Target Attainment in the Production of English Vowels by Polish Students: The Influence of Language Instruction in the Time of Covid-19, Imitation, and Musicality

This pilot experimental study pursues a number of goals. Firstly, it aims to assess the phonetic attainment of selected English vowels among twelve Polish students of English philology after one term of intensive online pronunciation training in pandemic conditions. Secondly, it looks at potential differences between production outcomes in two experimental contexts, that is, reading and imitation. Finally, it seeks to determine if there is any correlation between musicality and target attainment with a view to identifying a broader scope for potential future research questions. For this purpose, recorded samples of read and imitated English words containing vowels in a uniform context /h_d/ were assessed by six raters using a 5-point Likert scale. The results, including those of an online musicality test, were analysed and subjected to statistical testing. The majority of total scores exceed the assumed acceptability benchmark of 50%. The study yielded a number of unexpected results. Firstly, female participants performed significantly better than male ones in the reading experiment, but not in imitation. Secondly, a stronger correlation was found between the reading results and musicality than between imitation results and musicality.

Absorbing narratives and Motivation to Read

Digital reading has established its position, and thus research on how reading mode affects reading experience and enjoyment is needed. This study is based on a reading experiment with 89 14–15-year-olds who read or listened to an entire book in four different reading modes: paperbook, ebook, audiobook, and via a commercial subscription service. Using quantitative methods, we examine whether reading mode affects story world absorption as well as seek connections between gender, motivation, absorption and reading mode preferences. Based on the study, reading mode has no statistical impact on narrative absorption experience, measured by the Story World Absorption Scale. Instead, the experience correlates with reading motivation; an adolescent with higher motivation is more likely to feel absorbed while reading, regardless of reading mode. On average, girls experience higher reading motivation and absorption than boys. Less motivated seem to prefer audiobook whereas more motivated choose reading over listening.

The interpretational preferences of null and overt pronouns in Chinese

We report three reading comprehension experiments investigating the interpretational preferences and processing of pro and overt pronouns in Chinese, a ‘discourse-oriented’ pro-drop language (Huang 1984). Our offline rating experiments showed that both pro and overt pronouns were subject-based, but the preference for the subject antecedents was stronger with pro than with overt pronouns. In addition, these different levels of subject biases were confirmed in a self-paced reading experiment; a processing penalty was incurred with object antecedent interpretation regardless of the pronominal type, but the penalty was bigger for pro than for overt pronouns. These experimental results are consistent with Accessibility theory that less specific anaphoric expressions (e.g. pro) were less likely than more specific anaphoric expressions (e.g. overt pronouns) to refer to a less prominent antecedent (e.g. syntactic object).

A Rational Model of Incremental Argument Interpretation: The Comprehension of Swedish Transitive Clauses

A central component of sentence understanding is verb-argument interpretation, determining how the referents in the sentence are related to the events or states expressed by the verb. Previous work has found that comprehenders change their argument interpretations incrementally as the sentence unfolds, based on morphosyntactic (e.g., case, agreement), lexico-semantic (e.g., animacy, verb-argument fit), and discourse cues (e.g., givenness). However, it is still unknown whether these cues have a privileged role in language processing, or whether their effects on argument interpretation originate in implicit expectations based on the joint distribution of these cues with argument assignments experienced in previous language input. We compare the former, linguistic account against the latter, expectation-based account, using data from production and comprehension of transitive clauses in Swedish. Based on a large corpus of Swedish, we develop a rational (Bayesian) model of incremental argument interpretation. This model predicts the processing difficulty experienced at different points in the sentence as a function of the Bayesian surprise associated with changes in expectations over possible argument interpretations. We then test the model against reading times from a self-paced reading experiment on Swedish. We find Bayesian surprise to be a significant predictor of reading times, complementing effects of word surprisal. Bayesian surprise also captures the qualitative effects of morpho-syntactic and lexico-semantic cues. Additional model comparisons find that it—with a single degree of freedom—captures much, if not all, of the effects associated with these cues. This suggests that the effects of form- and meaning-based cues to argument interpretation are mediated through expectation-based processing.

Retrieval (N400) and integration (P600) in expectation-based comprehension

Expectation-based theories of language processing, such as Surprisal theory, are supported by evidence of anticipation effects in both behavioural and neurophysiological measures. Online measures of language processing, however, are known to be influenced by factors such as lexical association that are distinct from—but often confounded with—expectancy. An open question therefore is whether a specific locus of expectancy related effects can be established in neural and behavioral processing correlates. We address this question in an event-related potential experiment and a self-paced reading experiment that independently cross expectancy and lexical association in a context manipulation design. We find that event-related potentials reveal that the N400 is sensitive to both expectancy and lexical association, while the P600 is modulated only by expectancy. Reading times, in turn, reveal effects of both association and expectancy in the first spillover region, followed by effects of expectancy alone in the second spillover region. These findings are consistent with the Retrieval-Integration account of language comprehension, according to which lexical retrieval (N400) is facilitated for words that are both expected and associated, whereas integration difficulty (P600) will be greater for unexpected words alone. Further, an exploratory analysis suggests that the P600 is not merely sensitive to expectancy violations, but rather, that there is a continuous relation. Taken together, these results suggest that the P600, like reading times, may reflect a meaning-centric notion of Surprisal in language comprehension.

W czasie wiersza. "Posłańcy" Stanisława Grochowiaka

This paper – presenting a close reading of Stanisław Grochowiak’s poem Posłańcy [The Messengers] – proposes reflections on the “time of the poem”. It deals with the issue of experiencing different temporalities while reading (when and where you are while experiencing written words; what is the relationship between the reader's "real" and "fictional" – immersed in the process of reading – lives), and proposes a depiction of pace moderations in the analyzed work – of its own, differential dynamics. The problem of time and velocity is the starting point for a hermeneutic interpretation, or rather hermeneutic exercises (inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style): a conceptual, anthropological and semiotic reading experiment carried out on Grochowiak's poem. This essay is an attempt to pave a few paths for understanding The Messengers and their messages. Following in the footsteps of the title characters (with the help of associations and seemingly trivial observations) becomes a cognitive and imaginative adventure, a revolve around an ineffable, dark mystery of the poem (perhaps of all poems and their messengers).

Perspectival usages of French past time verbal tenses: an experimental investigation

In this paper, we carried out two experimental studies to investigate whether verbal tenses, in their perspectival usages, give access to the speaker’s perspective. Study 1 is an annotation study in which annotators evaluated corpus excerpts as expressing situations or narrating events in a subjective or objective way. We manipulated access to the verbal tense: half of the annotators saw the tense of the verbs, and half saw only infinitive forms of the verbs. Study 2 is a self-paced reading experiment in which we examined how native speakers of French process utterances with the Passé Simple when it is preceded by aujourd’hui (semantic incompatibility solved pragmatically by perspective-taking), hier (semantic and pragmatic compatibility) and en ce moment (semantic incompatibility which cannot be solved pragmatically). The results of Study 1 suggest that the subjective interpretation of an utterance is not triggered by its verbal tense. Study 2 questions the idea that perspective-taking is a component of speaker’s subjectivity. In general, our experimental findings do not support the hypothesis that verbal tenses give access to speaker’s subjectivity, a theoretical hypothesis which has never before been directly experimentally tested.

Definitely Islands? Experimental investigation of definite islands

Experimental work on islands has used formal acceptability judgment studies to quantify the severity of different island violations. This current study uses this approach to probe the (in-)violability of definite islands, an understudied island, in offline and online measures. We conducted two acceptability judgment studies and find a modest island effect. However, rating distributions appear bimodal across definites and indefinites. We also conducted a self-paced reading experiment, but found no sig- nificant effects. Overall, offline, definite islands differ from other uniform islands, but online, the results are more complicated.

Comparing predictors of sentence self-paced reading times: Syntactic complexity versus transitional probability metrics

When estimating the influence of sentence complexity on reading, researchers typically opt for one of two main approaches: Measuring syntactic complexity (SC) or transitional probability (TP). Comparisons of the predictive power of both approaches have yielded mixed results. To address this inconsistency, we conducted a self-paced reading experiment. Participants read sentences of varying syntactic complexity. From two alternatives, we selected the set of SC and TP measures, respectively, that provided the best fit to the self-paced reading data. We then compared the contributions of the SC and TP measures to self-paced reading times when entered into the same model. Our results showed that while both measures explained significant portions of variance in reading times (over and above control variables: word/sentence length, word frequency and word position) when included in independent models, their contributions changed drastically when SC and TP were entered into the same model. Specifically, we only observed significant effects of TP. We conclude that in our experiment the control variables explained the bulk of variance. When comparing the small effects of SC and TP, the effects of TP appear to be more robust.

What Are the Modulators of Cross-Language Syntactic Activation During Natural Reading?

Bilinguals juggle knowledge of multiple languages, including syntactic constructions that can mismatch (e.g., the red car, la voiture rouge; Mary sees it, Mary le voit). We used eye-tracking to examine whether French-English (n = 23) and English-French (n = 21) bilingual adults activate non-target language syntax during English L2 (Experiment 1) and L1 (Experiment 2) reading, and whether this differed from functionally monolingual English reading (Experiment 3, n = 26). People read English sentences containing syntactic constructions that were either partially shared across languages (adjective-noun constructions) or completely unshared (object-pronoun constructions). These constructions were presented in an intact form, or in a violated form that was French-consistent or French-inconsistent. For both L2 and L1 reading, bilinguals read French-consistent adjective-noun violations relatively quickly, suggesting cross-language activation. This did not occur when the same people read object-pronoun constructions manipulated in the same manner. Surprisingly, English readers exposed to French in their lifetime but functionally monolingual, also read French-consistent violations for adjective-noun constructions faster, particularly for some items. However, when we controlled for item differences in the L2 and L1 reading data, cross-language effects observed were similar to the original data pattern. Moreover, individual differences in L2 experience modulated both L2 and L1 reading for adjective-noun constructions, consistent with a cross-language activation interpretation of the data. These findings are consistent with the idea of syntactic cross-language activation during reading for some constructions. However, for several reasons, cross-language syntactic activation during comprehension may be overall more variable and challenging to investigate methodologically compared to past work on other forms of cross-language activation (i.e., single words).