Electrophysiological and behavioral evidence of syntactic priming in sentence comprehension.

Event-related potentials and eye tracking were used to investigate the nature of priming effects in sentence comprehension. Participants read 2 sentences (a prime sentence and a target sentence), both of which had a difficult and ambiguous sentence structure. The prime and target sentences contained either the same verb or verbs that were very close in meaning. Priming effects were robust when the verb was repeated. In the event-related potential experiment, the amplitude of the P600 was reduced in target sentences that followed prime sentences with the same verb but not in prime sentences with a synonymous verb. In the eye-tracking experiment, total reading times on the disambiguating region were reduced when the targets followed prime sentences with the same verb but not when targets followed prime sentences with a synonymous verb. The fact that verb overlap greatly boosted priming effects in reduced relative sentences may indicate that verb argument structures play an important role in online parsing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sources of sentence constraint on lexical ambiguity resolution

Results from a series of naming experiments demonstrated that major lexical categories of simple sentences can provide sources of constraint on the interpretation of ambiguous words (homonyms). Manipulation of verb (Experiment 1) or subject noun (Experiment 2) specificity produced contexts that were empirically rated as being strongly biased or ambiguous. Priming was demonstrated for target words related to both senses of a homonym following ambiguous sentences, but only contextually appropriate target words were primed following strongly biased dominant or subordinate sentences. Experiment 3 showed an increase in the magnitude of priming when multiple constraints on activation converged. Experiments 4 and 5 eliminated combinatorial intralexical priming as an alternative explanation. Instead, it was demonstrated that each constraint was influential only insofar as it contributed to the overall semantic representation of the sentence. When the multiple sources of constraint were retained but the sentence-level representation was changed (Experiment 4) or eliminated (Experiment 5), the results of Experiments 1, 2, and 3 and were not replicated. Experiment 6 examined the issue of homonym exposure duration by using an 80-msec stimulus onset asynchrony. The results replicated the previous experiments. The overall evidence indicates that a sentence context can be made strongly and immediately constraining by the inclusion of specific fillers for salient lexical categories. The results are discussed within a constraint-based, context-sensitive model of lexical ambiguity resolution.     

The development of the dental high-speed air turbine handpiece. Part 2

It is usually assumed that sexual material is easily identifiable by its content. The present study investigated whether subjects could be led to interpret ambiguous material as sexual or not via simple instructions. Thematically ambiguous written text was presented to 269 subjects. The principal independent variable was the content of advance information. Advance information was designed to suggest that the accompanying text had either a sexual or a nonsexual theme. After reading the story and completing an intervening task, subjects completed recall and recognition tasks based on the text. These data were used to determine the theme or story interpretation given by subjects. The information contained in the advance organizers influenced subjects' memories for and interpretations of the ambiguous story. When the story was preceded by introductory information that suggested sexual content, subjects tended to attribute sexual meaning to the story. Other subjects attributed a nonsexual meaning to the same text when it was preceded by nonsexual information. Findings suggest that under certain conditions, sex is in the "eye of the beholder."     

Younger and older adults' on-line processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences.

Off-line studies of younger and older adults' processing of syntactically complex sentences have shown that there is a consistent negative relationship between task performance and working memory for older adults. However, it is not evident from these studies whether working memory affects the immediate syntactic analysis of a sentence, off-line processes, or both. In the current study an on-line reading paradigm was used to examine the working memory capacity-constrained sentence processing model from M. C. MacDonald, M. A. Just, and P. A. Carpenter (1992). Working memory span, type of syntactic ambiguity (ambiguous vs. unambiguous), and type of syntactic ambiguity resolution (main verb vs. relative clause) interacted to influence younger and older adults' on-line reading times and off-line sentence comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Retrieval of Incidental Stimulus-Response Associations as a Source of Negative Priming.

Priming effects of ignored distractor words were investigated in a task-switching situation that allowed an orthogonal variation of priming and response compatibility between prime and probe. Across 3 experiments, the authors obtained a disordinal interaction of priming and response relation. Responding was delayed in the ignored repetition condition if different responses were required for identical stimuli in the prime and probe (negative priming). Repeating the prime distractor in the probe facilitated responding if the same response was required in the prime and in the probe (positive priming). The same pattern of results was replicated in a letter-matching task without task switching (Experiment 4). Findings lend support to a new model that explains negative priming in terms of an automatic retrieval of incidental stimulus-response associations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Strategy effects counteract distractor inhibition: Negative priming with constantly absent probe distractors.

It is an accepted, albeit puzzling finding that negative priming (NP) hinges on the presence of distractors in probe displays. In three experiments without probe distractors, the authors yielded evidence that response-biasing processes based on the contingency between prime and probe displays may have caused this finding. It is argued that it is of help in standard NP experiments to process the distractor in the prime display in order to prepare the response to the probe target. When this contingency was removed (Experiments 2 and 3), NP was reliably observed without probe distractors, whereas no NP emerged if the design contained the typical contingency (Experiment 1). For this reason, the data suggest that the absence of NP, which is usually observed under these conditions, may be due to a contingency-based component. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Parallel memory retrieval in dual-task situations: I. Semantic memory.

Can participants retrieve information about the 2nd of 2 stimuli while they are processing the 1st? Four experiments suggest they can. Reaction times to the 1st stimulus were faster if it came from the same category as the 2nd than if it came from a different category. This category-match effect was observed for letter-digit discrimination (Experiment 1), magnitude and parity judgments about digits (Experiment 2), and lexical decisions (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 showed that the 2nd stimulus could semantically prime the 1st. The category-match effect was observed only when the same task was performed on the 2 stimuli. When the task changed from the Ist stimulus to the 2nd, there was no advantage of a category match. This dependence on task set may explain previous failures to find parallel retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selection mechanisms in reading lexically ambiguous words.

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing lexically ambiguous words. The ambiguous words were either biased (one strongly dominant interpretation) or nonbiased. Readers' gaze durations were longer on nonbiased than biased words when the disambiguating information followed the target word. In Experiment 1, reading times on the disambiguating word did not differ whether the disambiguation followed the target word immediately or occurred several words later. In Experiment 2, prior disambiguation eliminated the long gaze durations on nonbiased target words but resulted in long gaze durations on biased target words if the context demanded the subordinate meaning. The results indicate that successful integration of one meaning with prior context terminates the search for alternative meanings of that word. This results in selective (single meaning) access when integration of a dominant meaning is fast (due to a biasing context) and identification of a subordinate meaning is slow (a strongly biased ambiguity with low-frequency meaning). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical ambiguity resolution in good and poor comprehenders: An eye fixation and self-paced reading study in primary school children.

To investigate the use of context and monitoring of comprehension in lexical ambiguity resolution in children, the authors asked 10- to 12-year-old good and poor comprehenders to read sentences consisting of 2 clauses, 1 containing the ambiguous word and the other the disambiguating information. The order of the clauses was reversed so that disambiguating information either preceded or followed the ambiguous word. Context use and comprehension monitoring were examined by measuring eye fixations (Experiment 1) and self-paced reading times (Experiment 2) on the ambiguous word and disambiguating region. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 showed that poor comprehenders made use of prior context to facilitate lexical ambiguity resolution as effectively as good comprehenders but that they monitored their comprehension less effectively than good comprehenders. Good comprehenders corrected an initial interpretation error on an ambiguous word and restored comprehension once they encountered the disambiguating region. Poor comprehenders failed to deal with this type of comprehension failure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

There's more to the picture than meets the eye: young children's difficulty understanding biased interpretation

5 experiments investigated children's understanding that expectations based on prior experience may influence a person's interpretation of ambiguous visual information. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-olds were asked to infer a puppet's interpretation of a small, ambiguous portion of a line drawing after the puppet had been led to have an erroneous expectation about the drawing's identity. Children of both ages failed to ascribe to the puppet an interpretation consistent with the puppet's expectation. Instead, children attributed complete knowledge of the drawing to the puppet. In Experiment 2, the task was modified to reduce memory demands, but 4- and 5-year-olds continued to overlook the puppet's prior expectations when asked to infer the puppet's interpretation of an ambiguous scene. 6-year-olds responded correctly. In Experiment 3, 4- and 5-year-olds correctly reported that an observer who saw a restricted view would not know what was in the drawing, but children did not realize that the observer's interpretation might be mistaken. Experiments 4 and 5 explored the possibility that children's errors reflect difficulty inhibiting their own knowledge when responding. The results are taken as evidence that understanding of interpretation begins at approximately age 6 years.     

Exploiting degrees of inflectional ambiguity: Stem form and the time course of morphological processing.

The authors compared sublexical and supralexical approaches to morphological processing with unambiguous and ambiguous inflected words and words with ambiguous stems in 3 masked and unmasked priming experiments in Finnish. Experiment 1 showed equal facilitation for all prime types with a short 60-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) but significant facilitation for unambiguous words only with a long 300-ms SOA. Experiment 2 showed that all potential readings of ambiguous inflections were activated under a short SOA. Whereas the prime-target form overlap did not affect the results under a short SOA, it significantly modulated the results with a long SOA. Experiment 3 confirmed that the results from masked priming were modulated by the morphological structure of the words but not by the prime-target form overlap alone. The results support approaches in which early prelexical morphological processing is driven by morph-based segmentation and form is used to cue selection between 2 candidates only during later processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Does English coronal place assimilation create lexical ambiguity?

The purpose of this study was to determine how potential lexical ambiguity produced by place assimilation is resolved. Four cross-modal form priming experiments using primes in sentential contexts were performed. In the first 2, prime items had underlyingly coronal offsets (e.g., right) with assimilated noncoronal place. The primes were judged to be perceptually ambiguous (between right and ripe) in Experiment 1 and noncoronal (ripe) in Experiment 2 in off-line testing. In Experiment 3, primes were replaced with corresponding underlyingly noncoronal items (ripe). In all 3 experiments, participants showed selective priming for the underlying form of the prime. A 4th form priming experiment using the gated tokens of priming stimuli used in Experiment 2 examined the role of postlexical context on this process. In this experiment, participants showed priming for both underlying and surface forms of the prime. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Why do non-color words interfere with color naming?

In the non-color-word Stroop task, university students' response latencies were longer for low-frequency than for higher frequency target words. Visual identity primes facilitated color naming in groups reading the prime silently or processing it semantically (Experiment 1) but did not when participants generated a rhyme of the prime (Experiment 3). With auditory identity primes, generating an associate or a rhyme of the prime produced interference (Experiments 2 and 3). Color-naming latencies were longer for nonwords than for words (Experiment 4). There was a small long-term repetition benefit in color naming for low-frequency words that had been presented in the lexical decision task (Experiment 5). Facilitation of word recognition speeds color naming except when phonological activation of the base word increases response competition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word recognition and syntactic attachment in reading: Evidence for a staged architecture.

In 3 experiments, the author examined how readers' eye movements are influenced by joint manipulations of a word's frequency and the syntactic fit of the word in its context. In the critical conditions of the first 2 experiments, a high- or low-frequency verb was used to disambiguate a garden-path sentence, while in the last experiment, a high- or low-frequency verb constituted a phrase structure violation. The frequency manipulation always influenced the early eye movement measures of first-fixation duration and gaze duration. The context manipulation had a delayed effect in Experiment 1, influencing only the probability of a regressive eye movement from later in the sentence. However, the context manipulation influenced the same early eye movement measures as the frequency effect in Experiments 2 and 3, though there was no statistical interaction between the effects of these variables. The context manipulation also influenced the probability of a regressive eye movement from the verb, though the frequency manipulation did not. These results are shown to confirm predictions emerging from the serial, staged architecture for lexical and integrative processing of the E–Z Reader 10 model of eye movement control in reading (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009). It is argued, more generally, that the results provide an important constraint on how the relationship between visual word recognition and syntactic attachment is treated in processing models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The parser doesn't ignore intransitivity, after all.

Several previous studies (B. C. Adams, C. Clifton, & D. C. Mitchell, 1998; D. C. Mitchell, 1987; R. P. G. van Gompel & M. J. Pickering, 2001) have explored the question of whether the parser initially analyzes a noun phrase that follows an intransitive verb as the verb's direct object. Three eye-tracking experiments examined this issue in more detail. Experiment 1 replicated the finding that readers experience difficulty on this noun phrase in normal reading and found that this difficulty occurs even with intransitive verbs for which a direct object is categorically prohibited. Experiment 2, however, demonstrated that this effect is not due to syntactic misanalysis but to disruption that occurs when a comma is absent at a subordinate clause/main clause boundary. Experiment 3 replicated the finding (M. J. Pickering & M. J. Traxler, 2003; M. J. Traxler & M. J. Pickering, 1996) that when a noun phrase "filler" is an implausible direct object for an optionally transitive relative clause verb, processing difficulty results; however, there was no evidence for such difficulty when the relative clause verb was strictly intransitive. Taken together, the 3 experiments undermine the support for the claim that the parser initially ignores a verb's subcategorization restrictions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's responses to ambiguous messages and their understanding of ambiguity.

Conducted 4 experiments to investigate whether a total of 212 young children (aged 4 yrs 6 mo to 7 yrs 3 mo) could respond differently to ambiguous and unambiguous messages if they were prevented from pointing at the potential referents. The exact nature of the bias that was operating was examined in the final 2 experiments, which investigated whether the differential responding to ambiguous and unambiguous messages was based on an understanding of ambiguity or on an awareness of certainty and uncertainty about the interpretation of ambiguous and unambiguous messages. It was found that Ss were more likely to respond differently to ambiguous and unambiguous messages if they were prevented from pointing at the potential referents. It was also found that the improvement in differential responding was not accompanied by an improvement in verbal judgments of message quality, and the differential responses were closely related to judgments of certainty and uncertainty about the interpretation of the message. Ss who did not know that verbal messages could be ambiguous could nevertheless respond differently to ambiguous and unambiguous messages by attending to their own certainty or uncertainty about the interpretation of those messages. They were more likely to do that when they were prevented from pointing at the potential references. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dissociative prime–probe contextual similarity effects on negative priming and repetition priming: A challenge to episodic retrieval as a unified account of negative priming.

This study examined the dependence of repetition priming (RP) and negative priming (NP) as a function of prime–probe contextual similarity in a paradigm in which participants were required to respond to a letter flanked by incompatible distractor letters (e.g., ABA). Experiment 1 used prime and probe displays containing a pair of "+" symbols that were presented horizontally or vertically. Experiments 2 and 3 manipulated whether the letter triplets contained the "!" symbol. In all experiments, regardless of whether the RP trials were intermixed with the NP trials (Experiment 2) or not (Experiment 3), RP was stronger in the prime–probe similar conditions than in the prime–probe dissimilar conditions, but NP was independent of prime–probe contextual similarity. These findings suggest that NP is not necessarily stronger in conditions in which episodic retrieval of the prime is more likely. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Correction to Rothermund et al. (2005).

Reports an error in the article "Retrieval of Incidental Stimulus-Response Associations as a Source of Negative Priming" by Rothermund et al. (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 31(3) May 2005, 482-495). Table 1 (p. 484) was incorrectly typeset. The correct layout is provided. (The following abstract of this article originally appeared in record 2005-05101-007.) Priming effects of ignored distractor words were investigated in a task-switching situation that allowed an orthogonal variation of priming and response compatibility between prime and probe. Across 3 experiments, the authors obtained a disordinal interaction of priming and response relation. Responding was delayed in the ignored repetition condition if different responses were required for identical stimuli in the prime and probe (negative priming). Repeating the prime distractor in the probe facilitated responding if the same response was required in the prime and in the probe (positive priming). The same pattern of results was replicated in a letter-matching task without task switching (Experiment 4). Findings lend support to a new model that explains negative priming in terms of an automatic retrieval of incidental stimulus-response associations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Processing arguments and adjuncts in isolation and context: The case of by-phrase ambiguities in passives.

Two eye-tracking experiments examined processing of sentences like The shrubs were planted by the apprentice/greenhouse that morning, where the by phrase is locally ambiguous between an agent and a location. Experiment 1 found a preference to initially interpret the by phrase agentively in the absence of context. In Experiment 2, a context like The head gardener decided [who should]/[where to] plant the shrubs induced an expectation that either an agent or a location would subsequently be specified. After agentive contexts, locatives were harder to process than agentives. After locative contexts, both sentences were easy to process. The authors argue that the verb and interrogative words (who, where) activate thematic roles, which can be associated with corresponding phrases. Phrases that express activated roles are easy to process. Phrases that might express activated roles but are subsequently shown not to express those roles require reanalysis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Plausibility and recovery from garden paths: An eye-tracking study.

Three eye-tracking experiments investigated plausibility effects on recovery from misanalysis in sentence comprehension. On the initially favored analysis, a noun phrase served as the object of the preceding verb. On the ultimately correct analysis, it served as the subject of a main clause in Experiments 1 and 3 and of a complement clause in Experiment 2. If the object analysis was implausible, disruption occurred during processing of the noun phrase. If it was plausible, disruption occurred after disambiguation. In Experiment 3, discourse context affected plausibility of the initial analysis and subsequent reanalysis. The authors argue that readers performed substantial semantic processing on the initial analysis and committed strongly when it was plausible. Experiment 3 showed that these effects were not due to selectional restrictions or word co-occurrences and that the interpretation of the target sentence was not computed in isolation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)