mechanism also holds for language comprehension, especially for languages like Mandarin Chinese, which arguably depends strongly on semantics to predict syntax in comprehension. Experiment 1 was a norming study (N=367) that measured the biases (DO vs. PO) of 48 Mandarin Chinese dative verbs. Experiment 2 (N=72) crossed verb bias (DO-bias or PO-bias) and structure (DO or PO) of prime sentences in a visual-world paradigm, to examine whether Mandarin comprehenders show an inverse preference effect. The priming effect is expressed as the proportion of looks to the predicted referent (i.e., the recipient after a DO-prime, the theme after a PO-prime), for two critical time windows during target sentence processing: the verb and the first syllable of the first post-verbal noun (which was identical in theme and recipient). There was priming in both time windows, even though the verb differed between prime and target. Importantly, there was an inverse preference effect (i.e., stronger priming after a DO prime with a PO-biased verb than with a DO-biased verb) in the second time window. These results provide evidence for an error-based structure prediction system in comprehension.

Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution

2005 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 260-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juhani Järvikivi ◽  
Roger P.G. van Gompel ◽  
Jukka Hyönä ◽  
Raymond Bertram
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Cognitive Structure ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Pronoun Resolution ◽  
Structure Building ◽  
Grammatical Subject ◽  
The Subject

A visual-world eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of order of mention and grammatical role on resolution of ambiguous pronouns in Finnish. According to the first-mention account, general cognitive structure-building processes make the first-mentioned noun phrase the preferred antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun. According to the subject-preference account, the preferred antecedent is the grammatical subject of the preceding clause or sentence. Participants listened to sentences in either subject-verb-object or object-verb-subject order; each was followed by a sentence containing an ambiguous pronoun that referred to either the subject or the object. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they looked at pictures representing the two possible antecedents of each pronoun. Analyses of the fixations on the pictures showed that listeners used both order-of-mention and grammatical-role information to resolve ambiguous pronouns.

scholarly journals A theory of prediction in simultaneous interpreting

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 706-715 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhona M. Amos ◽  
Martin J. Pickering
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Data ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Production System ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Other ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Visual World Paradigm ◽  
Simultaneous Interpreting

AbstractPeople make comprehension easier by predicting upcoming language. We might therefore expect prediction to occur during the extremely difficult task of simultaneous interpreting. This paper examines the theoretical and empirical foundations of this premise. It reviews accounts of prediction during comprehension in both monolinguals and bilinguals, and discusses these theories in light of experimental data (e.g., using the visual-world paradigm). It considers how these accounts may be applied to the unique and ecologically valid context of simultaneous interpreting, when two languages are used concurrently, one overtly engaging the comprehension system, and the other overtly engaging the production system. It then posits a role for the production system in prediction during comprehension and develops a theoretical framework for prediction-by-production in simultaneous interpreting that has implications for our understanding of prediction during language comprehension.

The influence of prominence cues in 7- to 10-year-olds’ pronoun resolution: Disentangling order of mention, grammatical role, and semantic role

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Liam P. BLYTHING ◽  
Maialen IRAOLA AZPIROZ ◽  
Shanley ALLEN ◽  
Regina HERT ◽  
Juhani JÄRVIKIVI
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Individual Variation ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Semantic Role ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Pronoun Resolution ◽  
Semantic Cues ◽  
Demonstrative Pronoun

Abstract In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds’ real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to SVO or OVS sentences containing active accusative verbs (küssen “to kiss”) in Experiment 1 (N = 72), or dative object-experiencer verbs (gefallen “to like”) in Experiment 2 (N = 64). This was followed by the personal pronoun er or the demonstrative pronoun der. Interpretive preferences for er were most robust when high prominence cues (first mention, subject, proto-agent) were aligned onto the same entity; and the same applied to der for low prominence cues (second mention, object, proto-patient). These preferences were reduced in conditions where cues were misaligned, and there was evidence that each cue independently influenced performance. Crucially, individual variation in age predicted adult-like weighting preferences for semantic cues (Schumacher, Roberts & Järvikivi, 2017).

scholarly journals Decoding the silence: Neural bases of zero pronoun resolution in Chinese

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shulin Zhang ◽  
Jixing Li ◽  
Yiming Yang ◽  
John Hale
Keyword(s):  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Parahippocampal Gyrus ◽  
Middle Temporal Gyrus ◽  
Pronoun Resolution ◽  
Chinese Speakers ◽  
Fmri Study ◽  
Referential Expressions ◽  
Multivariate Pattern ◽  
Left Middle Temporal Gyrus ◽  
Zero Pronoun

Chinese is one of many languages that can drop subjects. We report an fMRI study of language comprehension processes in these "zero pronoun" cases. The fMRI data come from Chinese speakers who listened to an audiobook. We conducted both univariate GLM and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) on these data time-locked to each verb with a zero pronoun subject. We found increased left middle temporal gyrus activity for zero pronouns compared to overt subjects, suggesting additional effort searching for an antecedent during zero pronoun resolution. MVPA further revealed that the intended referent of a zero pronoun seems to be physically represented in the Precuneus and the Parahippocampal Gyrus shortly after its presentation. This highlights the role of memory and discourse-level processing in resolving referential expressions, including unspoken ones, in naturalistic language comprehension.

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