scholarly journals Incremental processing of telicity in Italian children

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Jasmijn E. Bosch ◽  
Mathilde Chailleux ◽  
Francesca Foppolo
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Lexical Semantics ◽  
Semantic Meaning ◽  
Additional Time ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Visual World Paradigm ◽  
Incremental Processing ◽  
Final Interpretation ◽  
Italian Children

A sentence like 'Lyn has peeled the apple' triggers two types of inferences: a telicity inference that the event is telic; and a culmination inference that the event has reached its telos and has stopped. This results in the final interpretation of the sentence that Lyn has completely peeled the apple. We present an eye-tracking study to test children's ability to predict the upcoming noun (e.g., the apple) during the incremental processing of sentences like 'Look at the picture in which he/she has peeled the…' in which the predicate is telic and the verb appears in the perfective form. By means of the Visual World Paradigm, we aimed to investigate children's ability to use the lexical semantics and aspectual morphology of verbs during language processing. To test if children can predict the target (e.g., a completely peeled apple) by exploiting the lexical-semantic meaning of the verb, we contrasted the target picture with a picture of an object that cannot be peeled; to test if they can predict on the basis of the verb's perfective morphology, we compared the target with the picture of a half-peeled apple. Our results show that Italian children can anticipate the upcoming noun in both cases, providing evidence that children can exploit the morphosyntactic cue on the verb (perfective aspect) to incrementally derive the culmination inference that the telos is reached and the event is completed. We also show that the integration of aspect requires some additional time compared to the integration of the basic lexical semantics of the verb.

scholarly journals The online processing of causal and concessive discourse connectives

Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Köhne-Fuetterer ◽  
Heiner Drenhaus ◽  
Francesca Delogu ◽  
Vera Demberg
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Top Down ◽  
N400 Effect ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Visual World Paradigm ◽  
Incremental Processing ◽  
Online Processing ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Discourse Connectives

Abstract While there is a substantial amount of evidence for language processing being a highly incremental and predictive process, we still know relatively little about how top-down discourse based expectations are combined with bottom-up information such as discourse connectives. The present article reports on three experiments investigating this question using different methodologies (visual world paradigm and ERPs) in two languages (German and English). We find support for highly incremental processing of causal and concessive discourse connectives, causing anticipation of upcoming material. Our visual world study shows that anticipatory looks depend on the discourse connective; furthermore, the German ERP study revealed an N400 effect on a gender-marked adjective preceding the target noun, when the target noun was inconsistent with the expectations elicited by the combination of context and discourse connective. Moreover, our experiments reveal that the facilitation of downstream material based on earlier connectives comes at the cost of reversing original expectations, as evidenced by a P600 effect on the concessive relative to the causal connective.

scholarly journals The Comprehension of Counterfactual Conditionals: Evidence From Eye-Tracking in the Visual World Paradigm

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Orenes ◽  
Juan A. García-Madruga ◽  
Isabel Gómez-Veiga ◽  
Orlando Espino ◽  
Ruth M. J. Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Visual World Paradigm ◽  
Counterfactual Conditionals

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/.

The processing of passive sentences in German

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-195
Author(s):  
Valentina Cristante ◽  
Sarah Schimke
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Primary School ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Visual World ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Passive Sentence ◽  
Auxiliary Verb ◽  
Age Range

Abstract This study examines the processing and interpretation of passive sentences in German-speaking seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and adults. This structure is often assumed to be particularly difficult to understand, and not yet fully mastered in primary school (Kemp, Bredel, & Reich, 2008), i.e. in children aged between six and eleven. Few studies provide empirical data concerning this age range; it is therefore unknown whether this assumption is warranted. Against this background, we tested whether the three age groups differed in their off-line comprehension of passive sentences. In addition, we employed Visual World eye-tracking to measure processing difficulties that may differ between age groups and may not be reflected in the final interpretations. Previous studies on adult language processing in German and English have documented a preference to interpret sentences according to an agent-first strategy. Our results show that all three groups make use of this strategy, and that all of them are able to revise this interpretation once the first cue indicating a passive sentence is encountered (the auxiliary verb form wurde). We conclude that at least from age seven on, children have the linguistic and cognitive prerequisites to process the passive morphosyntax of German and to revise initial sentence misinterpretations.

scholarly journals Spared bottom-up but impaired top-down interactive effects during naturalistic language processing in schizophrenia: evidence from the visual-world paradigm

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (08) ◽  
pp. 1335-1345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Rabagliati ◽  
Nathaniel Delaney-Busch ◽  
Jesse Snedeker ◽  
Gina Kuperberg
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Interactive Effects ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Spoken Language Processing ◽  
Level Information

AbstractBackgroundPeople with schizophrenia process language in unusual ways, but the causes of these abnormalities are unclear. In particular, it has proven difficult to empirically disentangle explanations based on impairments in the top-down processing of higher level information from those based on the bottom-up processing of lower level information.MethodsTo distinguish these accounts, we used visual-world eye tracking, a paradigm that measures spoken language processing during real-world interactions. Participants listened to and then acted out syntactically ambiguous spoken instructions (e.g. ‘tickle the frog with the feather’, which could either specify how to tickle a frog, or which frog to tickle). We contrasted how 24 people with schizophrenia and 24 demographically matched controls used two types of lower level information (prosody and lexical representations) and two types of higher level information (pragmatic and discourse-level representations) to resolve the ambiguous meanings of these instructions. Eye tracking allowed us to assess how participants arrived at their interpretation in real time, while recordings of participants’ actions measured how they ultimately interpreted the instructions.ResultsWe found a striking dissociation in participants’ eye movements: the two groups were similarly adept at using lower level information to immediately constrain their interpretations of the instructions, but only controls showed evidence of fast top-down use of higher level information. People with schizophrenia, nonetheless, did eventually reach the same interpretations as controls.ConclusionsThese data suggest that language abnormalities in schizophrenia partially result from a failure to use higher level information in a top-down fashion, to constrain the interpretation of language as it unfolds in real time.

scholarly journals I’m not sure that curve means what you think it means: Toward a [more] realistic understanding of the role of eye-movement generation in the Visual World Paradigm

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob McMurray
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Type I Error ◽  
Sampling Procedure ◽  
Type I ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Visual World Paradigm ◽  
Stochastic Sampling ◽  
Data Visualizations ◽  
Sequential Nature

The Visual World Paradigm (VWP) is a powerful experimental paradigm for language. Listeners respond to speech in a “visual world” consisting of potential referents of the speech. Fixations to these referents provides insight into the preliminary states of language processing as decisions unfold. The VWP has become the dominant paradigm in psycholinguistics and extended to every level of language, development, and disorders. Part of its impact is the impressive data visualizations which reveal the millisecond-by-millisecond timecourse of processing, and advances have been made in developing new analyses that precisely characterize this timecourse. However, all theoretical and statistical approaches make the tacit assumption that the timecourse of fixations is closely related to the underlying activation in the system. It is unclear if this assumption holds given the sequential nature of fixations, and their long refractory period. I investigated this assumption with a series of simulations. Each simulation starts with a set of true underlying activation functions and generates simulated fixations using a simple stochastic sampling procedure that respects the sequential nature of fixations. I then analyzed the results to determine the conditions under which the observed fixations curves match the underlying, the reliability of the observed data, and the implications for Type I Error and power. These simulations demonstrate that even under the simplest fixation-based models, observed fixation curves are systematically biased relative to the underlying and substantially noisier, with important implications for reliability and power. I then present a potential generative model that may ultimately overcome many of these issues. **This is a preprint of a manuscript that is under review. Please do not cite without the authors permission.

Phonological, not semantic, activation dominates Chinese character recognition: Evidence from a visual world eye-tracking study

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 617-628
Author(s):  
Xiuhong Tong ◽  
Wei Shen ◽  
Zhao Li ◽  
Mengdi Xu ◽  
Liping Pan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Character Recognition ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
Chinese Character ◽  
Semantic Activation ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Visual World Paradigm ◽  
Chinese Character Recognition ◽  
Eye Fixations ◽  
Semantic Radical

Combining eye-tracking technique with a revised visual world paradigm, this study examined how positional, phonological, and semantic information of radicals are activated in visual Chinese character recognition. Participants’ eye movements were tracked when they looked at four types of invented logographic characters including a semantic radical in the legal (e.g., [Formula: see text]) and illegal positions ([Formula: see text]), a phonetic radical in the legal (e.g., [Formula: see text]) and illegal positions (e.g., [Formula: see text]). These logographic characters were presented simultaneously with either a sound-cued (e.g., /qiao2/) or meaning-cued (e.g., a picture of a bridge) condition. Participants appeared to allocate more visual attention towards radicals in legal, rather than illegal, positions. In addition, more eye fixations occurred on phonetic, rather than on semantic, radicals across both sound- and meaning-cued conditions, indicating participants’ strong preference for phonetic over semantic radicals in visual character processing. These results underscore the universal phonology principle in processing non-alphabetic Chinese logographic characters.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document