Parallelism in the production of noun phrases: Experiments and reaction time models.

In 3 experiments, the authors investigated the temporal coordination of the processes involved in the production of noun phrases (NPs). Speakers of German described drawings of colored objects by noun phrases with or without a determiner (e.g., [the] red table). Participants received, for varying amounts of time, advance information about either the color or the object. For a small number of nouns in the response set, advance information about the color led to shorter reaction times for no-determiner NPs than for definite-determiner NPs. For larger numbers of nouns, advance information about the object led to an additional reaction time benefit for definite-determiner NPs. A mathematical model is shown to account for these results. This model assumes that articulation can be initiated only after the grammatical encoding of the whole noun phrase has been completed, but that phonological encoding of the 1st element of an utterance is initiated as soon as the necessary grammatical information is available. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Principles of Conventionality and Contrast in Word Learning: An Empirical Examination.

In Study 1, 4-year-olds avoided 2 names for an object when exposed to a common or a proper noun in a puppet's presence or to a common noun in a puppet's absence, but not when exposed to a proper noun in a puppet's absence. In Study 2, 3-year-olds avoided 2 names for an object when the requester for the referent of a second label in a different language was bilingual and present during naming, but not when the speaker was bilingual but absent or monolingual. Study 3 followed up on the results of the first 2 studies. When children could assume that the puppet knew the name the experimenter used, they inferred that the puppet's use of a different name implied a different referential intent. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Scope of lexical access in spoken sentence production: Implications for the conceptual–syntactic interface.

Building on P. H. Allum and L. Wheeldon (2007), the authors conducted 5 experiments to investigate the scope of lexical access during spoken sentence production in Japanese and English. Speakers described pairs of pictured objects, and on critical trials, 1 object was previewed. In Japanese, sentence onset is speeded by the preview of each of the 2 pictures used to elicit a sentence initial coordinated noun phrase (Experiment 1). When the same displays are used to elicit an alternative Japanese listing structure, onset latencies are speeded only by the preview of the first picture to be named (Experiment 2). The findings of Experiment 1 were therefore not the result of stimulus design. Experiment 3 replicated the findings of Experiment 1 in English. Experiments 4 and 5 tested a subject phrase consisting of a noun phrase modified by a prepositional phrase in English and Japanese. In both languages, only preview of the first picture to be named speeds responses, irrespective of whether it occurs in the head phrase (English) or not (Japanese). These results suggest that prior to utterance onset, only access to the nouns for the first phrase to be produced is required, even if this is not the head phrase. The implications for speech production models are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's judgments of relative mass of two objects in a head-on-collision event

The purpose in this study was to investigate the ability of young children to judge the relative mass of two objects depicted on a CRT monitor as colliding head-on with each other, and to determine which feature of a collision event they depend on for their judgments. In the first experiment it was shown that half of the 4-year-olds and most of the 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds consistently judged the slower object to be heavier when the velocities of the two objects before collision were the same and those after collision were different. In the second experiment young children's judgements of relative mass in noncollision events in which two objects only moved in opposite directions at different speeds were examined. Results showed that half of the 5-year-olds and most of the 6-year-olds tended to assume consistently that the slower object was heavier. However, the 4-year-olds did not show any clear tendency. The third experiment was planned to examine young children's judgments of relative mass in different collision events in which only the precollision velocities of two colliding objects were different: half of the 6-year-old children judged the slower object to be heavier, but the rest of them and half of the 5-year-old children consistently gave the opposite responses. These were based upon the delay between the starts of motion of the two objects. The 4-year-olds did not show any tendency, as in experiment 2. The results indicate that young children can specify the kinetic information about relative mass from the kinematics of collision events when viewing an appropriate collision event, and that both the precollision phase and the postcollision phase contribute to the judgement of relative mass.     

A constraint-based lexicalist account of the subject/object attachment preference

When a noun phrase could either be the object of the preceding verb or the subject of a new clause or a sentence complement, readers and listeners show a strong preference to parse the noun phrase as the object of the verb. This can result in clear garden paths for sentences such as The student read the book was stolen and While the student read the book was stolen. Even when the verb does not permit a noun phrase complement, some processing difficulty is still found. This has led some theorists to propose models in which initial attachments are lexically blind, with lexical information subsequently used as a filter to evaluate and revise initial analyses. In contrast, we show that these results emerge naturally from constraint-based lexicalist models. We present a modeling experiment with a simple recurrent network that was trained to predict upcoming complements for a sample of verbs taken from the Penn Treebank corpus. The model exhibits an object bias and it also shows effects of verb frequency which are similar to those found in the psycholinguistic literature.     

Children's use of mutual exclusivity to learn labels for parts of objects.

When teaching children part terms, adults frequently outline the relevant part rather than simply point. This pragmatic information very likely helps children interpret the label correctly. But the importance of gestures may not negate the need for default lexical biases such as the whole object assumption and mutual exclusivity. On this view, children initially assume that a novel label refers to a whole object. If the label for the object is familiar, mutual exclusivity blocks this assumption and frees children to look for a part referent. In this study, the authors taught children part terms by outlining a novel part of a real object. We made mutual exclusivity available by showing children familiar whole objects with novel parts and unavailable by showing unfamiliar whole objects with novel parts. During test, the object was oriented with the part facing away from the child to distinguish pointing to the object from pointing to the part. Both 2-year-olds and 3-year-olds learned more part labels when mutual exclusivity was available. Thus, mutual exclusivity is indispensable even when part labeling is accompanied by naturalistic communicative gestures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word integration and regression programming during reading: A test of the E-Z reader 10 model.

Participants read sentences with two types of target nouns, one that did and one that did not require a determiner to form a legal verb–noun phrase sequence. Sentences were presented with and without the critical determiner to create a local noun integration difficulty when a required determiner was missing. The absence of a required determiner did not influence 1st-pass reading of the verb, the noun, and the posttarget word. It did, however, have a profound effect on 2nd-pass reading. All three words were a likely target of a regression when a required determiner was missing, and the noun and the posttarget word were likely sources of a regression. These results are consistent with novel E-Z reader model assumptions, according to which identification of the noun should be followed by its integration, and integration difficulties can lead to the initiation of a regression to the noun. However, integration difficulties influenced eye movements earlier and later than predicted by the new model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children associate novel words with complex objects rather than salient parts.

How do children learn associations between novel words and complex perceptual displays? Using a visual preference procedure, the authors tested 12- and 19-month-olds to see whether the infants would associate a novel word with a complex 2-part object or with either of that object's parts, both of which were potentially objects in their own right and 1 of which was highly salient to infants. At both ages, children's visual fixation times during test were greater to the entire complex object than to the salient part (Experiment 1) or to the less salient part (Experiment 2)--when the original label was requested. Looking times to the objects were equal if a new label was requested or if neutral audio was used during training (Experiment 3). Thus, from 12 months of age, infants associate words with whole objects, even those that could potentially be construed as 2 separate objects and even if 1 of the parts is salient. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Grammatical gender in noun phrase production: The gender interference effect in German.

Languages appear to differ in the way definite determiners are selected during noun phrase production. M. Miozzo and A. Caramazza (1999) proposed that a distinction should be made between early- and late-selection languages. In early-selection languages, the noun's gender uniquely specifies the definite determiner, whereas in late-selection languages the definite determiner can be specified only during the phonological encoding of the noun phrase. This hypothesis predicts that in picture–word interference experiments on noun phrase production in early selection languages like German, one should obtain a gender interference effect. In 2 experiments on German, this prediction is confirmed. The implications of these results for the proposed distinction between early- and late-selection languages are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's use of syntactic cues to learn proper names and count nouns.

In 6 experiments, 144 toddlers were tested in groups ranging in mean age from 20 to 37 months. In all experiments, children learned a novel label for a doll or a stuffed animal. The label was modeled syntactically as either a count noun (e.g., "This is a ZAV") or a proper name (e.g., "This is ZAV"). The object was then moved to a new location in front of the child, and a second identical-looking object was placed nearby. The children's task was to choose 1 of the 2 objects as a referent for the novel word. By 24 months, both girls (Experiment 2) and boys (Experiment 5) were significantly more likely to select the labeled object if they heard a proper name than if they heard a count noun. At 20 months, neither girls (Experiments 1 and 6) nor boys (Experiment 1) demonstrated this effect. By their 2nd birthdays, children can use syntactic information to distinguish appropriately between labels for individual objects and those for object categories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's memory for the true and pretend identities of objects.

Two studies examined how children conceive of the true and pretend identities of an object used in object-substitution pretense. In each study, 3- and 4-year-olds were assessed for their memory for each identity of an object that they used in a previous episode of pretend play (Study 1) or observed someone else using (Study 2). More children correctly remembered the true than the pretend identity of the objects, and there was no contingency between their tendency to remember each identity Additionally, children's tendency to correctly specify each identity was related to their age and when (i.e., during or after the pretend episode) the task was given. The results were explained by factors affecting young children's ability to manage separate representations of true and pretend identities of objects. (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)     

Guidance of attention to objects and locations by long-term memory of natural scenes.

Four flicker change-detection experiments demonstrate that scene-specific long-term memory guides attention to both behaviorally relevant locations and objects within a familiar scene. Participants performed an initial block of change-detection trials, detecting the addition of an object to a natural scene. After a 30-min delay, participants performed an unanticipated 2nd block of trials. When the same scene occurred in the 2nd block, the change within the scene was (a) identical to the original change, (b) a new object appearing in the original change location, (c) the same object appearing in a new location, or (d) a new object appearing in a new location. Results suggest that attention is rapidly allocated to previously relevant locations and then to previously relevant objects. This pattern of locations dominating objects remained when object identity information was made more salient. Eye tracking verified that scene memory results in more direct scan paths to previously relevant locations and objects. This contextual guidance suggests that a high-capacity long-term memory for scenes is used to insure that limited attentional capacity is allocated efficiently rather than being squandered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 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)     

Selecting one among many referents in spatial situation models.

Five experiments related to anaphor resolution to a classic memory variable, namely, interference created by multiple uses of a given object-concept, and by spatial distance of the referent from the reader's focus of attention. Participants memorized a diagram of a building with rooms containing objects, and then read narratives describing characters' activities there. Reading was self-paced word by word. Accessibility was measured by readers' time to understand anaphoric sentences containing a definite noun phrase referring to an object in its room. Spatial distance between the object and the current focus of attention increased reading times for names of the object, the room, and sentence wrap-up. Multiple examples of a target-object increased its reading time only if they were scattered across different rooms. An associative model of memory retrieval during text comprehension was used to interpret the complex pattern of results. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Taking a hands-on approach: Apparent grasping ability scales the perception of object size.

We examined whether the apparent size of an object is scaled to the morphology of the relevant body part with which one intends to act on it. To be specific, we tested if the visually perceived size of graspable objects is scaled to the extent of apparent grasping ability for the individual. Previous research has shown that right-handed individuals perceive their right hand as larger and capable of grasping larger objects than their left. In the first 2 experiments, we found that objects looked smaller when placed in or judged relative to their right hand compared to their left. In the third experiment, we directly manipulated apparent hand size by magnifying the participants' hands. Participants perceived objects to be smaller when their hand was magnified than when their hand was unmagnified. We interpret these results as demonstrating that perceivers use the extent of their hands' grasping abilities as “perceptual rulers” to scale the apparent size of graspable objects. Furthermore, hand size manipulations did not affect the perceived size of objects too big to be grasped, which suggests that hand size is only used as a scaling mechanism when the object affords the relevant action, in this case, grasping. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Limitations on preschool children's knowledge about counting: Using counting to compare two sets.

Possible limitations on preschool children's understanding of counting were examined by asking twenty 3-year-olds and twenty 4-year-olds to judge the appropriateness of counting carried out by a puppet. The puppet was asked to count either to find out how many objects were present altogether or to find out whether every object in one subset could have a corresponding object from the other subset. Within each counting task, half of the time the puppet counted all of the objects together and half of the time it counted the two subsets separately. Children at both ages showed some differentiation between the two counting tasks and performed at an above-chance level on the how-many task but not on the compare-sets task. The most common individual response pattern among the 3-year-olds was to judge both kinds of counts to be appropriate on both tasks, whereas the most common individual response pattern among the 4-year-olds was to judge counting of all the objects together to be appropriate and counting of the two subsets separately to be inappropriate on both tasks. The fact that children managed to differentiate appropriately between the two counting tasks despite using these basically undifferentiated strategies suggests that correct judgment processes coexisted with their predominant strategies and competed with them to determine performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Function morphemes in young children's speech perception and production.

Function morphemes or functors (e.g., articles and verb inflections) potentially provide children with cues for segmenting speech into constituents, as well as for labeling these constituents (e.g., noun phrase [NP] and verb phrase [VP]). However, the fact that young children often fail to produce functors may indicate that they ignore these cues in early language acquisition. Alternatively, children may be sensitive to functors in perception, but omit them in production. In 3 experiments, 2-year-olds imitated sentences that contained English or non-English functors and that were controlled for both suprasegmental and segmental factors. Children omitted English functors more frequently than non-English functors, indicating perceptual sensitivity to familiar vs unfamiliar elements. The results suggest that children may be able to use functors early in language acquisition to solve the segmentation and labeling problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)