scholarly journals The male bias of a generically-intended masculine pronoun: Evidence from eye-tracking and sentence evaluation

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. e0249309
Author(s):  
Theresa Redl ◽  
Stefan L. Frank ◽  
Peter de Swart ◽  
Helen de Hoop
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Possessive Pronoun ◽  
Early Language ◽  
Male Bias

Two experiments tested whether the Dutch possessive pronoun zijn ‘his’ gives rise to a gender inference and thus causes a male bias when used generically in sentences such as Everyone was putting on his shoes. Experiment 1 (N = 120, 48 male) was a conceptual replication of a previous eye-tracking study that had not found evidence of a male bias. The results of the current eye-tracking experiment showed the generically-intended masculine pronoun to trigger a gender inference and cause a male bias, but for male participants and in stereotypically neutral stereotype contexts only. No evidence for a male bias was thus found in stereotypically female and male context nor for female participants altogether. Experiment 2 (N = 80, 40 male) used the same stimuli as Experiment 1, but employed the sentence evaluation paradigm. No evidence of a male bias was found in Experiment 2. Taken together, the results suggest that the generically-intended masculine pronoun zijn ‘his’ can cause a male bias for male participants even when the referents are previously introduced by inclusive and grammatically gender-unmarked iedereen ‘everyone’. This male bias surfaces with eye-tracking, which taps directly into early language processing, but not in offline sentence evaluations. Furthermore, the results suggest that the intended generic reading of the masculine possessive pronoun zijn ‘his’ is more readily available for women than for men.

scholarly journals The male bias of a masculine generic pronoun: Evidence from eye-tracking and sentence evaluation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theresa Redl ◽  
Stefan L. Frank ◽  
Peter de Swart ◽  
Helen de Hoop
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Possessive Pronoun ◽  
Male Bias ◽  
Gender Information

Two experiments tested whether the Dutch possessive pronoun zijn ‘his’ gives rise to a gender inference and thus causes a male bias when used generically in sentences such as Everyone was putting on his shoes. Experiment 1 (N = 120, 48 male) was a conceptual replication of a previous eye-tracking study that had not found evidence of a male bias. The results of the current eye-tracking experiment showed the masculine generic pronoun to trigger a gender inference and cause a male bias, but for male participants and in neutral stereotype contexts only. No evidence for a male bias was thus found in stereotypically female and male contexts and for female participants altogether. Experiment 2 (N = 80, 40 male) used the same stimuli as Experiment 1, but employed the sentence evaluation paradigm. No evidence of a male bias was found in Experiment 2. Taken together, the results suggest that the masculine generic pronoun zijn ‘his’ can cause a male bias for male participants when no other gender information is provided, but only surfaces with a method such as eye-tracking, which taps directly into automatic language processing. Furthermore, the results suggest that the intended generic reading of the masculine possessive pronoun zijn ‘his’ is readily available for women.

scholarly journals When too many vowels impede language processing: An eye-tracking study of Danish-learning children

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Trecca ◽  
Dorthe Bleses ◽  
Anders Højen ◽  
Thomas O. Madsen ◽  
Morten H. Christiansen
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Speech Processing ◽  
Word Segmentation ◽  
Word Boundary ◽  
Early Language ◽  
Acquisition Process ◽  
Word Boundaries

Research has suggested that Danish-learning children lag behind in early language acquisition. The phenomenon has been attributed to the opaque phonetic structure of Danish, which features an unusually large number of non-consonantal sounds (i.e., vowels and semivowels/glides). The large amount of vocalic sounds in speech is thought to provide fewer cues to word segmentation and to make language processing harder, thus hindering the acquisition process. In this study, we explored whether the presence of vocalic sounds at word boundaries impedes real-time speech processing in 24-month-old Danish-learning children, compared to word boundaries that are marked by consonantal sounds. Using eye-tracking, we tested children’s real-time comprehension of known consonant-initial and vowel-initial words, when presented in either a consonant-final carrier phrase or in a vowel-final carrier phrase, thus resulting in the four boundary types C#C, C#V, V#C, and V#V. Our results showed that the presence of vocalic sounds around a word boundary—especially before—impedes processing of Danish child-directed sentences.

scholarly journals When Too Many Vowels Impede Language Processing: An Eye-Tracking Study of Danish-Learning Children

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 898-918
Author(s):  
Fabio Trecca ◽  
Dorthe Bleses ◽  
Anders Højen ◽  
Thomas O Madsen ◽  
Morten H Christiansen
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Speech Processing ◽  
Word Segmentation ◽  
Word Boundary ◽  
Early Language ◽  
Acquisition Process ◽  
Word Boundaries

Research has suggested that Danish-learning children lag behind in early language acquisition. The phenomenon has been attributed to the opaque phonetic structure of Danish, which features an unusually large number of non-consonantal sounds (i.e., vowels and semivowels/glides). The large number of vocalic sounds in speech is thought to provide fewer cues to word segmentation and to make language processing harder, thus hindering the acquisition process. In this study, we explored whether the presence of vocalic sounds at word boundaries impedes real-time speech processing in 24-month-old Danish-learning children, compared to word boundaries that are marked by consonantal sounds. Using eye-tracking, we tested children’s real-time comprehension of known consonant-initial and vowel-initial words when presented in either a consonant-final carrier phrase or in a vowel-final carrier phrase, thus resulting in the four boundary types C#C, C#V, V#C, and V#V. Our results showed that the presence of vocalic sounds around a word boundary—especially before—impedes processing of Danish child-directed sentences.

scholarly journals When too many vowels impede language processing: An eye-tracking study of Danish-learning children

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Trecca ◽  
Dorthe Bleses ◽  
Anders Højen ◽  
Thomas O. Madsen ◽  
Morten H. Christiansen
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Speech Processing ◽  
Word Segmentation ◽  
Word Boundary ◽  
Early Language ◽  
Acquisition Process ◽  
Word Boundaries

Research has suggested that Danish-learning children lag behind in early language acquisition. The phenomenon has been attributed to the opaque phonetic structure of Danish, which features an unusually large number of non-consonantal sounds (i.e., vowels and semivowels/glides). The large amount of vocalic sounds in speech is thought to provide fewer cues to word segmentation and to make language processing harder, thus hindering the acquisition process. In this study, we explored whether the presence of vocalic sounds at word boundaries impedes real-time speech processing in 24-month-old Danish-learning children, compared to word boundaries that are marked by consonantal sounds. Using eye-tracking, we tested children’s real-time comprehension of known consonant-initial and vowel-initial words, when presented in either a consonant-final carrier phrase or in a vowel-final carrier phrase, thus resulting in the four boundary types C#C, C#V, V#C, and V#V. Our results showed that the presence of vocalic sounds around a word boundary—especially before—impedes processing of Danish child-directed sentences.

The Opposition of Surprisal and Semantic Similarity in the Prediction of Language Processing: Evidence from Eye-tracking Data

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kun Sun
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Semantic Similarity ◽  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Word Processing ◽  
Reading Time ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Tracking Data ◽  
Dynamic Approach

Expectations or predictions about upcoming content play an important role during language comprehension and processing. One important aspect of recent studies of language comprehension and processing concerns the estimation of the upcoming words in a sentence or discourse. Many studies have used eye-tracking data to explore computational and cognitive models for contextual word predictions and word processing. Eye-tracking data has previously been widely explored with a view to investigating the factors that influence word prediction. However, these studies are problematic on several levels, including the stimuli, corpora, statistical tools they applied. Although various computational models have been proposed for simulating contextual word predictions, past studies usually preferred to use a single computational model. The disadvantage of this is that it often cannot give an adequate account of cognitive processing in language comprehension. To avoid these problems, this study draws upon a massive natural and coherent discourse as stimuli in collecting the data on reading time. This study trains two state-of-art computational models (surprisal and semantic (dis)similarity from word vectors by linear discriminative learning (LDL)), measuring knowledge of both the syntagmatic and paradigmatic structure of language. We develop a `dynamic approach' to compute semantic (dis)similarity. It is the first time that these two computational models have been merged. Models are evaluated using advanced statistical methods. Meanwhile, in order to test the efficiency of our approach, one recently developed cosine method of computing semantic (dis)similarity based on word vectors data adopted is used to compare with our `dynamic' approach. The two computational and fixed-effect statistical models can be used to cross-verify the findings, thus ensuring that the result is reliable. All results support that surprisal and semantic similarity are opposed in the prediction of the reading time of words although both can make good predictions. Additionally, our `dynamic' approach performs better than the popular cosine method. The findings of this study are therefore of significance with regard to acquiring a better understanding how humans process words in a real-world context and how they make predictions in language cognition and processing.

scholarly journals A Survey on Using Gaze Behaviour for Natural Language Processing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandeep Mathias ◽  
Diptesh Kanojia ◽  
Abhijit Mishra ◽  
Pushpak Bhattacharya
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Word Identification ◽  
Test Time ◽  
Gaze Behaviour ◽  
Cognitive Information ◽  
Essay Grading ◽  
Multiple Languages

Gaze behaviour has been used as a way to gather cognitive information for a number of years. In this paper, we discuss the use of gaze behaviour in solving different tasks in natural language processing (NLP) without having to record it at test time. This is because the collection of gaze behaviour is a costly task, both in terms of time and money. Hence, in this paper, we focus on research done to alleviate the need for recording gaze behaviour at run time. We also mention different eye tracking corpora in multiple languages, which are currently available and can be used in natural language processing. We conclude our paper by discussing applications in a domain - education - and how learning gaze behaviour can help in solving the tasks of complex word identification and automatic essay grading.

scholarly journals Divergence point analyses of visual world data: applications to bilingual research

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Kate Stone ◽  
Sol Lago ◽  
Daniel J. Schad
Keyword(s):  
Confidence Interval ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Multiple Comparisons ◽  
Individual Factors ◽  
Visual World ◽  
World Data ◽  
Divergence Point ◽  
L2 Processing ◽  
Divergence Points

Abstract Much work has shown that differences in the timecourse of language processing are central to comparing native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers. However, estimating the onset of experimental effects in timecourse data presents several statistical problems including multiple comparisons and autocorrelation. We compare several approaches to tackling these problems and illustrate them using an L1-L2 visual world eye-tracking dataset. We then present a bootstrapping procedure that allows not only estimation of an effect onset, but also of a temporal confidence interval around this divergence point. We describe how divergence points can be used to demonstrate timecourse differences between speaker groups or between experimental manipulations, two important issues in evaluating L2 processing accounts. We discuss possible extensions of the bootstrapping procedure, including determining divergence points for individual speakers and correlating them with individual factors like L2 exposure and proficiency. Data and an analysis tutorial are available at https://osf.io/exbmk/.

scholarly journals Monolingual and bilingual children's processing of coarticulation cues during spoken word recognition

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
pp. 1189-1206
Author(s):  
Félix DESMEULES-TRUDEL ◽  
Charlotte MOORE ◽  
Tania S. ZAMUNER
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Old English ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Phonetic Cues ◽  
Vowel Nasalization ◽  
English Monolingual

AbstractBilingual children cope with a significant amount of phonetic variability when processing speech, and must learn to weigh phonetic cues differently depending on the cues’ respective roles in their two languages. For example, vowel nasalization is coarticulatory and contrastive in French, but coarticulatory-only in English. In this study, we extended an investigation of the processing of coarticulation in two- to three-year-old English monolingual children (Zamuner, Moore & Desmeules-Trudel, 2016) to a group of four- to six-year-old English monolingual children and age-matched English–French bilingual children. Using eye tracking, we found that older monolingual children and age-matched bilingual children showed more sensitivity to coarticulation cues than the younger children. Moreover, when comparing the older monolinguals and bilinguals, we found no statistical differences between the two groups. These results offer support for the specification of coarticulation in word representations, and indicate that, in some cases, bilingual children possess language processing skills similar to monolinguals.

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