Training the Interpretation of Ambiguity

<p>The interpretation of emotionally ambiguous words, sentences, or scenarios can be biased through training procedures that are collectively called Cognitive Bias Modification for Interpretation (CBM-I). Little CBM-I research has examined the underlying mechanisms responsible for the induction of emotional interpretive biases, or the potential for this line of enquiry to inform psycholinguistic models of meaning activation and selection. In this thesis a novel CBM-I paradigm was developed and then systematically manipulated in order to discriminate between two mechanistic accounts of changes in interpretive bias – the Emotional Priming Account and the Ambiguity Resolution Account. In Experiment 1 participants completed word fragments that were consistently related to either a negative or benign interpretation of an ambiguous sentence. In a subsequent semantic priming task they demonstrated an interpretation bias, in that they were faster to judge the relatedness of targets that were associated with the training-congruent than the training-incongruent meaning of an emotionally ambiguous homograph. In Experiment 2 the time between the presentation of the prime and the target (Stimulus Onset Asynchrony; SOA) at test was shortened. Interpretive biases were not observed at a short SOA suggesting that training did not induce biases at an early lexical activation stage. Interpretive bias was then eliminated when participants simply completed valenced word fragments (Experiment 3) or completed fragments related to emotional but unambiguous sentences (Experiment 4) during training. Only when participants were required to actively resolve emotionally ambiguous sentences during training did changes in interpretation emerge at test. These findings suggest that CBM-I achieves its effects by altering a production rule that aids the selection of a single meaning from alternatives, in line with an Ambiguity Resolution account. Finally, no interpretive biases were observed when the task in the test phase was substituted with a lexical decision task (Experiment 5). Participants only showed biases in the selection of meanings when the test phase encouraged them to interpret the prime. This pattern of results suggests that the alteration of selection patterns in word recognition depend on the strategies employed by participants in the test phase. Overall the findings are discussed with regards to the Ambiguity Resolution and Emotional Priming accounts of modified interpretive biases. Implications for current psycholinguistic models of meaning activation and selection are considered.</p>

Training the Interpretation of Ambiguity

<p>The interpretation of emotionally ambiguous words, sentences, or scenarios can be biased through training procedures that are collectively called Cognitive Bias Modification for Interpretation (CBM-I). Little CBM-I research has examined the underlying mechanisms responsible for the induction of emotional interpretive biases, or the potential for this line of enquiry to inform psycholinguistic models of meaning activation and selection. In this thesis a novel CBM-I paradigm was developed and then systematically manipulated in order to discriminate between two mechanistic accounts of changes in interpretive bias – the Emotional Priming Account and the Ambiguity Resolution Account. In Experiment 1 participants completed word fragments that were consistently related to either a negative or benign interpretation of an ambiguous sentence. In a subsequent semantic priming task they demonstrated an interpretation bias, in that they were faster to judge the relatedness of targets that were associated with the training-congruent than the training-incongruent meaning of an emotionally ambiguous homograph. In Experiment 2 the time between the presentation of the prime and the target (Stimulus Onset Asynchrony; SOA) at test was shortened. Interpretive biases were not observed at a short SOA suggesting that training did not induce biases at an early lexical activation stage. Interpretive bias was then eliminated when participants simply completed valenced word fragments (Experiment 3) or completed fragments related to emotional but unambiguous sentences (Experiment 4) during training. Only when participants were required to actively resolve emotionally ambiguous sentences during training did changes in interpretation emerge at test. These findings suggest that CBM-I achieves its effects by altering a production rule that aids the selection of a single meaning from alternatives, in line with an Ambiguity Resolution account. Finally, no interpretive biases were observed when the task in the test phase was substituted with a lexical decision task (Experiment 5). Participants only showed biases in the selection of meanings when the test phase encouraged them to interpret the prime. This pattern of results suggests that the alteration of selection patterns in word recognition depend on the strategies employed by participants in the test phase. Overall the findings are discussed with regards to the Ambiguity Resolution and Emotional Priming accounts of modified interpretive biases. Implications for current psycholinguistic models of meaning activation and selection are considered.</p>

Influence of homophone processing during auditory language comprehension on executive control processes: A dual-task paradigm

In the present preregistered study, we evaluated the possibility of a shared cognitive mechanism during verbal and non-verbal tasks and therefore the implication of domain-general cognitive control during language comprehension. We hypothesized that a behavioral cost will be observed during a dual-task including both verbal and non-verbal difficult processing. Specifically, to test this claim, we designed a dual-task paradigm involving: an auditory language comprehension task (sentence comprehension) and a non-verbal Flanker task (including congruent and incongruent trials). We manipulated sentence ambiguity and evaluated if the ambiguity effect modified behavioral performances in the non-verbal Flanker task. Under the assumption that ambiguous sentences induce a more difficult process than unambiguous sentences, we expected non-verbal flanker task performances to be impaired only when a simultaneous difficult language processing is performed. This would be specifically reflected by a performance cost during incongruent Flanker items only during ambiguous sentence presentation. Conversely, we observed a facilitatory effect for the incongruent Flanker items during ambiguous sentence suggesting better non-verbal inhibitory performances when an ambiguous sentence was simultaneously processed. Exploratory data analysis suggests that this effect is not only related to a more difficult language processing but also to the previous (n-1) Flanker item. Indeed, results showed that incongruent n-1 Flanker items led to a facilitation of the incongruent synchronized Flanker items only when ambiguous sentences were conjointly presented. This result, even if it needs to be corroborated in future studies, suggests that the recruitment of executive control mechanisms facilitates subsequent executive control implication during difficult language processing. The present study suggests a common executive control mechanism during difficult verbal and non-verbal tasks.

Ambiguous Sentence Processing in Translation

The goal of our research was to explore the possible online co-activation of both the target language (TL) syntactic structure representation and TL attachment strategies in translation, and to look over a possible interaction between both syntactic properties. To this purpose, Spanish (L1) – English (L2) bilinguals were instructed to read complex noun phrases with an ambiguous relative clause in Spanish to either repeat them in Spanish or translate them into English. The final word of the sentences and the syntactic congruency between the source language (SL) and TL syntactic structure were manipulated. The results revealed co-activation of both TL syntactic properties: participants interpreted sentences more accordingly to the TL preferred strategy (low attachment) in the reading for translation task, read congruent sentences faster, and used the TL preferred interpretation strategy in the congruent condition of the sentences more. These results indicated TL activation at different syntactic levels during comprehension of the SL in translation.

A Multinomial Processing Tree Model of RC Attachment

In the field of sentence processing, speakers’ preferred interpretation of ambiguous sentences is often determined using a variant of a discrete choice task, in which participants are asked to indicate their preferred meaning of an ambiguous sentence. We discuss participants’ degree of attentiveness as a potential source of bias and variability in such tasks.We show that it may distort the estimates of the preference of a particular interpretation obtained in such experiments and may thus complicate the interpretation of the results as well as the comparison of the results of several experiments. We propose an analysis method based on multinomial processing tree models (Batchelder and Riefer, 1999) which can correct for this bias and allows for a separation of parameters of theoretical importance from nuisance parameters. We test two variants of the MPT-based model on experimental data from English and Turkish and demonstrate that our method can provide deeper insight into the processes underlying participants’ answering behavior and their interpretation preferences than analyses based on raw percentages.

Pronominal anaphora resolution in Polish: investigating online sentence interpretation using eye-tracking.

The mechanism of anaphora resolution is subject to large cross-linguistic differences. The most likely reason for this is the different sensitivity of pronouns to pragmatic and syntactic cues of reference. In the current study, we explored the mechanism of anaphora resolution in Polish. First, in an ambiguous sentence-interpretation task, we explored the natural biases that occur during the interpretation of null or overt pronouns. More specifically, we investigated whether Polish speakers prefer to relate overt pronouns to antecedents which are in the syntactic position of a subject or an object. Subsequently, we tested the consequences of violation of this bias when tracing the online sentence-interpretation process using eye-tracking. Our results show that Polish speakers have a strong preference for interpreting null pronouns as referring to antecedents in a subject position and for interpreting overt pronouns as referring to antecedents in an object position. However, in online sentence interpretation, only overt pronouns showed sensitivity to violation of the speaker’s natural preferences for a pronoun-antecedent match. We found the null pronoun resolution to be more flexible than that of overt pronouns. Our results indicate that it is much easier for Polish speakers to shift the reference of a null pronoun than an overt one whenever a pronoun is forced to refer to a less-preferred antecedent. We propose that this is because the interpretation of null and overt pronouns is sensitive to the different cues which determine their reference. Overall, in the Polish language, interpretation of a null pronoun seems to be more sensitive to pragmatic cues of reference than syntactic cues of reference, while resolution of overt pronouns relies strongly on syntax-based cues.

Are Bilingual Logical Representations Shared?: Priming scopally ambiguous sentences in English, Estonian, and Dutch

Do bilinguals use the same logical representations in processing both languages they know if the languages they know diverge on the preferred interpretation of a scopally ambiguous sentence? We investigated this question by studying effects of cross-linguistic influence and priming in the comprehension of scopally ambiguous all...not sentences. In this investigation, we focused on Estonian-English bilinguals, because these sentences are interpreted differently in English compared to Estonian.Across four sentence-picture matching experiments, we firstly observed that bilingual logical representations can be primed within languages (both from L1-to-L1 and from L2-to-L2) and between languages (both from L1-to-L2 and from L2-to-L1). This finding indicates that bilinguals make use of shared logical representations in processing the languages they know, and that logical representations do not specify language-specific biases in the assignment of scope. Secondly, we observed that bilinguals experience bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in the construction of logical representations. This finding suggests that bilingual representations of implicit knowledge about scopal preferences is integrated between the languages they know.

The Soul’s Tomb: Plato on the Body as the Cause of Psychic Disorders

I argue that, according to Plato, the body is the sole cause of psychic disorders. This view is expressed at Timaeus 86b in an ambiguous sentence that has been widely misunderstood by translators and commentators. The goal of this article is to offer a new understanding of Plato’s text and view. In the first section, I argue that although the body is the result of the gods’ best efforts, their sub-optimal materials meant that the soul is constantly vulnerable to the body’s influences. In the second section, I argue that every psychic disorder is a disruption of the motions of the inner psychic circles by the body; moreover, I defend my translation of 86b. In the final section, I argue that the goal of education is to restore the circles to their original orbits, and I disarm a possible objection that bad education is also a cause of psychic disorder.

Single-stage prediction models do not explain the magnitude of syntactic disambiguation difficulty

The disambiguation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence in favor of dispreferred parse can lead to slower reading at the disambiguation point. This phenomenon, referred to as a garden path effect, has motivated models in which readers only maintain a subset of the possible parses of the sentence; reverting to a discarded parse requires costly reanalysis. More recently, it has been proposed that the garden path effect can be reduced to surprisal arising in a fully parallel parser: words consistent with the initially dispreferred but ultimately correct parse are simply less predictable than those consistent with the incorrect parse. The surprisal account is more parsimonious since predictability has pervasive effects in reading far beyond garden path sentences. Crucially, this account predicts a linear effect of surprisal: the difficulty experienced by readers should be proportional to the difference in word surprisal between the ultimately correct and ultimately incorrect interpretations. To test this prediction, we estimated word-by-word surprisal using recurrent neural network language models, comparing those estimates to self-paced reading times for three garden path constructions. While surprisal successfully predicted the existence of garden path responses, it severely underpredicted the magnitude of all of the garden path effects. Further, the relative size of the predicted effects was inconsistent with the relative size of the responses in humans, indicating that a differently scaled linking function would not be able to predict the response magnitudes either. These results support two-stage processing models in which recovery mechanisms beyond predictability are involved in processing garden path sentences.

Profiles of Dialogue for Amphiboly

Amphiboly has been widely recognized, starting from the time of Aristotle, as an informal fallacy arising from grammatical ambiguity. This paper applies the profiles of dialogue tool to the fallacy of amphiboly, providing a five-step evidence-based procedure whereby a syntactically ambiguous sentence uttered in a natural language text can be evaluated as committing a fallacy of amphiboly (or not). A user applies the tool to a natural language text by comparing a descriptive graph, representing how the argumentation actually went, to a normative graph, representing how the argumentation should ideally have proceeded.