Effects of syntax in human sentence parsing: Evidence against a structure-based proposal mechanism.

In 1992, D. C. Mitchell et al (see record 1992-18602-001) presented new evidence to suggest that contextual information does not influence the parser's initial decisions. It was suggested, however, that if sufficient material separates the choice point from the point of syntactic disambiguation, the processor may have sufficient time to revoke an initial structure-based decision in favor of a more contextually compatible analysis, and so avoid the garden path. Mitchell et al described a reading time experiment that they claim is incompatible with an initial context-based decision. In the present article the authors argue that the Mitchell et al contexts were in fact ineffective. An experiment based on a subset of the Mitchell et al design, but with differently structured contexts is described, and eye movement data that are compatible with the claim that contextual information can influence the parser's initial decisions are presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Thematic roles in sentence parsing.

Two eyetracking experiments examined the interaction among syntactic parsing preferences, thematically based comprehension preferences, and plausibility in the early stages of reading a sentence. Results from 64 adults support the pattern of results reported by L. Stowe (1989) when looking at the disambiguating region of a sentence. However, the results for earlier regions suggest that the postverbal noun phrase was initially taken as direct object of an ergative verb even when the subject was inanimate. It appears that the inanimacy of the subject may not have guided the initial syntactic analysis, but rather facilitated the revision of an initial misanalysis. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual word recognition by bilinguals in a sentence context: Evidence for nonselective lexical access.

Recent research on bilingualism has shown that lexical access in visual word recognition by bilinguals is not selective with respect to language. In the present study, the authors investigated language-independent lexical access in bilinguals reading sentences, which constitutes a strong unilingual linguistic context. In the first experiment, Dutch-English bilinguals performing a 2nd language (L2) lexical decision task were faster to recognize identical and nonidentical cognate words (e.g., banaan-banana) presented in isolation than control words. A second experiment replicated this effect when the same set of cognates was presented as the final words of low-constraint sentences. In a third experiment that used eyetracking, the authors showed that early target reading time measures also yield cognate facilitation but only for identical cognates. These results suggest that a sentence context may influence, but does not nullify, cross-lingual lexical interactions during early visual word recognition by bilinguals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On priming by a sentence context.

Previous investigations of sentence context effects (SCEs) on word-naming time have uncovered a pattern of facilitation dominance. Another finding has been that words that are more difficult to recognize in isolation display larger SCEs than easier words. The present experiments with 384 undergraduates showed SCEs to be robust and eliminated several alternative explanations. Two experiments demonstrated the appropriateness of the neutral condition used to assess facilitation and inhibition. Another showed that SCEs did not depend on the procedure used. It was shown that manipulations that were designed to affect S strategies did not change the pattern of results. In 3 experiments, an interaction between stimulus quality and content condition was obtained. The interaction replicated across 2 forms of stimulus degradation, but only 1 form increased inhibition effects as well as facilitation effects. Other inconsistencies between previous SC experiments in the magnitude of the inhibition effects observed were resolved by showing that an SC produced more inhibition in the lexical decision task than in the naming task. It was demonstrated that the 2 tasks produced different amounts of inhibition when the same stimuli were used. Sentence integration processes that occurred after lexical access appeared to be responsible for some of the inhibition observed in lexical decision tasks. (85 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical and sentence context effects in word recognition.

Three experiments examined lexical and sentence-level contributions to contextual facilitation effects in word recognition. Subjects named target words preceded by normal or scrambled sentence contexts that contained lexical associates of the target. In Experiment 1, normal sentences showed facilitation for related targets and inhibition for unrelated targets. Experiment 2 eliminated syntactically anomalous targets among unrelated items and showed only facilitation for related targets. In neither experiment was there any effect of relatedness for scrambled stimuli. Experiment 3 included syntactically normal but semantically anomalous sentences to test whether the failure of scrambled sentences to show priming was due to their syntactic incoherence. Normal sentences again showed contextual facilitation, but neither scrambled nor anomalous sentences showed such effects. The results indicate that there are sentence-context effects that do not arise solely from intralexical spreading activation and suggest that context facilitates the identification of a lexical candidate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word misperception, the neighbor frequency effect, and the role of sentence context: Evidence from eye movements.

An eye movement experiment was conducted to investigate whether the processing of a word can be affected by its higher frequency neighbor (HFN). Target words with an HFN (birch) or without one (spruce) were embedded into 2 types of sentence frames: 1 in which the HFN (birth) could fit given the prior sentence context, and 1 in which it could not. The results suggest that words can be misperceived as their HFN, and that top-down information from sentence context strongly modulates this effect. Implications for models of word recognition and eye movements during reading are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Syntactic and thematic processing in sentence comprehension: Evidence for a temporal dissociation.

The time courses for processing constituent structure relations, subcategorization restrictions, and thematic role relations during sentence comprehension were measured with reaction time and speed–accuracy trade-off variants of a grammaticality judgment task. Thematic role processing was found to be delayed by as much as 100 ms relative to the time when constituent structure and subcategorization information were processed. These data suggest a model of sentence comprehension in which the construction of a syntactic representation temporally leads the construction of a more embellished thematic representation. Serial and parallel variants of such a model are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's imitation of sentence subjects: Evidence of processing limitations.

Elicited imitation was used to determine whether young children's inconsistent production of sentence subjects was due to limitations in their knowledge of English or in their ability to access and use that knowledge. Nineteen young children (age range = 1 year 10 months to 2 years 8 months; Mean Length of Utterance [MLU] range = 1.28 to 4.93) repeated sentences that varied in length, structure, and type of subject. A competence-deficit hypothesis would predict that children below MLU 3 would differentially omit expletive subjects and subjects preceded by a discourse topic more often than children above MLU 3. That hypothesis was disconfirmed. A performance-deficit hypothesis would predict that children below MLU 3 would omit more subjects from long sentences than short ones, and that the high-MLU children would not show a length effect. That hypothesis was confirmed. Processing limitations, rather than a defective grammar, explain very young children's absent subjects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical and message-level sentence context effects on fixation times in reading.

Readers' eye movements were recorded as they read an unambiguous noun in a sentence context. In Exp 1, fixation durations on a target noun were shorter when it was embedded in context containing a subject noun and a verb that were weakly related to the target than when either content word was replaced with a more neutral word. These results were not affected by changes in the syntactic relations between the content words. In Exp 2, the semantic relations between the message-level representation of the sentence and the target word were altered whereas the lexical content was held constant. Fixation time on the target word was shorter when the context was semantically related to the target word than when it was unrelated. Intralexical priming effects between the subject noun and the verb were also observed. Results suggest that both lexical and message-level representations can influence the access of an individual lexical item in a sentence context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

In search of perceptual influences of sentence context on word recognition.

A major issue in the study of word perception concerns the nature (perceptual or nonperceptual) of sentence context effects. The authors compared effects of legal, word replacement, nonword replacement, and transposed contexts on target word performance using the Reicher-Wheeler task to suppress nonperceptual influences of contextual and lexical constraint. Experiment 1 showed superior target word performance for legal (e.g., "it began to flap/flop") over all other contexts and for transposed over word replacement and nonword replacement contexts. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with higher constraint contexts (e.g., "the cellar is dark/dank") and Experiment 3 showed that strong constraint contexts improved performance for congruent (e.g., "born to be wild") but not incongruent (e.g., mild) target words. These findings support the view that the very perception of words can be enhanced when words are presented in legal sentence contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Parafoveal preview during reading: Effects of sentence position.

Two experiments examined parafoveal preview for words located in the middle of sentences and at sentence boundaries. Parafoveal processing was shown to occur for words at sentence-initial, mid-sentence, and sentence-final positions. Both Experiments 1 and 2 showed reduced effects of preview on regressions out for sentence-initial words. In addition, Experiment 2 showed reduced preview effects on first-pass reading times for sentence-initial words. These effects of sentence position on preview could result from either reduced parafoveal processing for sentence-initial words or other processes specific to word reading at sentence boundaries. In addition to the effects of preview, the experiments also demonstrate variability in the effects of sentence wrap-up on different reading measures, indicating that the presence and time course of wrap-up effects may be modulated by text-specific factors. We also report simulations of Experiment 2 using version 10 of E-Z Reader (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009), designed to explore the possible mechanisms underlying parafoveal preview at sentence boundaries. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of humor on sentence memory.

Memory for humorous and nonhumorous versions of sentences was compared. Humorous sentences were better remembered than the nonhumorous sentences on both free- and cued-recall tests and on measures of sentence recall and word recall. These effects persisted when Ss were warned that they were about to read a humorous sentence but were attenuated in incidental learning and limited to within-Ss manipulations. In incidental learning, recall was also scored as a function of subjective ratings of humor. Subjective humor affected memory in both within- and between-Ss designs. Attention, arousal, rehearsal, retrieval, and surprise explanations were explored. Results suggest that humorous material receives both increased attention and rehearsal relative to nonhumorous material. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Use of verb information in syntactic parsing: Evidence from eye movements and word-by-word self-paced reading.

We investigated whether readers use verb information to aid in their initial parsing of temporarily ambiguous sentences. In the first experiment, subjects' eye movements were recorded. In the second and third experiments, subjects read sentences by using a noncumulative and cumulative word-by-word self-paced paradigm, respectively. The results of the first two experiments supported L. Frazier and K. Rayner's (see record 1982-20309-001) garden-path model of sentence comprehension: Verb information did not influence the initial operation of the parser. The third experiment indicated that the cumulative version of the self-paced paradigm is not appropriate for studying on-line parsing. We conclude that verb information is not used by the parser to modify its initial parsing strategies, although it may be used to guide subsequent reanalysis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Brain potentials elicited by garden-path sentences: Evidence of the application of verb information during parsing.

Event-related potentials were recorded from 13 scalp locations while participants read sentences containing a syntactic ambiguity. In Exp 1, syntactically disambiguating words that were inconsistent with the "favored" syntactic analysis elicited a positive-going brain potential (P600). Exp 2 examined whether syntactic ambiguities are resolved by application of a phrase-structure-based minimal attachment principle or by word-specific subcategorization information. P600 amplitude was a function of subcategorization biases rather than syntactic complexity. These findings indicate that such biases exist and can influence the parser under certain conditions and that P600 amplitude is a function of the perceived syntactic well-formedness of the sentence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Building up linguistic context in schizophrenia: Evidence from self-paced reading.

An impairment in the build-up and use of context has been proposed as a core feature of schizophrenia. The current study tested the hypothesis that schizophrenia patients show impairments in building up context within sentences because of abnormalities in combining semantic with syntactic information. Schizophrenia patients and healthy controls read and made acceptability judgments about sentences containing verbs that were semantically associated with individual preceding words but that violated either the meaning (animacy/semantic constraints) or the syntactic structure (morphosyntactic constraints) of their preceding contexts. To override these semantic associations and determine that such sentences are unacceptable, participants must integrate semantic with syntactic information. These sentences were compared with congruous and pragmatically/semantically violated sentences that imposed fewer semantic-syntactic integration demands. At sentence-final words and decisions, patients showed smaller reaction time differences than controls to animacy/semantically violated or morphosyntactically violated sentences relative to pragmatically/semantically violated or nonviolated sentences. The relative insensitivity to these violations in patients with schizophrenia may arise from impairments in combining semantic and syntactic information to build up sentence context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evidence that ferritin is UV inducible in human skin: part of a putative defense mechanism

The low-affinity penicillin-binding protein (PBP) 5 is the main beta-lactam target and is responsible for resistance to this class of antibiotics in Enterococcus faecium. The PBP 5 variants of 15 clinical isolates (including 8 resistant to vancomycin) with different levels of beta-lactam resistance were analyzed. Most of the highly beta-lactam-resistant isolates produced small quantities of PBP 5 of low affinity. This was associated with particular amino acid substitutions: an Ala or Ile for Thr-499, a Glu for Val-629, and a Pro for Ser-667. A change of Met-485 to Thr or Ala (adjacent to the conserved SDN box) was observed in isolates with MICs of ampicillin of 64 or 128 microg/mL, respectively. In the 2 most resistant isolates, with MICs of ampicillin of 256 microg/mL, an additional Ser was present just after Ser-466. Thus, particular point mutations in PBP 5 and combinations thereof may lead to high-level beta-lactam resistance in E. faecium.     

Consequences of caring: Pain in the human context.

Contends that painful experiences and their observable manifestations reflect the sufferer's personal background in a particular family and culture. People's interest and compassion for the suffering of others can have a powerful impact on their own experiences and expression of pain and illness as well as determine the care provided for others in physical distress. The complex processes whereby patterns of pain and illness behavior are acquired, both verbal and nonverbal, are examined, and various cognitive, affective, behavioral, and social processes are suggested as potential targets for prevention and intervention in the lives of people suffering chronic pain. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)