Development of gist versus verbatim memory in sentence recognition: Effects of lexical familiarity, semantic content, encoding instructions, and retention interval.

Fuzzy-trace theory is used to explore children's memory and comprehension of sentences describing spatial or linear relationships. Recognition tests were given immediately and after a 1 wk delay, and test sentence truth, wording (original and novel), and premise–inference status were varied. When children were instructed to recognize only verbatim sentences (Exp 1), premise recognition (memory) was independent of systematic misrecognition of true inferences (reasoning), and experimental manipulations (delay; spatial vs linear stimuli) drove memory and reasoning in opposite directions. Therefore, verbatim memories were not semantically integrated with gist, such as inferences. When children were specifically instructed to process gist (Exp 2), however, memory and reasoning were positively dependent. Results are discussed from the perspectives of constructivism, theories of suggestibility, and fuzzy-trace theory. (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)     

The issue of negative evidence: Adult responses to children's language errors.

This study was designed to assess one of the major assumptions of current language learning theories: Adults ignore children's speech errors. We observed both parents (n?=?16) and nonparent adults (n?=?13) conversing with children and examined the conversations for evidence of adults' differential responding to the children's syntactic, phonological, and semantic errors. Results indicated that adults were more likely to repeat verbatim a well-formed sentence than an ill-formed sentence. In contrast, adults were more likely to repeat with changes, or request clarification of, a sentence containing syntactic or phonological errors than well-formed sentences. Adults also more frequently used the correct syntactic or phonological form in the immediately subsequent sentence if the child's preceding sentence contained only one syntactic or phonological error rather than multiple errors. Overall, the results indicate that all adults tend to respond differentially to children's language mistakes, with parents showing greater sensitivity than adults who are not parents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Younger and older adults' use of mental models as representations for text materials.

Recent work suggests that formation and use of mental models (representations of situations described) is an integral part of discourse comprehension. In an experiment comparing younger and older adults on this aspect of text comprehension, subjects heard readings of a list of sentences and took a forced-choice recognition test. The test contained 2 types of distractors with an equal degree of verbatim similarity to the target sentences. One type described the same situation as the corresponding target sentence; the other did not. If mental models are an integral part of text representation formed at encoding, then a large number of confusions of the first, but not the second, type of distractor with the target sentence would be obtained. Younger and older adults showed this pattern to equal degrees. These data are consistent with those indicating that linguistic competence remains stable over the adult years (cf. L. L. Light, 1988). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Structural priming: A critical review.

Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is structural priming, a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced ("prime") sentence (J. K. Bock, 1986). The recent explosion of research in structural priming has made it the dominant means of investigating the processes involved in the production (and increasingly, comprehension) of complex expressions such as sentences. This review considers its implications for the representation of syntax and the mechanisms of production and comprehension and their relationship. It then addresses the potential functions of structural priming, before turning to its implications for first language acquisition, bilingualism, and aphasia. The authors close with theoretical and empirical recommendations for future investigations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Seeing, acting, understanding: Motor resonance in language comprehension.

Observing actions and understanding sentences about actions activates corresponding motor processes in the observer-comprehender. In 5 experiments, the authors addressed 2 novel questions regarding language-based motor resonance. The 1st question asks whether visual motion that is associated with an action produces motor resonance in sentence comprehension. The 2nd question asks whether motor resonance is modulated during sentence comprehension. The authors' experiments provide an affirmative response to both questions. A rotating visual stimulus affects both actual manual rotation and the comprehension of manual rotation sentences. Motor resonance is modulated by the linguistic input and is a rather immediate and localized phenomenon. The results are discussed in the context of theories of action observation and mental simulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Episodically enhanced comprehension fluency.

Explored fluent reading comprehension in 6 experiments involving sentences presented in normal and inverted typography. 226 college students served as Ss. Sentences read in a test phase had been read earlier in exactly the same form or in versions that were created by altering the word order within sentences to create randomly ordered word strings or exchanging causally related clauses to form new meaningful sentences. Variation increased the time taken to read the test sentences, and these effects were evident over retention intervals ranging from 1 day to 4 mo. Results support an episodic view of the basis for rereading fluency in which comprehension processes responsible for constructing and integrating propositions are automatically recruited and reapplied when a sentence is reread. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Encoding and memory for visible speech and gestures: A comparison between young and older adults.

Two experiments explored whether older adults have developed a strategy of compensating for slower speeds of language processing and hearing loss by relying more on the visual modality. Experiment 1 examined the influence of visual articulatory movements of the face (visible speech) in auditory–visual syllable classification in young adults and older adults. Older adults showed a significantly greater influence of visible speech. Experiment 2 examined immediate recall in three spoken-language sentence conditions: speech alone, with visible speech, or with both visible speech and iconic gestures. Sentences also varied in meaningfulness and speech rate. In the old adult group, recall was better for sentences containing visible speech compared with the speech-alone sentences in the meaningful sentence condition. Old adults' recall showed no overall benefit of the presence of gestures. Young adults' recall on meaningful sentences was not higher for the visible speech compared with the speech-alone condition, whereas recall was significantly higher with the addition of iconic gestures. In the anomalous sentence condition, both young and old adults showed an advantage in recall by the presence of visible speech.… (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Secondary metabolites play primary roles in human affairs

Three hypotheses concerning the functional source of aphasic patients' difficulty comprehending semantically reversible sentences were tested using declarative sentences in active and passive voice and sentences with center-embedded relative clauses. Each of the three hypotheses is predicated on relative patterns of impairment and sparing of patient performance on these (and other) sentence types, yet the three hypotheses make somewhat different predictions about performance patterns across these types. Results from 5 Broca's aphasic patients were not consistent with the predictions of the linguistically motivated Trace Deletion Hypothesis or of a hypothesis based on an impairment involving grammatical morphemes. The hypothesis that aphasic comprehension impairments reflect a general limitation of working memory capacity was given partial support by the ordinal pattern of difficulty for a mixed group of 10 patients, but failed to account for patterns obtained from individual patients. Results are interpreted as having relevance for methodological as well as theoretical aspects of research on aphasic sentence comprehension.     

Reading strategies of fast and slow readers.

Evaluated in 3 S-paced experiments reading patterns at the word, line, and sentence levels for fast and slow readers. A moving-window method was used to collect word reading times for natural texts. At the reading level, reading times of word N were influenced by features of word N–2 for fast (but not slow) Ss. The lag effect shown by fast Ss indicates that they continue to process a word when it is no longer in view. Both reader groups processed many new arguments (NAs) from a sentence. However, fast Ss exhibited greater NA effects relative to lines, whereas slow Ss exhibited greater NA effects relative to sentences. Results are discussed in terms of a buffer-and-integrate model of reading comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical Information Drives Perceptual Learning of Distorted Speech: Evidence From the Comprehension of Noise-Vocoded Sentences.

Speech comprehension is resistant to acoustic distortion in the input, reflecting listeners' ability to adjust perceptual processes to match the speech input. For noise-vocoded sentences, a manipulation that removes spectral detail from speech, listeners' reporting improved from near 0% to 70% correct over 30 sentences (Experiment 1). Learning was enhanced if listeners heard distorted sentences while they knew the identity of the undistorted target (Experiments 2 and 3). Learning was absent when listeners were trained with nonword sentences (Experiments 4 and 5), although the meaning of the training sentences did not affect learning (Experiment 5). Perceptual learning of noise-vocoded speech depends on higher level information, consistent with top-down, lexically driven learning. Similar processes may facilitate comprehension of speech in an unfamiliar accent or following cochlear implantation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Response latencies in auditory sentence comprehension: Effects of linguistic versus perceptual challenge.

Older adults with good hearing and with mild-to-moderate hearing loss were tested for comprehension of spoken sentences that required perceptual effort (hearing speech at lower sound levels), and two degrees of cognitive load (sentences with simpler or more complex syntax). Although comprehension accuracy was equivalent for both participant groups and for young adults with good hearing, hearing loss was associated with longer response latencies to the correct comprehension judgments, especially for complex sentences heard at relatively low amplitudes. These findings demonstrate the need to take into account both sensory and cognitive demands of speech materials in older adults' language comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preserved word-stem-completion priming of semantically encoded information in Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients and normal elderly control subjects completed 80 standardized sentence frames with single words, yielding a measure of semantic memory. Memory for best fit sentence endings was then tested either explicitly, with a forced-choice recognition task, or implicitly, with a word-stem-completion task. The patients completed fewer sentences with best fit word endings than did the control subjects. Explicit retention was markedly defective in the AD group, but word-stem completion was normal. The preserved word-stem completion in AD is discussed in terms of encoding operations and transfer-appropriate processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Speaking clearly for the hard of hearing IV: Further studies of the role of speaking rate

The contribution of reduced speaking rate to the intelligibility of "clear" speech (Picheny, Durlach, & Braida, 1985) was evaluated by adjusting the durations of speech segments (a) via nonuniform signal time-scaling, (b) by deleting and inserting pauses, and (c) by eliciting materials from a professional speaker at a wide range of speaking rates. Key words in clearly spoken nonsense sentences were substantially more intelligible than those spoken conversationally (15 points) when presented in quiet for listeners with sensorineural impairments and when presented in a noise background to listeners with normal hearing. Repeated presentation of conversational materials also improved scores (6 points). However, degradations introduced by segment-by-segment time-scaling rendered this time-scaling technique problematic as a means of converting speaking styles. Scores for key words excised from these materials and presented in isolation generally exhibited the same trends as in sentence contexts. Manipulation of pause structure reduced scores both when additional pauses were introduced into conversational sentences and when pauses were deleted from clear sentences. Key-word scores for materials produced by a professional talker were inversely correlated with speaking rate, but conversational rate scores did not approach those of clear speech for other talkers. In all experiments, listeners with normal hearing exposed to flat-spectrum background noise performed similarly to listeners with hearing loss.     

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)     

Sounds, Words, Sentences: Age-Related Changes Across Levels of Language Processing.

Age-related changes in sensory, lexical, and sentence processing were examined and compared using event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded as young and elderly participants listened to natural speech for comprehension. Lexically associated and unassociated word pairs were embedded in meaningful or syntactically legal but meaningless sentences. Early, general sensory, and attention-related responses (N1, P2) were delayed by about 25 msec for older participants, but later components indexing semantic processing (N400) were not delayed. There were no differences in the size, timing, or distribution of lexical associative effects for the two groups. In contrast, message-level context effects were delayed by more than 200 msec in the elderly group. The results support models that posit age-related changes primarily in higher order language processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of age, speed of processing, and working memory on comprehension of sentences with relative clauses.

Two hundred participants, 50 in each of four age ranges (19–29, 30–49, 50–69, 70–90) were tested for working memory, speed of processing, and the processing of sentences with relative clauses. In Experiment 1, participants read four sentence types (cleft subject, cleft object, subject-subject, subject-object) in a word-by-word, non-cumulative, self-paced reading task and made speeded plausibility judgments about them. In Experiment 2, participants read two types of sentences, one of which contained a doubly center embedded relative clause. Older participants' comprehension was less accurate and there was age-related slowing of online processing times in all but the simplest sentences, which increased in syntactically complex sentences in Experiment 1. This pattern suggests an age-related decrease in the efficiency of parsing and interpretation. Slower speed of processing and lower working memory were associated with longer online processing times only in Experiment 2, suggesting that task-related operations are related to general speed of processing and working memory. Lower working memory was not associated with longer reading times in more complex sentences, consistent with the view that general working memory is not critically involved in online syntactic processing. Longer online processing at the most demanding point in the most demanding sentence was associated with better comprehension, indicating that it reflects effective processing under some certain circumstances. However, the poorer comprehension performance of older individuals indicates that their slower online processing reflects inefficient processing even at these points. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 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)