scholarly journals Information Structure and Word Order Canonicity in the Comprehension of Spanish Texts: An Eye-Tracking Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolina A. Gattei ◽  
Luis A. París ◽  
Diego E. Shalom
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Eye Movement ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Total Reading Time ◽  
Pragmatic Motivation

Word order alternation has been described as one of the most productive information structure markers and discourse organizers across languages. Psycholinguistic evidence has shown that word order is a crucial cue for argument interpretation. Previous studies about Spanish sentence comprehension have shown greater difficulty to parse sentences that present a word order that does not respect the order of participants of the verb's lexico-semantic structure, irrespective to whether the sentences follow the canonical word order of the language or not. This difficulty has been accounted as the cognitive cost related to the miscomputation of prominence status of the argument that precedes the verb. Nonetheless, the authors only analyzed the use of alternative word orders in isolated sentences, leaving aside the pragmatic motivation of word order alternation. By means of an eye-tracking task, the current study provides further evidence about the role of information structure for the comprehension of sentences with alternative word order and verb type, and sheds light on the interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. We analyzed both “early” and “late” eye-movement measures as well as accuracy and response times to comprehension questions. Results showed an overall influence of information structure reflected in a modulation of late eye-movement measures as well as offline measures like total reading time and questions response time. However, effects related to the miscomputation of prominence status did not fade away when sentences were preceded by a context that led to non-canonical word order of constituents, showing that prominence computation is a core mechanism for argument interpretation, even in sentences preceded by context.

scholarly journals Eye-tracking the effect of word order in sentence comprehension in aphasia: evidence from Basque, a free word order ergative language

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (10) ◽  
pp. 1320-1343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miren Arantzeta ◽  
Roelien Bastiaanse ◽  
Frank Burchert ◽  
Martijn Wieling ◽  
Maite Martinez-Zabaleta ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Free Word

Fronting, dislocation, and the syntactic role of discourse-related features

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvio Cruschina
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Linguistic Variation ◽  
Contrastive Focus ◽  
Syntactic Features

This paper focuses on the syntactic role of the features related to discourse and information structure. It is argued that information-structure notions are encoded in syntax as syntactic features projecting their own phrase structure, and are fundamental in accounting for cross-linguistic variation. The word order alternations and syntactic operations which are strictly dependent on the discourse/informational properties of the sentence, as well as the different grammatical properties characterizing different information-structure categories, can all be related to the syntactic role of discourse-related features, the functional projections with which they are associated, and the type of movement that these features trigger. Under this view, this paper offers an analysis of fronting and dislocation phenomena in Romance, which entails that variation with respect to these processes is correlated to the activation and to the attraction properties of the functional projections encoding information-structure distinctions. Keywords: discourse-related features; information structure; functional projections; topic; informational focus; contrastive focus; Romance; Sicilian

scholarly journals The role of the l-IPS in the comprehension of reversible and irreversible sentences: an rTMS study

2020 ◽  
Vol 225 (8) ◽  
pp. 2403-2414
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Vercesi ◽  
Prerana Sabnis ◽  
Chiara Finocchiaro ◽  
Luigi Cattaneo ◽  
Elena Tonolli ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation ◽  
Thematic Roles ◽  
Passive Voice ◽  
Performance Accuracy ◽  
Thematic Relations ◽  
First Pass ◽  
Stimulation Of

Abstract Thematic roles can be seen as semantic labels assigned to who/what is taking part in the event denoted by a verb. Encoding thematic relations is crucial for sentence interpretation since it relies on both syntactic and semantic aspects. In previous studies, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over the left inferior intraparietal sulcus (l-IPS) selectively influenced performance accuracy on reversible passive (but not active) sentences. The effect was attributed to the fact that in these sentences the assignment of the agent and theme roles requires re-analysis of the first-pass sentence parsing. To evaluate the role of reversibility and non-canonical word order (passive voice) on the effect, rTMS was applied over l-IPS during a sentence comprehension task that included reversible and irreversible, active and passive sentences. Participants were asked to identify who/what was performing the action or who/what the action was being performed on. Stimulation of the l-IPS increased response time on reversible passive sentences but not on reversible active sentences. Importantly, no effect was found on irreversible sentences, irrespective of sentence diathesis. Results suggest that neither reversibility nor sentence diathesis alone are responsible for the effect and that the effect is likely to be triggered/constrained by a combination of semantic reversibility and non-canonical word order. Combined with the results of previous studies, and irrespective of the specific role of each feature, these findings support the view that the l-IPS is critically involved in the assignment of thematic roles in reversible sentences.

scholarly journals Comparing the Effect of Product-Based Metrics on the Translation Process

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bram Vanroy ◽  
Moritz Schaeffer ◽  
Lieve Macken
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
Coarse Grained ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Total Reading Time ◽  
Positive Effect ◽  
Activity Information

Characteristics of the translation product are often used in translation process research as predictors for cognitive load, and by extension translation difficulty. In the last decade, user-activity information such as eye-tracking data has been increasingly employed as an experimental tool for that purpose. In this paper, we take a similar approach. We look for significant effects that different predictors may have on three different eye-tracking measures: First Fixation Duration (duration of first fixation on a token), Eye-Key Span (duration between first fixation on a token and the first keystroke contributing to its translation), and Total Reading Time on source tokens (sum of fixations on a token). As predictors we make use of a set of established metrics involving (lexico)semantics and word order, while also investigating the effect of more recent ones concerning syntax, semantics or both. Our results show a, particularly late, positive effect of many of the proposed predictors, suggesting that both fine-grained metrics of syntactic phenomena (such as word reordering) as well as coarse-grained ones (encapsulating both syntactic and semantic information) contribute to translation difficulties. The effect on especially late measures may indicate that the linguistic phenomena that our metrics capture (e.g., word reordering) are resolved in later stages during cognitive processing such as problem-solving and revision.

Eye tracking dysfunction in schizophrenia: Characterization of component eye movement abnormalities, diagnostic specificity, and the role of attention.

1994 ◽  
Vol 103 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Sweeney ◽  
Brett A. Clementz ◽  
Gretchen L. Haas ◽  
Michael D. Escobar ◽  
Karl Drake ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Eye Movement ◽  
Diagnostic Specificity

Grammaticalization in Young People's Language

1999 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 155-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jannis K. Androutsopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Language Varieties ◽  
Speech Styles ◽  
Youth Language ◽  
Colloquial Speech ◽  
Pragmatic Motivation ◽  
Order Pattern

Abstract. Recent research has pointed out that certain grammaticalization phenomena originate in substandard varieties and/or colloquial speech styles. However, the potential of insights to be gained from relating grammaticalization and sociolinguistics still remains largely unexplored. The present paper is an attempt at such an approach, discussing grammaticalization processes in contemporary German youth language (Jugendsprache). On a word formation level, the paper deals with nominal and verbal formatives, denominal conversions, and the use of verb stems as lexical morphemes. Syntactic phenomena include the development of the non-inflected negative null and a new intensifier word order pattern. After highlighting the relevant grammaticalization mechanisms for each of these patterns, the paper discusses the relation between slang creation and grammaticalization, emphasizing the role of expressivity as a discourse-pragmatic motivation for linguistic innovations. Finally, the paper draws attention to connections between youth specific language varieties and language change, and tries to account for the fact that some grammaticalization processes in substandard varieties never reach their potential end point.

scholarly journals The role of verb semantics in Hungarian verb-object order

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 54
Author(s):  
Dorottya Demszky
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Lexical Semantics ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Logical Function ◽  
Semantic Class ◽  
Verb Semantics ◽  
Semantic Classes

Hungarian is often referred to as a discourse-configurational language, since the structural position of constituents is determined by their logical function (topic or comment) rather than their grammatical function (e.g., subject or object). We build on work by Komlósy (1989) and argue that in addition to discourse context, the lexical semantics of the verb also plays a significant role in determining Hungarian word order. In order to investigate the role of lexical semantics in determining Hungarian word order, we conduct a large-scale, data-driven analysis on the ordering of 380 transitive verbs and their objects, as observed in hundreds of thousands of examples extracted from the Hungarian Gigaword Corpus. We test the effect of lexical semantics on the ordering of verbs and their objects by grouping verbs into 11 semantic classes. In addition to the semantic class of the verb, we also include two control features related to information structure, object definiteness and object NP weight, chosen to allow a comparison of their effect size to that of verb semantics. Our results suggest that all three features have a significant effect on verb-object ordering in Hungarian and among these features, the semantic class of the verb has the largest effect. Specifically, we find that stative verbs, such as fed 'cover', jelent 'mean' and övez 'surround', tend to be OV-preferring (with the exception of psych verbs which are strongly VO-preferring) and non-stative verbs, such as bírál 'judge', csökkent 'reduce' and csókol 'kiss', verbs tend to be VO-preferring. These findings support our hypothesis that lexical semantic factors influence word order in Hungarian.

scholarly journals Combining eye tracking with EEG: Effects of filter settings on EEG for trials containing task relevant eye-movements

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louisa Kulke ◽  
Vincent Kulke
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Eye Movement ◽  
List Type ◽  
Pass Filter ◽  
Eeg Data ◽  
Movement Artifacts ◽  
Filter Frequency ◽  
High Pass

Co-registration of electroencephalography (EEG) and eye movements is becoming increasingly popular, as technology advances. This new method has several advantages, including the possibility of testing non-verbal populations and infants. However, eye movements can create artefacts in EEG data. Previous methods to remove eye-movement artefacts, have used high-pass filters before data processing. However, the role of filter settings for eye-artefact exclusion has not directly been investigated. The current study examined the effect of filter settings on EEG recorded in a dataset containing task-relevant eye movements. Part 1 models the effects of filters on eye-movement artifacts and part 2 demonstrates this effect on an EEG dataset containing task-relevant eye-movements. It shows that high-pass filters can lead to significant distortions and create artificial responses that are unrelated to the target. In conclusion, high-pass filter settings of 0.1 or lower can be recommended for EEG studies involving task-relevant eye movements.HighlightsCo-registration of EEG and eye-tracking is gaining popularityHowever, eye movements can create artifacts in the EEG signalThe current paper models the effect of high pass filters on eye-movement artifactsHigh pass filters can induce large distortions in EEG data containing regular eye-movementsThe distortion is affected by fixation duration and filter frequency

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