Prosodic influences on the resolution of temporary ambiguity during on-line sentence processing

We present three experiments designed to investigate the role of prosody during sentence processing. The first investigated the question of whether an utterance's prosodic contour influences its comprehension on-line. We spliced the beginning and end portions of direct object and embedded clause sentences and observed the consequent effects on comprehension using a dual-task procedure to measure processing load. Our second experiment sought to determine whether the constituent structure of these sentences could be reliably predicted using prosodic information. We found that the duration and F0 contour associated with the main-clause verb and the following NP reliably distinguished between the direct object and embedded clause constructions. In the final experiment, we manipulated the duration of the main-clause verb and found that subjects used this information to guide their initial parse during on-line sentence comprehension. The need for a model of sentence processing that addresses the use of prosodic information is discussed.     

Strategies for processing unbounded dependencies: Lexical information and verb–argument assignment.

This article describes 2 experiments about verb–argument relations in sentence processing in which there is no ambiguity involving the subcategorization of the verb but in which the role that the argument serves is initially unclear. Specifically, a self-paced reading experiment and an eye-tracking experiment investigated the way in which readers form unbounded dependencies when the verb is looking for both a direct object and a clause and when the filler either could be the direct object or could form part of the clause. The results suggested that readers treated the filler as the verb's direct object and probably also considered the clausal analysis at the same time. The results are interpreted with respect to current accounts of parsing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Influence of thematic relations on the comprehension of modifier–noun combinations.

To comprehend a nonpredicating combination involving a modifier (e.g., mountain) and a head noun (e.g., stream), one must specify a thematic relation (e.g., a stream in the mountains) that links the 2 constituent concepts. The authors investigated the influence of thematic relations on the comprehension of nonpredicating combinations. Experiments 1 and 3 demonstrated that people use information about what relations the constituents typically instantiate during conceptual combination. More specifically, a combination is easier to interpret when it uses a frequent relation of the modifier than when it uses a less frequent relation. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that these results are not an artifact of the individual component words. The authors propose a model of conceptual combination called the competition among relations in nominals (CARIN) model in which ease of comprehension depends both on the frequency of the to-be-selected relation and on the frequency of the alternatives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Structural and lexical constraints on filling gaps during sentence comprehension: A time-course analysis.

Reaction time and speed-accuracy trade-off procedures were used to examine when different linguistic constraints were operative in processing sentences with filler-gap dependencies. Experiments measured the time to assess the acceptability of structures with anomalous filler-gap dependencies stemming from violations of configuration (syntactic) constraints or local lexical constraints. Full time-course data indicate that configurational (island) constraints were operative 200–400 ms before local lexical constraints (i.e., subcategorization and thematic role restrictions). These results suggest that filler-gap assignments are determined by processes that appeal first to general syntactic information and only later to specific lexical information. The time-course data indicate that the parser does not posit potential gap sites within syntactic islands, which in turn motivates a restricted version of a first-resort model of filler-gap processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory connections between thematically similar episodes.

Investigated the use of cross-episode connections (i.e., when 2 episodes with a shared theme are connected through a thematic structure) in comprehension and memory in 6 experiments with 106 undergraduates. Results from the use of a priming technique in Exps I and II indicate that verification time for a test sentence from 1 story was speeded by an immediately preceding test sentence from a thematically similar story but only when Ss were given instructions to rate the similarities of the stories. In Exp III–VI, a single test sentence was presented immediately after a story was read, with timing controlled by presenting the story one word at a time. Response time for a test sentence from a previously read story was facilitated if the immediately preceding story was thematically similar but only if the previously read story was extensively prestudied. It is concluded that during reading of an episode, thematic information may be encoded to lead to activation of similar episodes and formation of connections in memory between episodes, but such encoding is not automatic and depends on Ss' strategies and task difficulty. Sample stories are appended. (36 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Syntactic analysis during language comprehension.

Recent research has demonstrated the psychological reality of syntactic structure in language comprehension. A syntactic structure is a representation of the linear and hierarchical relations among words. It is proposed that such a structure must be created and then semantically interpreted in order for a listener or reader to understand a sentence. Some psychologists have claimed that comprehenders do not rely on purely syntactic strategies to parse sentences; instead, comprehenders use a variety of semantic heuristics and bypass syntactic analysis altogether. Work that my colleagues and I have conducted suggests that comprehenders do use syntactic strategies to parse sentences. In particular, evidence shows that comprehenders attempt to construct the simplest syntactic structure possible, and only revise that interpretation if the sentence becomes syntactically or semantically anomalous. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Task demands and sentence comprehension in patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type

Patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) and matched normal controls were given three tests of syntactic comprehension in which nonlinguistic visual and memory task demands were varied. In all tasks, subjects were presented spoken semantically reversible sentences with a variety of syntactic structures and required to match the sentence to a picture. In the first experiment, subjects matched the spoken sentence to one of two pictures that appeared either before or immediately following the presentation of the sentence. The target picture depicted the spoken sentence correctly and the foil depicted the reversed thematic roles to those in the sentence (i.e., it was a syntactic foil). The second experiment employed a sentence video-verification task in which subjects were required to determine if the spoken sentence matched a videotaped depiction of the action in the sentence or a syntactic foil. In the third experiment, in different conditions, subjects were required to determine whether the spoken sentence matched a single picture or to choose the picture that matched the sentence from an array of two or three pictures. In this experiment, both lexical and syntactic foils were used. In all tasks, DAT patients were affected by the number of propositions in the presented sentence, but not by the syntactic complexity of the sentence. Control subjects also were unaffected by the syntactic complexity of the sentence; the number-of-proposition effect was present in some experiments in the control population. Comparison of performance across the one-, two-, and three-picture versions of the task showed that the magnitude of the effect of number of propositions increased as the number of pictures in the array increased. In addition, analysis of the data from each of the tasks separately showed that the effect of number of propositions only occurred when subjects were attempting to match the target to a syntactic foil (one-picture version) or to choose between the target and a syntactic foil (two- and three-picture versions). The results support the view that patients with DAT do not have disturbances affecting syntactic processing. In addition, they suggest that the effect of number of propositions arises at a stage of analysis that is partially separate from assigning sentence meaning, such as in holding a representation of the sentence in memory until the pictures can be analyzed and encoded and/or in comparing the results of the picture analysis with a stored representation of the sentence meaning.     

Assessing the elements contributing to a "mapping" deficit: a targeted treatment study

Aphasic patients with excellent comprehension of word meanings frequently fail to understand simple declarative sentences in which either of two nouns could reasonably serve as agent of a transitive action. This study employed targeted treatment of this comprehension problem in a chronic aphasic patient (E.A.) in an attempt to isolate the source or sources of his comprehension failure. Treatment exercises that relied on error feedback in sentence-picture matching or verification initially were not effective. Comprehension of active and passive sentences improved only after both structures were explicitly compared and linked to a picture. Subsequently E.A. maintained consistently accurate interpretation of both sentence types in the treatment exercises as long as the full sentence was available to him. E.A. learned to assign thematic roles using a limited set of cues in the surface structure. Although improvement was reported in untreated sentences, the degree of generalization and the level of performance differed across tasks and appeared to be attributable to cognitive impairments that were not addressed by the treatment. Results are interpreted as evidence suggesting that multiple impairments contribute to failure of sentence comprehension tasks.     

Tracking conceptual and semantic processing in the comprehension and production of text and discourse.

Current research on text and discourse processing has focussed on the nature of conceptual and semantic representation and processing, and the relationship between conceptual knowledge and the structure and processing of text or discourse. It is now generally recognized that discourse comprehension involves the construction of a conceptual "situation model" by a listener or reader, that is, a conceptual representation that is appropriate to the content and context of a text or discourse. Current psychological models of discourse production view discourse processing as a process of translating conceptual knowledge structures into "rhetorical" discourse structures that are appropriate to a communicative situation and setting. One important component of such translation is the construction of a conceptual situation model to be communicated to a listener or reader. A second is the construction of a propositional text base to specify precisely the semantic content to be expressed through segments of text or discourse. A third is to define a discourse organization that appropriately guides the reader in constructing a conceptual situation model from the text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Relationship Between Age, Verbal Working Memory, and Language Comprehension.

A structural modeling approach was used to examine the relationships between age, verbal working memory (vWM), and 3 types of language measures: online syntactic processing, sentence comprehension, and text comprehension. The best-fit model for the online-processing measure revealed a direct effect of age on online sentence processing, but no effect mediated through vWM. The best-fit models for sentence and text comprehension included an effect of age mediated through vWM and no direct effect of age. These results indicate that the relationship among age, vWM, and comprehension differs depending on the measure of language processing and support the view that individual differences in vWM do not affect individuals' online syntactic processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Organization and comprehensibility in scientific proofs: or, "Consider a particle p…"

Scientific texts commonly present principles by first giving a proof and only afterward stating the principle—a "proof-first" organization. This specialized text structure differs from conventional structures in that it lacks thematic information to guide text processing. The current research examined the effects on comprehension of this proof-first organization. This was done by comparing the processing of proof-first texts to that of "principle-first" texts, in which the theme (i.e., the principle) is stated at the beginning. Readers had more difficulty determining what was important when reading proof-first texts and reorganized proof-first texts into a principle-first structure when summarizing. The proof-first organization also decreased recall of the principle. These results suggest that, compared with a principle-first structure, the proof-first structure increases processing difficulty and results in a less complete text representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The nature of phonological processing and its causal role in the acquisition of reading skills.

Three bodies of research that have developed in relative isolation center on each of three kinds of phonological processing: phonological awareness, awareness of the sound structure of language; phonological recoding in lexical access, recoding written symbols into a sound-based representational system to get from the written word to its lexical referent; and phonetic recoding in working memory, recoding written symbols into a sound-based representation system to maintain them efficiently in working memory. In this review we integrate these bodies of research and address the interdependent issues of the nature of phonological abilities and their causal roles in the acquisition of reading skills. Our review supports a causal role for phonological awareness in learning to read, and suggests the possibility of similar causal roles for phonological recoding in lexical access and phonetic recoding in working memory. Most researchers have neglected the probable causal role of learning to read in the development of phonological skills. It is no longer enough to ask whether phonological skills play a causal role in the acquisition of reading skills. The question now is which aspects of phonological processing (e.g., awareness, recoding in lexical access, recoding in working memory) are causally related to which aspects of reading (e.g., word recognition, word analysis, sentence comprehension), at which point in their codevelopment, and what are the directions of these causal relations? (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Information processing speed and sentence comprehension in Parkinson's disease.

This study tests the hypothesis that sentence comprehension difficulty in Parkinson's disease (PD) is related in part to altered information processing speed that plays a crucial role in grammatical processing. The authors measured information processing speed in 32 PD patients without dementia using a lexical list-priming paradigm in which the interstimulus interval (ISI) between the prime and the target varied. Sentence comprehension accuracy was also assessed in 22 of these patients. Sentence comprehension accuracy for object-relative center-embedded sentences was impaired in a subgroup of PD patients. This subgroup of PD patients primed at an abnormally long ISI. Similarly, only PD patients who primed at a long ISI had greater difficulty understanding sentences with an object-relative clause than a subject-relative clause. Findings suggest that slowed information processing speed contributes to sentence comprehension difficulty in PD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of connectives on young readers' processing and comprehension of text.

Connectives are cohesive devices that signal the relations between clauses and are critical to the construction of a coherent representation of a text's meaning. The authors investigated young readers' knowledge, processing, and comprehension of temporal, causal, and adversative connectives using offline and online tasks. In a cloze task, 10-year-olds were more accurate than 8-year-olds on temporal and adversative connectives, but both age groups differed from adult levels of performance (Experiment 1). When required to rate the “sense” of 2-clause sentences linked by connectives, 10-year-olds and adults were better at discriminating between clauses linked by appropriate and inappropriate connectives than were 8-year-olds. The 10-year-olds differed from adults only on the temporal connectives (Experiment 2). In contrast, online reading time measures indicated that 8-year-olds' processing of text is influenced by connectives as they read, in much the same way as 10-year-olds'. Both age groups read text more quickly when target 2-clause sentences were linked by an appropriate connective compared with texts in which a connective was neutral (and), inappropriate to the meaning conveyed by the 2 clauses, or not present (Experiments 3 and 4). These findings indicate that although knowledge and comprehension of connectives is still developing in young readers, connectives aid text processing in typically developing readers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution.

Ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. Lexical and syntactic ambiguities are standardly assumed to involve different types of knowledge representations and be resolved by different mechanisms. An alternative account is provided in which both types of ambiguity derive from aspects of lexical representation and are resolved by the same processing mechanisms. Reinterpreting syntactic ambiguity resolution as a form of lexical ambiguity resolution obviates the need for special parsing principles to account for syntactic interpretation preferences, reconciles a number of apparently conflicting results concerning the roles of lexical and contextual information in sentence processing, explains differences among ambiguities in terms of ease of resolution, and provides a more unified account of language comprehension than was previously available. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The intensity dimension of thought: Pupillometric indices of sentence processing.

Explored the intensity of processing during sentence comprehension by measuring pupillary response during reading. Two experiments with 76 college students contrasted the processing of simpler vs more complex sentences. The 2 more complex sentence types, object-relative center-embedded sentences and filler-gap sentences, not only took longer to process than their simpler counterparts, but they also produced a larger change in pupil diameter. It is proposed that the pupillary response is an indicator of how intensely the processing system is operating. Results are integrated within a resource-limited computational model of comprehension. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Processing mechanisms underlying use of the balance schema.

Three experiments contrasted 2 procedures for processing information about sentiment relations: (a) use of the balance schema as a mental model and (b) propositional processing. Ss read short stories that described some of the like–dislike relations in 4-person groups. Stories were presented on a computer terminal, 1 sentence at a time, at a rate controlled by Ss. Later, Ss took a computer-administered retrieval test of all relations in each group. Analysis of reading times, inferences from the given information, and response latencies supported use of the balance schema in processing these relations. This schema enables Ss to construct a complete model of relations in a group without reasoning propositionally and provides a stable configuration in the permanent memory store. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking during reading.

The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence structures that placed these NPs at the same linear distances from one another but allowed integration with a verb for 1 of the NPs, the comprehension difficulty was not seen. These results are interpreted as indicating that similarity-based interference occurs online during the comprehension of complex sentences and that the degree of memory accessibility conventionally associated with different types of NPs does not have a strong effect on sentence processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

This Construction Needs Learned.

Four experiments are presented in which adults learned to comprehend a new syntactic construction in their native language. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults quickly learn to comprehend the new construction and generalize it to new verbs. Experiment 3 shows that experience with the novel construction affects the processing of a construction already known to the participants and with which the novel construction is temporarily ambiguous. Experiment 4 demonstrates that the influence of a novel construction on the comprehension of familiar constructions is affected by the processing that occurred while the novel construction was learned. These results are discussed in the context of the constraint satisfaction approach to sentence processing and episodic-processing accounts of memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)