Eye movements and speech prosody in the processing of information structure: An exploratory study in Mandarin Chinese

2017 ◽  
Vol 142 (4) ◽  
pp. 2519-2519
Author(s):  
Li Liu ◽  
Ying Chen ◽  
Xueqin Zhao
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Speech Prosody

Eye-Movement Patterns of Readers With Down Syndrome During Sentence-Processing: An Exploratory Study

2010 ◽  
Vol 115 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Frenck-Mestre ◽  
Nathalie Zardan ◽  
Annie Colas ◽  
Alain Ghio
Keyword(s):  
Down Syndrome ◽  
Eye Movements ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Matched Control ◽  
Reading Level ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Simple Sentences

Abstract Eye movements were examined to determine how readers with Down syndrome process sentences online. Participants were 9 individuals with Down syndrome ranging in reading level from Grades 1 to 3 and a reading-level-matched control group. For syntactically simple sentences, the pattern of reading times was similar for the two groups, with longer reading times found at sentence end. This “wrap-up” effect was also found in the first reading of more complex sentences for the control group, whereas it only emerged later for the readers with Down syndrome. Our results provide evidence that eye movements can be used to investigate reading in individuals with Down syndrome and underline the need for future studies.

Effects of saccadic bilateral eye movements on memory in children and adults: An exploratory study

2012 ◽  
Vol 78 (3) ◽  
pp. 238-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Parker ◽  
Neil Dagnall
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Exploratory Study

Anatomy of a Counterexample: Extraction from Relative Clauses

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivy Sichel
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Structural Ambiguity ◽  
Fine Grained Structure ◽  
Lebanese Arabic

Relative clauses (RCs) are considered islands for extraction, yet acceptable cases of overt extraction from RCs have been attested over the years in a variety of languages: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Japanese, Hebrew, English, Italian, Spanish, French, and also in Lebanese Arabic and Mandarin Chinese, where covert extraction from an RC is observed. The possibility for extraction has often been presented as evidence against a syntactic theory of locality, and in favor of constraints defined in terms of information structure, or processing limitations and constraints on working memory. Another possibility, still hardly explored, is that locality is determined syntactically, combined with a more fine-grained structure for RCs and a theory of how extraction from this structure interacts with the theory of locality. I argue in favor of the latter approach. I assume the structural ambiguity of RCs and argue that while externally headed RCs do block extraction, extraction is possible, under certain conditions, from a raising RC, and is formally similar to extraction from an embedded interrogative.

scholarly journals Information Structure and Word Order Preference in Child and Adult Speech of Mandarin Chinese

Languages ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Jidong Chen ◽  
Bhuvana Narasimhan ◽  
Angel Chan ◽  
Wenchun Yang ◽  
Shu Yang
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Late Development ◽  
Linguistic Markers ◽  
Production Study ◽  
Order Preference

The acquisition of appropriate linguistic markers of information structure (IS), e.g., word order and specific lexical and syntactic constructions, is a rather late development. This study revisits the debate on language-general preferred word order in IS and examines the use of language-specific means to encode IS in Mandarin Chinese. An elicited production study of conjunct noun phrases (NPs) of new and old referents was conducted with native Mandarin-speaking children (N = 24, mean age 4;6) and adults (N = 25, mean age 26). (The age of children is conventionally notated as years;months). The result shows that adults differ significantly from children in preferring the “old-before-new” word order. This corroborates prior findings in other languages (e.g., German, English, Arabic) that adults prefer a language-general “old-before-new” IS, whereas children disprefer or show no preference for that order. Despite different word order preferences, Mandarin-speaking children and adults resemble each other in the lexical and syntactic forms to encode old and new referents: bare NPs dominate the conjunct NPs, and indefinite classifier NPs are used for both the old and the new referents, but when only one classifier phrase is produced, it is predominantly used to refer to the new referents, which suggests children’s early sensitivity to language-specific syntactic devices to mark IS.

scholarly journals Interaction between image and text during the process of biblical art reception

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregor Hardiess ◽  
Caecilie Weissert
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Religious Background ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Scanning Behavior ◽  
Biblical Figures

In our exploratory study, we ask how naive observers, without a distinct religious background, approach biblical art that combines image and text. For this purpose, we choose the book ‘New biblical figures of the Old and New Testament’ published in 1569 as source of the stimuli. This book belongs to the genre of illustrated Bibles, which were very popular during the Reformation. Since there is no empirical knowledge regarding the interaction between image and text during the process of such biblical art reception, we selected four relevant images from the book and measured the eye movements of participants in order to characterize and quantify their scanning behavior related to such stimuli in terms of i) looking at text (text usage), ii) text vs. image interaction measures (semantic or contextual relevance of text), and iii) narration. We show that texts capture attention early in the process of inspection and that text and image interact. Moreover, semantics of texts are used to guide eye movements later through the image, supporting the formation of the narrative.

Prosodic encoding of information structure in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from picture description task

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifei Bi ◽  
Lesya Y. Ganushchak ◽  
Agnieszka E. Konopka ◽  
Guiqin Ren ◽  
Xue Sui ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Picture Description ◽  
Description Task

scholarly journals Information structure cues for 4-year-olds and adults: tracking eye movements to visually presented anaphoric referents

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (7) ◽  
pp. 877-892 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juhani Järvikivi ◽  
Pirita Pyykkönen-Klauck ◽  
Sarah Schimke ◽  
Saveria Colonna ◽  
Barbara Hemforth
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Tracking Eye Movements

scholarly journals Understanding refusal style and pragmatic competence of teenage Cantonese English learners in refusals: An exploratory study

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia Lee
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Strategy Use ◽  
Pragmatic Competence ◽  
Single Strategy ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Chinese English Learners ◽  
Specific Reason

AbstractThe paper investigates the refusal style of teenage Cantonese learners of English in terms of strategy use, pattern, order, and content of refusals’ semantic formulae quantitatively and qualitatively, and discusses learners’ pragmatic competence and refusal style with reference to that of adult native Mandarin Chinese (L1) speakers and Chinese English learners reported in the literature. One hundred fifty-six Cantonese English learners aged between 14 and 18, studying in Form 2, Form 4, and Form 6, participated in the study. Refusals to requests were collected using five closed role plays in which sociolinguistic variables were controlled. It was found that three indirect refusal patterns were generally used by the three age groups across situations, with the strategy of giving a specific reason being dominant. Only the difference in use of single strategy was statistically significant (

Acquiring the pitch patterns of L2 Mandarin Chinese

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chunsheng Yang
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
First Language ◽  
Tone Sequence ◽  
Foreign Accent ◽  
Subject Group ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Pitch Patterns ◽  
L1 And L2

AbstractThis study examines the acquisition of utterance-level pitch patterns in Mandarin Chinese by American second language (L2) learners. It is an exploratory study with the goal of identifying the utterance-level prosody in L2 Mandarin Chinese. The focus of this study is not on the pitch patterns of individual learners but those of subject groups. The analysis shows that the pitch patterns between two syntactic structures for the same tone sequence vary with the tone sequence and the subject group. The biggest difference between first language (L1) and L2 Mandarin Chinese lies in the frequency of target undershoot in L2 speech. The infrequent tone target undershoot in L2 speech, especially among the intermediate learners, was attributed to the incomplete acquisition of L2 prosody. It was argued that the infrequent tone target undershoot may render L2 speech more staccato or robot-like, which contributes to the perception of a foreign accent in L2 Mandarin Chinese.

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