scholarly journals Syntactic and semantic interference in sentence comprehension: Support from English and German eye-tracking data

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Mertzen ◽  
Dario Paape ◽  
Brian Dillon ◽  
Ralf Engbert ◽  
Shravan Vasishth
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Relative Timing ◽  
Semantic Retrieval ◽  
Semantic Interference ◽  
Semantic Cues ◽  
Retrieval Cues ◽  
Default Assumption

A long-standing debate in the sentence processing literature concerns the time course of syntactic and semantic information in online sentence comprehension. The default assumption in cue-based models of parsing is that syntactic and semantic retrieval cues simultaneously guide dependency resolution. When retrieval cues match multiple items in memory, this leads to similarity-based interference. Both semantic and syntactic interferencehave been shown to occur in English. However, the relative timing of syntactic vs. semantic interference remains unclear. In this first-ever cross-linguistic investigation of the time course of syntactic vs. semantic interference, the data from two eye-tracking reading experiments (English and German) suggest that the two types of interference can in principle arise simultaneously during retrieval. However, the data also indicate that semantic cues may be evaluated with a small timing lag in German compared to English. This suggests that there may be cross-linguistic variation in how syntactic and semantic cues are used to resolve linguistic dependencies in real-time.

scholarly journals Subject encodings and retrieval interference

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.

scholarly journals The Interaction of Morphological Gender With Stereotypical Information: An Eye Tracking Study on Gender Inferences

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 111
Author(s):  
Daniela Ronca ◽  
Vincenzo Moscati
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Mental Model ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Gender Biases ◽  
On Line ◽  
Competing Models

In this paper we observe the time-course and the activation of gender stereotypes comparing the predictions of two competing models: the Minimalist (McKoon et al., 1992) and the Mental Model Hypothesis (Garnham 2001). The on-line processing of sentences containing male-biased stereotypes is experimentally investigated in Italian on epicenes nouns (i.e. nouns that do not morphologically disambiguate between male and female referents) adopting a procedure based on the Visual World paradigm.Eye-movements during sentence comprehension show that stereotypes become immediately active as soon as male-biased role nouns are encountered, as predicted by the Mental Model Hypothesis. Our results also show that when disambiguating cues based on morphological agreement are provided, the activation of stereotypes is blocked. This indicates that morphological gender is quickly processed and that it can suppress stereotypical gender biases.

Brain Oscillations during Spoken Sentence Processing

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 1149-1164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcela Peña ◽  
Lucia Melloni
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Temporal Integration ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Gamma Band ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Band Power ◽  
Gamma Power

Spoken sentence comprehension relies on rapid and effortless temporal integration of speech units displayed at different rates. Temporal integration refers to how chunks of information perceived at different time scales are linked together by the listener in mapping speech sounds onto meaning. The neural implementation of this integration remains unclear. This study explores the role of short and long windows of integration in accessing meaning from long samples of speech. In a cross-linguistic study, we explore the time course of oscillatory brain activity between 1 and 100 Hz, recorded using EEG, during the processing of native and foreign languages. We compare oscillatory responses in a group of Italian and Spanish native speakers while they attentively listen to Italian, Japanese, and Spanish utterances, played either forward or backward. The results show that both groups of participants display a significant increase in gamma band power (55–75 Hz) only when they listen to their native language played forward. The increase in gamma power starts around 1000 msec after the onset of the utterance and decreases by its end, resembling the time course of access to meaning during speech perception. In contrast, changes in low-frequency power show similar patterns for both native and foreign languages. We propose that gamma band power reflects a temporal binding phenomenon concerning the coordination of neural assemblies involved in accessing meaning of long samples of speech.

Anticipatory sentence processing in children with specific language impairment: Evidence from eye movements during listening

2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
LLORENÇ ANDREU ◽  
MÒNICA SANZ-TORRENT ◽  
JOHN C. TRUESWELL
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Anticipatory Eye Movements ◽  
And Control

ABSTRACTTwenty-five children with specific language impairment (SLI; age 5 years, 3 months [5;3]–8;2), 50 typically developing children (3;3–8;2), and 31 normal adults participated in three eye-tracking experiments of spoken language comprehension that were designed to investigate the use of verb information during real-time sentence comprehension in Spanish. In Experiment 1, participants heard sentences like El niño recorta con cuidado el papel (The boy trims carefully the paper) in the presence of four depicted objects, only one of which satisfied the semantic restrictions of the verb recorta (e.g., paper, clock, fox, and dinosaur). Eye movements revealed that children with SLI, like other groups, were able to recognize and retrieve the meaning of the verb rapidly enough to anticipate the upcoming semantically appropriate referent, prior to actually hearing the noun phrase el papel (the paper). Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that for all groups of participants, anticipatory eye movements were also modulated by the semantic fit of the object serving as the patient/theme of the verb. Relatively fine-grained semantic information of a verb was computed fast enough even by children with SLI to result in anticipatory eye movements to semantically appropriate referents. Children with SLI did differ from age-matched controls, but only slightly in terms of overall anticipatory looking at target objects; the time course of looking between these groups was quite similar. In addition, no differences were found between children with SLI and control children matched for mean length of utterance. Implications for theories that characterize SLI are discussed.

Processing delays

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Loes Koring ◽  
Hans van de Koot
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Visual World Paradigm ◽  
Exact Time ◽  
On Line

Abstract An eye-tracking experiment using the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) shows that in on-line sentence processing in English the argument of an unaccusative verb reactivates late after verb offset. In contrast to previous studies, this VWP experiment establishes the exact time course of this effect, which matches the time course previously found for Dutch, despite differences in word order between the two languages. Furthermore, it uncovers an early reactivation of the argument of unergative verbs that has previously gone unnoticed. Such an effect has previously been observed for Dutch, but not for English. Moreover, the effect seems to occur earlier in English than in Dutch. We suggest that this difference may be due to the more rigid word order of English, which provides the parser with more informative cues.

scholarly journals Role of expectation and working memory constraints in Hindi comprehension: An eyetracking corpus analysis

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arpit Agrawal ◽  
Sumeet Agarwal ◽  
Samar Husain
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Fixation Time ◽  
Storage Cost ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Total Fixation ◽  
Sentence Level ◽  
Cost Metrics

We used the Potsdam-Allahabad Hindi eye-tracking corpus to investigate the role of word-level and sentence-level factors during sentence comprehension in Hindi. Extending previous work that used this eye-tracking data, we investigate the role of surprisal and retrieval cost metrics during sentence processing. While controlling for word-level predictors (word complexity, syllable length, unigram and bigram frequencies) as well as sentence-level predictors such as integration and storage costs, we find a significant effect of surprisal on first-pass reading times (higher surprisal value leads to increase in FPRT). Effect of retrieval cost was only found for a higher degree of parser parallelism. Interestingly, while surprisal has a significant effect on FPRT, storage cost (another prediction-based metric) does not. A significant effect of storage cost shows up only in total fixation time (TFT), thus indicating that these two measures perhaps capture different aspects of prediction. The study replicates previous findings that both prediction-based and memory-based metrics are required to account for processing patterns during sentence comprehension. The results also show that parser model assumptions are critical in order to draw generalizations about the utility of a metric (e.g. surprisal) across various phenomena in a language.

When Hearing Does Not Mean Understanding: On the Neural Processing of Syntactically Complex Sentences by Listeners With Hearing Loss

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Margreet Vogelzang ◽  
Christiane M. Thiel ◽  
Stephanie Rosemann ◽  
Jochem W. Rieger ◽  
Esther Ruigendijk
Keyword(s):  
Hearing Loss ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Secondary Task ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Inferior Frontal Gyrus ◽  
Normal Hearing ◽  
Cognitive Demands ◽  
Sentence Complexity ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
And Task

Purpose Adults with mild-to-moderate age-related hearing loss typically exhibit issues with speech understanding, but their processing of syntactically complex sentences is not well understood. We test the hypothesis that listeners with hearing loss' difficulties with comprehension and processing of syntactically complex sentences are due to the processing of degraded input interfering with the successful processing of complex sentences. Method We performed a neuroimaging study with a sentence comprehension task, varying sentence complexity (through subject–object order and verb–arguments order) and cognitive demands (presence or absence of a secondary task) within subjects. Groups of older subjects with hearing loss ( n = 20) and age-matched normal-hearing controls ( n = 20) were tested. Results The comprehension data show effects of syntactic complexity and hearing ability, with normal-hearing controls outperforming listeners with hearing loss, seemingly more so on syntactically complex sentences. The secondary task did not influence off-line comprehension. The imaging data show effects of group, sentence complexity, and task, with listeners with hearing loss showing decreased activation in typical speech processing areas, such as the inferior frontal gyrus and superior temporal gyrus. No interactions between group, sentence complexity, and task were found in the neuroimaging data. Conclusions The results suggest that listeners with hearing loss process speech differently from their normal-hearing peers, possibly due to the increased demands of processing degraded auditory input. Increased cognitive demands by means of a secondary visual shape processing task influence neural sentence processing, but no evidence was found that it does so in a different way for listeners with hearing loss and normal-hearing listeners.

scholarly journals Reanalysis processes in non-native sentence comprehension

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Hiroki Fujita ◽  
Ian Cunnings
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movement ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Memory Trace ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Direct Object ◽  
Subordinate Clause

Abstract We report two offline and two eye-movement experiments examining non-native (L2) sentence processing during and after reanalysis of temporarily ambiguous sentences like “While Mary dressed the baby laughed happily”. Such sentences cause reanalysis at the main clause verb (“laughed”), as the temporarily ambiguous noun phrase (“the baby”) may initially be misanalysed as the direct object of the subordinate clause verb (“dressed”). The offline experiments revealed that L2ers have difficulty reanalysing temporarily ambiguous sentences with a greater persistence of the initially assigned misinterpretation than native (L1) speakers. In the eye-movement experiments, we found that L2ers complete reanalysis similarly to L1ers but fail to fully erase the memory trace of the initially assigned interpretation. Our results suggested that the source of L2 reanalysis difficulty is a failure to erase the initially assigned misinterpretation from memory rather than a failure to conduct syntactic reanalysis.

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