Age-Related Differences in Sentence Processing of Who-Questions: An Eye-Tracking Study

ABSTRACTIn this paper we report on a visual world eye-tracking experiment that investigated the differing abilities of adults and children to use referential scene information during reanalysis to overcome lexical biases during sentence processing. The results showed that adults incorporated aspects of the referential scene into their parse as soon as it became apparent that a test sentence was syntactically ambiguous, suggesting they considered the two alternative analyses in parallel. In contrast, the children appeared not to reanalyze their initial analysis, even over shorter distances than have been investigated in prior research. We argue that this reflects the children's over-reliance on bottom-up, lexical cues to interpretation. The implications for the development of parsing routines are discussed.

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Processing gender stereotypes in dementia patients and older healthy adults: a self-paced reading study

Linguistics Vanguard ◽

10.1515/lingvan-2018-0029 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 5 (s2) ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Daniel Müller-Feldmeth ◽

Katharina Ahnefeld ◽

Adriana Hanulíková

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Young Adults ◽

Sentence Processing ◽

Gender Stereotypes ◽

Time Course ◽

Healthy Adults ◽

Control Group ◽

Healthy Older Adults ◽

Dementia Patients ◽

Age Related

AbstractWe used self-paced reading to examine whether stereotypical associations of verbs with women or men as prototypical agents (e.g. the craftsman knits a sweater) are activated during sentence processing in dementia patients and healthy older adults. Effects of stereotypical knowledge on language processing have frequently been observed in young adults, but little is known about age-related changes in the activation and integration of stereotypical information. While syntactic processing may remain intact, semantic capacities are often affected in dementia. Since inferences based on gender stereotypes draw on social and world knowledge, access to stereotype information may also be affected in dementia patients. Results from dementia patients (n = 9, average age 86.6) and healthy older adults (n = 14, average age 79.5) showed slower reading times and less accuracy in comprehension scores for dementia patients compared to the control group. While activation of stereotypical associations of verbs was visible in both groups, they differed with respect to the time-course of processing. The effect of stereotypes on comprehension accuracy was visible for healthy adults only. The evidence from reading times suggests that older adults with and without dementia engage stereotypical inferences during reading, which is in line with research on young adults.

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Subject encodings and retrieval interference

10.31219/osf.io/rvun9 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Nathan Arnett ◽

Matthew Wagers

Keyword(s):

Eye Tracking ◽

Sentence Processing ◽

Retrieval Cues ◽

Syntactic Theory ◽

The Subject ◽

Syntactic Properties ◽

Retrieval Interference ◽

Processing Difficulty

Interference has been identified as a cause of processing difficulty in linguistic dependencies, such as the subject-verb relation (Van Dyke and Lewis, 2003). However, while mounting evidence implicates retrieval interference in sentence processing, the nature of the retrieval cues involved - and thus the source of difficulty - remains largely unexplored. Three experiments used self-paced reading and eye-tracking to examine the ways in which the retrieval cues provided at a verb characterize subjects. Syntactic theory has identified a number of properties correlated with subjecthood, both phrase-structural and thematic. Findings replicate and extend previous findings of interference at a verb from additional subjects, but indicate that retrieval outcomes are relativized to the syntactic domain in which the retrieval occurs. One, the cues distinguish between thematic subjects in verbal and nominal domains. Two, within the verbal domain, retrieval is sensitive to abstract syntactic properties associated with subjects and their clauses. We argue that the processing at a verb requires cue-driven retrieval, and that the retrieval cues utilize abstract grammatical properties which may reflect parser expectations.

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Eye-Tracking Evaluation of Age-Related Differences in User Behaviour on Mobile Applications

Journal of scientific research ◽

10.37398/jsr.2021.650127 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 65 (01) ◽

pp. 214-221

Author(s):

Antony William Joseph ◽

Dr. Ramaswamy Murugesh

Keyword(s):

Eye Tracking ◽

Mobile Applications ◽

User Behaviour ◽

Age Related

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Anxiety-Related Attention Bias in Four- to Eight-Year-Olds: An Eye-Tracking Study

Behavioral Sciences ◽

10.3390/bs10120194 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 (12) ◽

pp. 194

Author(s):

Suzannah Stuijfzand ◽

Bobby Stuijfzand ◽

Shirley Reynolds ◽

Helen Dodd

Keyword(s):

Eye Tracking ◽

Effortful Control ◽

Community Sample ◽

Age Groups ◽

Attention Bias ◽

Overt Attention ◽

Age Related ◽

Neutral Face ◽

Moderation Model ◽

Development Of Anxiety

(1) Background: There is evidence of an attention bias–anxiety relationship in children, but lack of appropriate methods has limited the number of studies with children younger than eight years old. This study used eye tracking as a measure of overt attention in young children. The aim of this study was to assess anxiety-related attention bias in children aged four to eight years. Age was considered a moderator, and the influence of effortful control was investigated. (2) Method: A community sample of 104 children was shown pairs of happy–neutral and angry–neutral faces. Growth curve analyses were used to examine patterns of gaze over time. (3) Results: Analyses revealed moderation by age and anxiety, with distinct patterns of anxiety-related biases seen in different age groups in the angry–neutral face trials. Effortful control did not account for age-related effects. (4) Conclusions: The results support a moderation model of the development of anxiety in children.

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Eye-tracking evidence for active gap-filling regardless of dependency length

10.31234/osf.io/8qcxh ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Wing Yee Chow ◽

Yangzi Zhou

Keyword(s):

Eye Tracking ◽

Real Time ◽

Sentence Processing ◽

Critical Region ◽

Statistical Power ◽

Gap Filling ◽

Reading Experiment ◽

Actual Location

Previous work on real-time sentence processing has established that comprehenders build and interpret filler-gap dependencies without waiting for unambiguous evidence about the actual location of the gap (“active gap-filling”) as long as such dependencies are grammatically licensed. However, this generalisation was called into question by recent findings in a self-paced reading experiment by Wagers and Phillips (2014; W&P14) which may be taken to show that comprehenders do not interpret the filler at the posited gap when the dependency spans a longer distance. In the present study we aimed to replicate these findings in an eye-tracking experiment with better controlled materials and increased statistical power. Crucially, we found clear evidence for active gap-filling across all levels of dependency length. This diverges from W&P14’s findings but is in line with the long-standing generalisation that comprehenders build and interpret filler-gap dependencies predictively as long as they are grammatically licensed. We found that the effect became smaller in the long dependency conditions in the post-critical region, which suggests the weaker effect in the long dependency conditions may have been undetected in W&P’s study due to insufficient statistical power and/or the use of a self-paced reading paradigm.

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Older adults show a more sustained pattern of effortful listening than young adults

10.31234/osf.io/3g6y5 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Ronan McGarrigle ◽

Sarah Knight ◽

Lyndon Rakusen ◽

Jason Geller ◽

Sven Mattys

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Young Adults ◽

Young Adult ◽

Sentence Processing ◽

Daily Life ◽

Recognition Task ◽

Adult Group ◽

Listening Effort ◽

Age Related ◽

Listening Task

Listening to speech in adverse conditions can be challenging and effortful, especially for older adults. This study examined age-related differences in effortful listening by recording changes in the task-evoked pupil response (TEPR; a physiological marker of listening effort) both at the level of sentence processing and over the entire course of a listening task. A total of 65 (32 young adults; 33 older adults) participants performed a speech recognition task in the presence of a competing talker, while moment-to-moment changes in pupil size were continuously monitored. Participants were also administered the Vanderbilt Fatigue Scale; a questionnaire assessing daily life listening fatigue within four domains (social, cognitive, emotional, physical). Normalized TEPRs were overall larger and more steeply rising and falling around the peak in the older versus the young adult group during sentence processing. Additionally, mean TEPRs over the course of the listening task were more stable in the older versus the young adult group, consistent with a more sustained recruitment of compensatory attentional resources to maintain task performance. No age-related differences were found in terms of total daily life listening fatigue; however, older adults reported higher scores than young adults within the social domain. Overall, this study provides evidence for qualitatively distinct patterns of physiological arousal between young and older adults consistent with age-related upregulation in resource allocation during listening. A more detailed understanding of age-related changes in the subjective and physiological mechanisms that underlie effortful listening will ultimately help to address complex communication needs in aging listeners.

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Anxiety Related Attention Bias in Four to Eight-Year-Olds: An Eye-Tracking Study

10.20944/preprints202011.0319.v1 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Suzannah Stuijfzand ◽

Shirley Reynolds ◽

Bobby Stuijfzand ◽

Helen Dodd

Keyword(s):

Eye Tracking ◽

Effortful Control ◽

Community Sample ◽

Age Groups ◽

Attention Bias ◽

Age Related ◽

Neutral Face ◽

Moderation Model ◽

Development Of Anxiety ◽

Robust Evidence

(1) Background: There is robust evidence of an attention bias-anxiety relationship in children, but lack of appropriate methods has limited the number of studies with children younger than 8 years old. This study used eye-tracking as a measure of overt attention in young children. The aim of this study was to assess anxiety related attention bias in children aged 4 to 8 years. Age was considered as a moderator and the influence of effortful control was investigated. (2) Method: A community sample of 104 children were shown pairs of happy-neutral and angry-neutral faces. Growth curve analyses were used to examine patterns of gaze over time. (3) Results: Analyses revealed moderation by age and anxiety, with distinct patterns of anxiety-related biases seen in different age groups in the angry-neutral face trials. Effortful control did not account for age related effects. (4) Conclusions: Results support a moderation model of the development of anxiety in children.

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Eye-tracking multi-word units: some methodological questions

Journal of Eye Movement Research ◽

10.16910/jemr.7.5.5 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 7 (5) ◽

Author(s):

Gareth Carrol ◽

Kathy Conklin

Keyword(s):

Eye Tracking ◽

Sentence Processing ◽

Basic Unit ◽

Single Word ◽

Formulaic Language ◽

Unit Of Analysis

Eye-tracking in linguistics has focused mainly on reading at the level of the word or sentence. In this paper we discuss how the phenomenon of formulaic language might best be examined using this methodology. Formulaic language is fundamentally multi-word in nature, therefore an approach to eye-tracking that considers the “word” as the basic unit of analysis may require re-evaluation. We review the existing literature on single word and sentence processing, and also those studies that have used eye-tracking as a way of investigating formulaic language to date. We discuss how eye-tracking might elucidate the “added extra” processing advantage for formulaic language. We conclude with some suggestions about the best way to utilise eye-tracking within this sub-field of linguistic investigation.

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