http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/glossapsycholinguistics/rss Recent eScholarship items from Glossa Psycholinguistics Fri, 15 May 2026 20:12:29 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8773j26k <p>This study investigates how English and Mandarin Chinese speakers linguistically encode transfer events (e.g., <em>give</em>, <em>take</em>). We test the hypothesis that transfer events, like motion events, involve Goal and Source paths and are therefore subject to a Goal bias, such that Goals are encoded more prominently than Sources. Across two experiments, speakers of both languages described transfer events. In both languages, descriptions showed a robust Goal bias: speakers mentioned Goals more often than Sources, even when controlling for potential Agent–Subject mapping effects, and they were more likely to use canonical Goal-encoding devices for Goals than canonical Source-encoding devices for Sources. These findings reveal a cross-linguistically reliable preference for Goals in transfer-event descriptions, consistent with the possibility that Goal prominence reflects general principles of event message planning. More broadly, the results provide support for accounts... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8773j26k Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chen, Yiran https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0695-3940 Papafragou, Anna https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0701-921X Trueswell, John https://orcid.org/0009-0008-5613-6341 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9nw5c35s <p>Prediction, both on the syntactic and the semantic level, is a central process in language comprehension. For instance, people predict aspects of event structure based on morphosyntactic markers on verbs: hearing <em>has peeled</em> directs one's attention towards a culminated event, as opposed to an ongoing event. Here, we ask how general this prediction process is, and specifically, whether it extends to cues outside the predicate, using the Hindi split-ergative system as case study. Ergativity allows properties of an event to be predicted on the subject, notably a constituent outside the Verb Phrase. In four studies, we map out the role subject marking plays for prediction of event properties in comprehension. Our results show that in some offline judgments, ergativity is a strong predictor of culminated events; but the cue provided by ergative marking is not taken into account during incremental comprehension, questioning accounts of automatically triggered culmination... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9nw5c35s Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Vos, Myrte https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3896-2742 Gurumukhani, Mohit https://orcid.org/0009-0007-8808-2846 Vaidya, Ashwini https://orcid.org/0009-0003-0537-110X Wittenberg, Eva https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3188-6145 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9bm6t62c <p>Discourse particles are little words that provide non-at-issue content to sentences, reshaping the illocutionary force of an utterance. Among them, question-sensitive discourse particles (QDiPs), like German <em>denn</em>, are subject to a number of interacting syntactic, semantic and pragmatic licensing constraints, offering a unique window into language processing at the interfaces. We present EEG data on the processing of QDiPs in different types of interrogatives (eliciting either syntactic/semantic or pragmatic QDiP licensing), along with QDiPs in declaratives (i.e., unlicensed QDiPs resulting in ill-formed structures). The analysis of event-related potentials shows an increased negativity for QDiPs relative to a non-QDiP baseline in the P300/N400 time window; this is more pronounced for unlicensed QDiPs (in declaratives) than licensed QDiPs (in interrogatives). In the P600 time window, QDiPs elicit more positive-going curves than non-QDiPs, with this pattern wearing off... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9bm6t62c Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kharaman, Mariya https://orcid.org/0009-0005-5351-0324 Czypionka, Anna https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2247-0110 Eulitz, Carsten https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6589-5920 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8fc3t67c <p>Connectives such as <em>and</em>, <em>but</em>, and <em>so</em> conjoin two elements of discourse in characteristic ways. While highlighting (i) the conjunctive contribution of all three and (ii) the rich procedural information in the latter two, we posit that discourse connectives such as <em>but</em> and <em>so</em> convey specific kinds of extra-logical inferences, concerning <em>contrast</em> and causality, <em>respectively</em>. Unlike previous processing studies, which have focused either on the integration of a given connective to a provided thematic discourse representation or on its effect on processing downstream, we focus on the inferential potential of discourse connectives from the moment they are presented and in a largely thematically-neutral scenario. In order to systematically vary the processing import of discourse connectives, while holding constant all other variables, we present participants a repeatable game in which they determine whether a provided sentence... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8fc3t67c Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Larralde, Cecile https://orcid.org/0009-0005-9998-6643 Moyer, Morgan https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3544-2792 Pouscoulous, Nausicaa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2597-7489 Noveck, Ira https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3401-9629 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7m13r0xc <p>Sociolinguistic research finds that: (i) the speech signal contains talker-specific and socio-indexical structure, with talkers varying idiosyncratically within the same social category and systematically across categories; (ii) both talker-specific and socio-indexical variation influence speech perception. What is unclear is how sociolinguistic perception arises—following exposure to an unfamiliar, socially-mediated variant, how do listeners learn that this feature is characteristic of a broader social group and can generalize to other group members? The current study exposed listeners to an unattested variant in L1-English (a /p/ to [b] phonetic shift), investigating how the number of exposure talkers mediates cross-talker generalization. All participants completed an exposure phase (phrase-final keyword identification) followed by a test phase (categorization along a <em>buy–pie</em> continuum for a novel female and male talker in separate blocks). Experiment 1 exposed listeners... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7m13r0xc Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Aoki, Nicholas https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6267-281X Zellou, Georgia https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9167-0744 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7hk0941c <p>Adult language learners have variable performance with subject-verb number agreement. But it is unclear whether their performance additionally depends on the availability of agreement morphology in their first language. To address this question, we conducted a self-paced reading task comparing different speaker groups: (a) first vs. second language speakers of German; (b) intermediate-to-advanced German learners whose first language had more or less productive number agreement morphology (Spanish vs. English). Two manipulations were used to diagnose number processing: agreement violations and agreement attraction. Our results showed decreased sensitivity to agreement violations in language learners, irrespective of the morphological productivity of their first language. Meanwhile, differences in attraction effects were inconclusive in all between-group comparisons. We suggest that second language variability with subject-verb agreement is unlikely to result from increased retrieval... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7hk0941c Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lago, Sol https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4966-1913 Oltrogge, Elise https://orcid.org/0009-0004-4953-9186 Stone, Kate https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2180-9736 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7hb2h628 <p>Interpreters frequently draw projection inferences, that is, inferences that the speaker believes utterance content contributed in the scope of an entailment-canceling operator. These inferences are modulated by a number of factors, including interpreters’ <em>prior beliefs</em> about the content, the extent to which the content is <em>at-issue </em>with respect to the Question Under Discussion, as well as the <em>lexical meaning</em> of expressions associated with the content. This paper addresses open questions and disagreements in the literature about how these factors interact in modulating projection inferences. The paper reports the result of two experiments designed to investigate the relation between prior beliefs, at-issueness, and lexical meaning for projection inferences in American English. The contents under investigation are contributed by the clausal complements of clause-embedding predicates (e.g., <em>know</em>, <em>discover</em>), which differ in lexical meaning.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7hb2h628 Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Degen, Judith https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2513-0234 Tonhauser, Judith https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6061-7120 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7g30m0th <p>Recent studies suggest that language users generate and maintain multiple predictions in parallel, especially in tasks that explicitly instruct participants to generate predictions. Here, we investigated the possibility of parallel gradedness of linguistic predictions in a simple reading task, using a new measure—<em>imbalance</em>—that captures the probabilistic difference between multiple sentence completions. We focus on prenominal gender-marked articles in German to obtain prediction-specific effects. Native speakers of German read predictable or unpredictable gender-marked nouns that were preceded by prediction-consistent or -inconsistent prenominal articles. Sentence frames either biased expectations more strongly toward the most likely continuation of the sentence, or balanced expectations between the first and second most likely continuation. The results showed reading facilitation for gender-marked articles when sentences were more biased but slowing when sentences... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7g30m0th Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Haeuser, Katja I. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6553-3551 Borovsky, Arielle https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5869-0241 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/76s6t9xc <p>The processing of subject-verb number agreement has been extensively studied when the subject precedes the verb; by contrast, agreement processing in dependencies in which the subject follows the verb has been less investigated. To address this gap, the authors measured the processing of sentences with postverbal subjects in Italian adults, investigating the role of syntactic structure and discourse licensing on agreement processing. They tested whether number agreement violations in verb-subject orders were processed differently depending on whether they occurred in transitive structures with clitic-left dislocation versus unaccusative structures with locative inversion. Because transitive structures are temporarily ambiguous and more constrained by discourse conditions than unaccusative structures, the authors hypothesized that the former might increase comprehenders’ memory load and impair the detection of agreement violations. The results of speeded acceptability judgments... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/76s6t9xc Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Listanti, Andrea https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7925-6222 Lago, Sol https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4966-1913 Torregrossa, Jacopo https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7538-9725 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5q52m9g5 <p>This study investigates how prosody contributes to the interpretation of French indirect requests. We ask whether prosodic cues directly map onto speech acts (Direct Mapping view) or primarily serve as contrastive markers, signaling a departure from the most likely interpretation (Contrastive Marking view). Four interrogative constructions were examined, each compatible with both a request and a yes/no question reading: modal interrogatives (<em>Tu peux fermer la fenêtre ?</em> ‘Can you close the window?’), non-modal interrogatives (<em>Tu fermes la fenêtre ?</em> ‘Are you closing the window?’), and their counterparts with <em>est-ce que</em> (<em>Est-ce que tu peux fermer la fenêtre ?</em> ‘Can you close the window?’; <em>Est-ce que tu fermes la fenêtre ?</em> ‘Are you closing the window?’). Norming studies with 320 French speakers established baseline request probabilities for these forms, confirming that modal interrogatives strongly favor a request interpretation, while... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5q52m9g5 Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ruytenbeek, Nicolas https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1651-9777 Trott, Sean https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6003-3731 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4th7k78b <p>A <em>bridged interpretation</em> of a noun phrase (NP) is one in which the referent is understood to stand in some unstated relation to an entity or event previously mentioned in the discourse. For example, in the sequence <em>Yasmin approached the house. The door was open.</em>, the NP <em>the door</em> is naturally interpreted as referring to a door of the just-mentioned house. In the theoretical literature, definiteness is often identified as the key driver of bridged interpretations, requiring an alternative analysis for bridged indefinites (<em>Yasmin approached the house. A door was open.</em>). We contrast this two-phenomena approach with a one-phenomenon approach, whereby bridging inferences are understood to be the result of general considerations of discourse coherence, particularly facilitated by entity relatedness, but also responsive to effects of definiteness. We present two new methods aimed at measuring the ease and strength of participants’ bridging inferences... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4th7k78b Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Simons, Mandy https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6260-6102 Rohde, Hannah https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9356-3229 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/43w8z808 <p>Many languages allow flexible word orders, and how humans parse and comprehend them has been one of the central questions in psycholinguistics. Mounting evidence has suggested that not only syntactic factors (e.g., the formation of a filler–gap dependency) but also discourse-related factors (e.g., the discourse status of phrases) influence the processing of non-canonical word orders. However, far too little attention has been paid to subject-initial non-canonical word orders, leaving it unclear how these two factors interact during the processing of such structures. Given this background, we conducted two self-paced reading experiments in Japanese, focusing on inchoative constructions involving a theme subject and a causer adjunct. Experiment 1 showed that the pre-verbal phrase was read more quickly in causer–theme sentences than in theme–causer sentences. We attributed this processing asymmetry to a filler–gap dependency between the sentence-initial theme subject and its original... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/43w8z808 Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Asami, Daiki https://orcid.org/0009-0000-5707-7197 Tomioka, Satoshi https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7076-1508 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3bx719z9 <p>In support of an account in which disfluency can cue social reasoning in real time, Loy et al. (2019) showed that listeners are more likely to make an early commitment to a socially undesirable meaning of some as all, if it follows disfluent uh in a context where larger values are associated with greed (“I ate, [uh], some biscuits”). However, their finding is also compatible with an account in which disfluency simply heightens attention to the core semantic meaning of some, namely, some and possibly all. The current study differentiates these two accounts, using contexts in which smaller values are the socially undesirable interpretations of some. In two experiments, we recorded participants’ mouse movements as they heard fluent and disfluent utterances in a job interview context (“I have, [uh], some qualifications”) and clicked on one of four images corresponding to specific interpretations of some. Here, in keeping with an account in which the effects of disfluency reflect... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3bx719z9 Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Li, Wei https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7568-4940 Rohde, Hannah https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9356-3229 Corley, Martin https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7011-428X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/373639hj <p>The present article investigates the prevalence of statistical reporting inconsistencies across articles in thirteen experimental linguistics journals published between 2000 and 2023. Using the R package Statcheck, we retrieved 82,991 statistical tests from 13,065 articles and assessed whether p-values were consistent with their test statistic and degrees of freedom. Almost half of the articles (49%) that used null-hypothesis significance testing contained at least one inconsistent p-value. Around one in eight articles (12%) contained an inconsistency that may have affected the statistical conclusion. The inconsistency rates were comparable across journals and seem stable over publication years. We discuss possible reasons for this high rate and offer actionable steps for authors, reviewers, and editors to remedy this state of affairs.<br>&nbsp;<br>&nbsp;<br>&nbsp;</p> https://escholarship.org/uc/item/373639hj Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Etemady, Dara-Leonard Jenssen https://orcid.org/0009-0006-0083-3944 Roettger, Timo B. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1400-2739 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/31q9z60k <p>This study investigates how the semantic restrictions of Spanish copulas (ser and estar) impact the online processing of locative constructions. The choice of copula depends on the eventiveness of the subject noun: <em>ser</em> is used with event nouns (e.g., <em>La reunión es en la biblioteca </em>/ The meeting isser in the library), while <em>estar</em> is used with object nouns (e.g., <em>El libro está en la biblioteca</em> / The book is_ESTAR in the library). By manipulating copula type (<em>ser</em> vs. <em>estar</em>) and noun type (event vs. object), we created compatible (<em>ser</em> + event, <em>estar</em> + object) and incompatible combinations. The results from a self-paced reading task and an eye-tracking experiment converge in showing that event nouns were read faster after <em>ser</em>, and object nouns were read faster after <em>estar</em>. These findings suggest that readers rapidly use the copula’s semantic restrictions to anticipate the eventiveness... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/31q9z60k Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Aguilar, Miriam https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7787-5732 López-Cortés, Natalia https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9131-8660 Demestre, Josep https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9221-066X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sp1b3vs <p>Acceptability judgments are one of the major tools for (psycho)linguists to assess speakers’ preferences for specific utterances in a given language, shedding light on the grammar of the language under study. However, it is well known that factors that are not related to grammaticality, such as frequency of exposure, cognitive constraints, and others, can influence the perceived acceptability of an utterance. We will use the system of wh-interrogatives in French as an example to study the impact of linguistic norms on what is considered “good” French. In three experiments, we show that adult L1 French speakers have internalized the dichotomy between variants that are considered “good French”, according to the norms, and those that are suited to more informal daily life situations. Speakers can express these differences when given the appropriate tools, but not with a unique general acceptability scale. In line with previous work, we argue that acceptability judgments are a... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sp1b3vs Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Thiberge, Gabriel https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9727-7860 Hemforth, Barbara https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8371-1323 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/26q6t59t <p>In psycholinguistics, phenomena which are commonly analysed as involving some type of movement are associated with increased costs in sentence processing (Anderson, 2004; Bornkessel et al., 2002; Friederici et al., 2006; Gibson, 2000). But these increased costs are not the same for all speakers. In particular, while some speakers can rely on interpretations that require movement with no additional efforts, other speakers either seem to reject them or have more difficulties with these interpretations (Brasoveanu &amp; Dotlačil, 2015; Caplan et al., 2011; Caplan &amp; Waters, 1999; Gil, 1982; Kemper &amp; Liu, 2007; King &amp; Just, 1991; Philipp &amp; Zimmermann, 2020; Pregla, et al., 2021; Vogelzang et al., 2019; Wingfield et al., 2003). However, what factors drive these individual differences is currently unclear. Knowing their sources will help us to sharpen our knowledge about the linguistic system. We therefore aim to investigate inter-individual differences in processing... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/26q6t59t Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Philipp, Mareike https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3799-8471 Pregla, Dorothea https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1d7926hb <p>In two visual world experiments with L1 and L2 German speakers, this study investigates how listeners use semantic cues on the verb to predict either a post-verbal object in subject-first SVO sentences or a post-verbal subject in adverb-first verb-second (AdvVS(O)) sentences, with the goal of assessing to what extent the syntax of an unfolding sentence constrains the activation of potential upcoming referents. In all sentence types, both L1 and L2 listeners looked at the referent of the post-verbal argument earlier when the verb was semantically constraining than when it was not. Predictive looks were slower overall in the L2 group, but not attenuated in syntactic configurations absent from their L1, namely, adverb-first verb-second (AdvVS(O)) sentences. Both groups were more likely to fixate plausible subjects than objects on hearing a transitive verb following a sentence-initial adverb, suggesting that prediction of an upcoming argument was constrained not only by semantic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1d7926hb Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jackson, Carrie N https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0284-850X Hopp, Holger https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3026-3349 Grüter, Theres https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6354-9787 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1c59b1sn <p>The English present perfect and simple future tenses are felicitous with the living, but not the dead, as a referent must exist at reference time. In contrast, the simple past is odd with living referents in out-of-the-blue statements, as it requires a specified or implied past reference time. We employed eye-tracking during reading (Experiment 1) and self-paced reading (Experiments 2 and 3) in order to explore how (referent) lifetime-tense congruence influences processing across three English tenses. Referent-lifetime contexts (e.g., <em>Jimi Hendrix was an American musician. He died in London.</em>) were followed by critical sentences in the present perfect (Experiments 1-3), simple future (Experiments 1 and 2), and the simple past (Experiment 3) (e.g., <em>He has performed/will perform/performed in numerous music festivals.</em>). Lifetime-tense congruence effects in reading times and naturalness responses emerged in all three tenses, but with differences in the latency,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1c59b1sn Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Palleschi, Daniela https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7633-2736 Ronderos, Camilo Rodríguez https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7779-406X Knoeferle, Pia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4350-6445 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0fr520rs <p>Lexical processing reflects patterns of phonological and/or orthographic similarity among words. One approach to explaining this is to conceive of the mental lexicon as being structured according to these similarity patterns, and to model that structure as a network, most commonly by connecting each word to its immediate neighbors. Evidence that lexical processing is related to structure beyond the size of words’ immediate neighborhoods suggests that network analyses can capture psycholinguistically relevant structural patterns in the lexicon, but it remains unclear how that structure is represented in the mind and how it relates to the mechanisms used in the most prominent theoretical approaches to explaining lexical processing. To shed light on this issue, we use a latent variable approach to identify the underlying dimensions of phonological and orthographic structure in the lexicon by modeling multiple network-derived properties and testing those dimensions against word... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0fr520rs Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Carlson, Matthew T. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3078-6855 DiMercurio II, Dominick https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6517-3733 Gertel, Victoria H. Diaz, Michele T. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7263-1694 Sandberg, Chaleece W. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2147-661X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0ds9702v <p>To what degree listeners can maintain gradient subcategorical information about speech input in memory over time has been a matter of considerable debate. The literature has largely lacked formal computational models of potential mechanisms against which to compare human behavior. Here, we formalize several competing cognitive models of this process and quantitatively compare them to data from a series of behavioral experiments. We find consistently strong evidence in favor of models which allow for maintenance of subcategorical information over the course of an utterance. These results suggests that listeners are able to maintain relatively fine-grained details about prior linguistic input over long perceptual timescales. This work also highlights the importance of formalizing cognitive models of behavior to distinguish between competing theoretical mechanisms.</p> https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0ds9702v Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Bushong, Wednesday https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1837-0689 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/05t0n30m <p>In three forced-choice completion experiments in Hebrew, the present study investigates the degree to which attachment decisions in sentences with local ambiguity are driven by the goal to maximize interpretation during incremental processing. In particular, we examine a processing strategy aimed at thematic assignment maximization proposed by Pritchett (1988, 1992): at every point during processing, the Theta Criterion attempts to be satisfied, given the maximal thematic grid of the available verbs. We find a consistent preference for attaching a noun phrase to a preceding verb over attaching it as the subject of a yet-unmentioned verb, in accord with thematic assignment maximization and in line with previous observations. In contrast, when two possible verbs were available before the noun phrase, no consistent attachment preference was observed. This points to a prominent role for thematic assignment in ambiguity resolution. In addition, transitivity bias was found to affect... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/05t0n30m Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Karsenti, Lola https://orcid.org/0009-0004-7016-4665 Meltzer-Asscher, Aya https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4886-0029 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/54r8g7t1 <p>We investigated the processing of resumptive pronouns in English relative clauses. We asked whether resumptive pronouns in complex relative clauses formed from islands and non-islands establish dependencies with head nouns in incremental processing. Based on the findings from two reading time experiments using the Maze task with the gender-mismatch paradigm, as well as an off-line comprehension study, we conclude that (i) a dependency is formed with the head noun immediately upon encountering the resumptive pronoun; (ii) dependency formation is easier across islands than across non-islands; (iii) dependency formation privileges the head noun over intervening noun phrases; and (iv) these dependencies are maintained in off-line comprehension. The data suggest that although resumptive pronouns are judged to be unacceptable in English, comprehenders automatically and immediately integrate them using routines similar to filler-gap dependencies. We discuss the implications of our... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/54r8g7t1 Wed, 6 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Han, Chung-hye Block, Trevor https://orcid.org/0009-0001-3531-8073 Gendron, Holly Storoshenko, Dennis Ryan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4038-4796 Weir, Jesse https://orcid.org/0009-0003-6201-0589 Williamson, Sara Moulton, Keir https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jk1q99w <p>In nominal classification systems, both form (i.e., morphology, phonology or both) and meaning often interact to determine the class or gender of the noun. In Bantu languages in particular, linguistic analysis has often put the emphasis on meaning, both inherent and evaluative (e.g., diminutive). However, recent quantitative studies have argued that both meaning and morphophonology – the ubiquitous nominal prefixes – serve as cues to class in Bantu, with their robustness and specific aspects potentially differing across individual languages. Here, we conducted an experimental study aimed at establishing whether speakers of Kîîtharaka (Bantu, E54) are sensitive to both semantics and morphophonology when classifying novel Kîîtharaka nouns. We used two wug-task-style experiments to establish whether particular aspects of meaning or form (here, nominal prefixes) would influence participants’ production of agreement on nominal dependents. Results showed that speakers are sensitive... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jk1q99w Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kanampiu, Patrick Njue https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6625-8827 Martin, Alexander https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1241-2435 Culbertson, Jennifer https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1737-6296 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0wf4b90q <p>Typological data show a tendency for languages to exhibit harmonic (i.e., consistent) ordering between heads and dependents. Previous experimental work using artificial language learning experiments has shown that learners prefer harmonic patterns. This suggests that the typological trend for harmony may, at least in part, be driven by a cognitive bias. However, it is well-documented that specific categories sometimes contradict this tendency. Here, we investigate one such case in the domain of the noun phrase. While many nominal dependents exhibit harmony, adjectives and genitives do not: adjectives tend to follow the noun and genitives tend to precede. Previous experiments have identified the existence of cognitive biases that keep these dependents split across the head noun in contexts where there is no conventional language system in place. In this study, we use a silent gesture experiment to examine whether the specific biases that apply to these two dependent types compete... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0wf4b90q Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Holtz, Annie https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4325-9931 Culbertson, Jennifer https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1737-6296 Kirby, Simon https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6496-1340 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/592472fg <p>Recent work on sound symbolism has established a relation between roughness and the alveolar trill (e.g., Ćwiek et al., 2024). The available evidence is, however, ambiguous as to whether the phonetic properties of an alveolar trill or the phonological properties of rhotics are associated with roughness. This was tested in Maltese, which uses both alveolar approximants and alveolar trills for /r/. Participants were presented with a product that had either a rough or a smooth surface and were asked to choose a potential product name from two options, one containing an /r/ and the other an /l/. The /r/ was produced either as a trill or an approximant. The /r/-bearing word was chosen more often when the product was rough, but this was independent of the phonetic implementation of the /r/. This indicates that the phonological properties of rhotics, and not the phonetic properties of the trill, support the association of /r/ with roughness.</p> https://escholarship.org/uc/item/592472fg Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mitterer, Holger https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4318-0032 Arvanitidou, Martha https://orcid.org/0009-0006-7447-477X Balzan, Julia https://orcid.org/0009-0007-8825-7490 Borg, Daniela https://orcid.org/0009-0004-7599-3817 Demanuele, Ritienne https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1289-9845 Engels, Laura-Viviane https://orcid.org/0009-0004-7796-6257 Grixti, Nadia https://orcid.org/0009-0003-0086-3519 Koczyk, Patrycjusz https://orcid.org/0009-0005-8569-8894 Thorsteinsdottir, Anna https://orcid.org/0009-0001-8105-1218 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2q52c2jp <p>In addition to referential uses, pronouns can have covarying interpretations, i.e., exhibit the behavior of a bound variable. The grammatical mechanism(s) behind such readings have been subject to longstanding debates: Some authors argue for a fairly flexible but unified semantic mechanism that is not tied closely to syntactic configurations. Others distinguish a core class of bona fidebinding with tight syntactic constraints from other mechanisms that give rise to ultimately parallel effects, but do so more indirectly. Psycholinguistic work has started to uncover the processing mechanisms involved in evaluating dependencies between covarying pronouns and (candidate) antecedents. Moulton and Han (2018) leverage the processing perspective to try to shed light on the theoretical question of what grammatical mechanism is at play for a given covarying pronoun. They argue that so-called Gender Mismatch Effects only arise for cases of bona fide binding, supporting the existence of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2q52c2jp Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lakhani, Nikhil Vipul https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9081-1514 Schwarz, Florian https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6426-3174 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/04v9z9b5 <p>This study investigates whether crosslinguistic constraints on subject selection in physical causative constructions extend to causative psychological verbs (psych verbs, e.g., <em>frighten, surprise</em>), with a focus on subject volitionality. According to Wolff et al.’s (2009) initiator hypothesis, languages tend to restrict subjecthood in causative events to entities that can plausibly initiate a causal chain. While this has been established for physical causatives, it remains unclear whether similar constraints apply in psychological causation. To test this, we conducted an Acceptability Judgment Task in which native speakers of Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and English rated grammatical sentences varying in subject volitionality. The results showed that only Korean speakers consistently dispreferred non-volitional subjects, suggesting that their subject selection is more constrained by volitionality. These findings indicate that the initiator hypothesis extends beyond physical... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/04v9z9b5 Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kim, Jihyun https://orcid.org/0009-0007-4241-426X Marsden, Heather https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4885-3446 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/985605cw <p>This study aims to explore crosslinguistic variation in island sensitivity between Danish and English, specifically focusing on the extraction patterns of different types of adjunct clauses. Additionally, it investigates how context, dependency type, information structure and syntactic structure may impact the acceptability of extraction from adjunct clauses. The results indicate that Danish exhibits acceptability patterns similar to those found in Swedish and Norwegian regarding extraction from conditional and causal adjunct clauses. However, the raw scores of extraction from adjunct clauses are unexpectedly low in Danish. The study discusses potential explanations involving factors related to syntax, discourse function and processing but finds limitations in each approach and concludes that a fine-grained account is needed in order to capture the observed variability. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of island phenomena and highlights the need for investigation... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/985605cw Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Nyvad, Anne Mette https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9554-6716 Müller, Christiane https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5385-905X Christensen, Ken Ramshøj https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8758-240X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/46d7f3k5 <p>The present study investigates whether the relationship between voice gender (female and male voices) and gender-associated meanings (e.g., flower [female] vs. football [male]) influences learning of an artificial lexicon after brief auditory exposure. Participants were trained on 16 novel words in either a gender-aligning condition (i.e., female voices produced novel words with female-associated meanings and male voices produced novel words with male-associated meanings) or a gender-mismatching condition (e.g., female voices produced words with male-associated meanings, etc.). Listeners either heard voices that contain stereotypical or non-stereotypical gross acoustic patterns. Listeners showed worse word learning in gender-mismatching conditions. And, learning performance was mediated by voice stereotypicality. This study demonstrates how gender associations implicitly modulate social attention when learning a new language. Also, since the experiment was under the guise of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/46d7f3k5 Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zellou, Georgia https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9167-0744 Rácz, Péter https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7896-4801 Barreda, Santiago https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1552-083X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5w04m7v2 <p>In two web-based experiments, we compare comprehension difficulty between Dutch&nbsp;and German sentences with clusters of two or three verbs. In Dutch, such sentences involve&nbsp;crossing dependencies, whereas these dependencies are nested in German. Replicating the&nbsp;seminal finding of Bach et al. (1986), we find that the crossing (Dutch) structure is easier to&nbsp;comprehend than the nested (German) structure, although we find a different pattern of results&nbsp;in terms of where this difficulty manifests. The results are in line with predictions from the&nbsp;Dependency Locality Theory.</p> https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5w04m7v2 Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Yadav, Himanshu Frank, Stefan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7026-711X Futrell, Richard Husain, Samar https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4336-4897 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/87v9q353 <p>A central endeavor in psycholinguistic research has been to determine the processing profile of syntactically ambiguous strings. Previous work investigating syntactic attachment ambiguities has shown that discarding a locally grammatically available, but globally failing, parse is costly. However, little is known about how comprehenders cope with <em>semantic</em> parsing ambiguities. Using the case study of scopally ambiguous definite descriptions such as <em>the rabbit in the big hat</em>, we examine whether comparable penalties arise for non-lexical semantic ambiguities. In a series of reference resolution tasks, we find dispreference for strings that are globally defined but fail to refer under alternative semantic parses, compared to strings where all readings successfully refer to the same individual. Crucially, this effect is only detectable when the alternative failing reading gives rise to a REFERENTIAL GARDEN PATH, where a dynamic constraint evaluation process temporarily... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/87v9q353 Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Aparicio, Helena https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8619-1500 Levy, Roger https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4493-8864 Coppock, Elizabeth https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9987-344X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0gg2t6gv <p>Vowel letters are a source of difficulty in reading English words, for they have both long and short pronunciations. In two studies, we examined how vowels are pronounced before different types of medial consonants in the words of English and the degree to which skilled readers follow those vocabulary statistics in their behavior. We found more short vowels before sequences beginning with ‹s› than before those such as ‹pl›, regardless of whether the letter after ‹s› corresponded to a stop consonant (e.g., ‹sp›) or a sonorant (e.g., ‹sl›). These results show that pronunciation of vowels is influenced by the nature and not just the number of following consonants, contrary to the assumptions that commonly underlie phonics instruction. Although the results support a statistical learning view of reading, in that participants showed an implicit use of untaught patterns, participants’ pronunciations differed in some ways from those expected given the vocabulary statistics.&nbsp;</p> https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0gg2t6gv Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Treiman, Rebecca https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6819-8338 Kessler, Brett https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5759-0193 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3nw5828p <p>Prosodic phrasing plays a crucial role in sentence comprehension because it helps listeners resolve structural ambiguities. However, explicit prosody is not available in reading. According to the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, readers are assumed to assign default prosody to sentences, which then guides parsing decisions (Fodor, 2002a, 2002b). This study tested this hypothesis by manipulating the lexical accent of phrases, which affects the prosodic phrasing of sentences in Japanese. The results of a self-paced silent reading experiment showed faster reading times for the structure that matched the prosodic phrasing than the structure that did not. This finding suggests that readers implicitly represent a prosodic structure that plays a functional role in syntactic processing.</p> https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3nw5828p Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Murakami, Risa Yano, Masataka https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4465-8456 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1x11z7zf <p>The German focus-sensitive particle auch (‘too’) can associate with different constituents (ACs) in an utterance. In terms of position, it can precede or follow its AC. There is a strong preference for using preceding auch when the AC is the object. In three sentence fragment arrangement tasks, we investigated whether speakers are structurally primed by the context. To that end, we used context sentences as part of short dialogues with different particles: nur (‘only’), kein(e)(‘no’), both of which precede their AC, and nicht (‘not’), which follows its AC. The results show that the established preference for preceding auch is affected by the position of the particle in the context (following auch occurred more often when the context contained following nicht). Follow-up experiments rule out an explanation based on intonation (Experiment 2) or on the underlying syntactic structure (Experiment 3). We found clear surface structural priming effects for function words with effect... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1x11z7zf Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Reimer, Laura https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8074-8526 Braun, Bettina https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7696-3255 Dimroth, Christine https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0483-7839 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7266r32c <p>Recent research has highlighted that lexical scales vary in their likelihood of giving rise to a scalar inference—a finding labeled scalar diversity. The current paper examines the role of intonation for this phenomenon, which has thus far primarily been studied using written materials. A specific focus in this regard was on the so-called rise-fall-rise contour, which has been argued to (i) convey uncertainty, which could have an influence on scalar inference calculation, and (ii) be sensitive to properties of lexical scales, which could interact with factors driving scalar diversity. Experiment 1 combined production with an inference task to assess the likelihood of different intonational contours, as well as how a given contour affects scalar inference rates. Production of the rise-fall-rise varied across lexical scales, as expected, and led to an increase in scalar inference derivation relative to a fall. The latter finding was further confirmed in Experiment 2, which explicitly... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7266r32c Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Ronai, Eszter https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1578-0938 Göbel, Alexander https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7920-9071 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2t85h25g <p>While maximum standard absolute adjectives (such as straight) typically have a precise meaning (e.g., ‘perfectly straight’), they are also regularly used imprecisely (e.g., to mean ‘straight enough’). The current study investigates how contextual expectations of precision and a visual referent’s conceptual distance from an ideal maximum standard influence the processing effort of precise and imprecise interpretations of these adjectives. In three experiments, we showed native speakers of English images depicting objects that could be referred to precisely or imprecisely via an absolute adjective and asked them to select the image that best matched the written sentence (Experiments 1 and 2) or to read sentences containing maximum standard absolute adjectives (Experiment 3). Experiment 1 presented no discourse context, and participants accepted, on average, only a small degree of imprecision; and when they did, they took longer, relative to cases in which the same adjectives... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2t85h25g Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Ronderos, Camilo Rodríguez https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7779-406X Noveck, Ira https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3401-9629 Lossius Falkum, Ingrid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1203-8036 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n78m4x9 <p>Pronunciation variation is systematic, and provides listeners with cues to what the speaker is about to say. Shortened stems, for example, can indicate an upcoming suffix, while lengthened ones can indicate a word boundary follows. Previous work has shown that listeners draw on these cues to distinguish polysyllabic words, like rocket, from monosyllabic words, like rock. This strategy is useful in morphological processing, as additional morphological structure often adds additional syllables. The current study asks (i) whether listeners use these cues to distinguish words that differ only in morphological structure with no change in syllable count (e.g., rock/rocks); and (ii) how surrounding morphosyntactic context affects listeners’ ability to use these cues. Ideal observer models predict that listeners should be attentive to phonetic detail in all contexts regardless of how much new information it offers, while the strategic listener account allows listeners to dynamically... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n78m4x9 Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Cohen, Clara https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7308-671X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/108433d2 <p>Research has shown that people anticipate upcoming linguistic content, but evidence regarding expectations of specific lexical markers is mixed. We use the Dutch pair of discourse markers "Aan de ene kant...Aan de andere kant" (“On the one hand...On the other hand”) and "Enerzijds...Anderzijds" (also equivalent to “On the one hand...On the other hand”) to test whether readers generate predictions of an upcoming upcoming contrast dependency based on the lexical marker for the first contrastive perspective, and whether such predictions focus on a lexical form or rather on a discourse relation. In a self-paced reading, we show that readers do generate expectations for upcoming discourse markers, but that these expectations are not specific to a lexical form. In an eye-tracking study, we replicate the facilitative effect of the first marker of a lexical pair on the processing of the second marker, and show that this effect occurs in immediate processing. These results establish... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/108433d2 Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Scholman, Merel https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0223-8464 Rohde, Hannah https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9356-3229 Demberg, Vera https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8834-0020 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8d24r4pw <p>Unlike the gender-based systems of noun categorization in many European languages, numerous semantic categories contribute to Bantu noun class systems. Kinyarwanda, the focus of our study, has a rich inventory of noun class prefixes, but it is unknown to what degree the semantic and morphological systems underlying these noun classes influence how speakers mentally categorize nominals in their language. To investigate this, speakers of Kinyarwanda (n = 46) were recruited to take part in an online triadic comparison experiment. Across 144 trials, participants were asked to identify the item most different from a written list of three nouns. These lists were constructed based on morphological similarity (from noun classes 3, 5, 7, or 9), semantic overlap (from the domains of ‘mammals’ and ‘tools’), or both. Results show an overall preference for semantic grouping in the triads, although the strength of these preferences differed across individuals. This variation turned out to... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8d24r4pw Thu, 5 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Lawyer, Laurel A. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5419-6120 O'Gara, Fate https://orcid.org/0009-0009-3023-7563 Ngoboka, Jean Paul https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6726-0980 van Boxtel, Willem https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1199-1340 Jerro, Kyle https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1467-2524 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/36q4c5mf <p>Deletion-based accounts of verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) predict that this construction requires a syntactically identical antecedent, but previous research shows that some antecedent-target mismatches are perceived as relatively acceptable in experiments (see e.g. Arregui et al., 2006; Miller &amp; Hemforth, 2014). So far, the acceptability of these mismatches has been explained mostly by licensing conditions on VPE or by ellipsis-specific processing mechanisms. This article explores to what extent the acceptability of mismatches follows from the more general principles of an information-theoretic account of language use, which has been independently evidenced for other omission phenomena: To avoid under- or overutilizing the hearer’s processing resources, predictable VPs are more likely to be omitted, whereas unpredictable ones are more likely to be realized. This hypothesis is tested with three experiments that investigate a gradual acceptability cline between VPE mismatches... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/36q4c5mf Thu, 5 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Lemke, Robin https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2964-7396 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2jn2d9w0 <p>Previous research has shown that the computation of subject-verb number agreement can be derailed by the presence of syntactically illicit nouns, a phenomenon called agreement attraction. By contrast, the incidence of agreement attraction with anaphoric dependencies is less clear: previous work has mostly focused on reflexives and strong pronouns, which sometimes show attraction and other times do not. Meanwhile, research on clitics—a different class of pronominal anaphora—is scarcer. To expand the empirical record, we examined clitic pronouns in an under-researched language, Bulgarian. The results of a large sample eye-tracking study showed clear agreement attraction effects in fixation durations and regressive eye movements to the clitic pronoun and following words. These findings provide further evidence that the variable attraction profile of anaphoric dependencies might depend on the features of an anaphoric element, including its placement and the role of syntactic constraints... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2jn2d9w0 Mon, 26 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Ivanova-Sullivan, Tanya https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8604-5204 Sekerina, Irina A. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3859-3000 Lago, Sol https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4966-1913 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/026094hf <p>Non-linguistic factors leave a distinct thumbprint on our speech production that is perceptible to listeners. A steadily growing line of research demonstrates that listeners can perceive a contrast between native and non-native (L2) speakers based on accents and further classify these speakers according to dialectal variation, even when they are not native speakers of a language. Most of these studies have focused on dialectal variation within US English speakers, a combination of US and International English dialects, or L2 speakers representing a wide range of languages. Most have also featured listeners who are monolingual native speakers of the target language coming from a homogenous background, or a contrast between these and a targeted set of L2 speakers.&nbsp;We therefore lack knowledge of how exposure to, or familiarity with, diverse accents and languages, or specific native language competence of the native language of L2 speakers, can guide listeners’ accent perception... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/026094hf Mon, 26 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Syrett, Kristen https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3773-3035 Lu, Joy Parrish, Kyle https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8227-1370 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/53s3w4r5 <p>This paper investigates the relationship between morphological productivity and neological intuition, defined as the ability to identify novel words as such. It can be hypothesised that the more productive a word-formation process is, the less salient the neologisms it forms will be. We test this hypothesis experimentally on neologisms formed with prefixes and suffixes of variable productivity. Three experiments are conducted, involving lexical identification and reading tasks with eye tracking, to provide a comprehensive description of neological intuition. The negative correlation between productivity and neological salience is supported by experimental results, but only in the case of suffixed neologisms, as opposed to prefixed ones. The effect of affix type on neological intuition can be explained by differences in the grammatical nature of prefixes and suffixes. Broadly speaking, investigating the linguistic factors of neological intuition provides an original approach... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/53s3w4r5 Tue, 13 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Lombard, Alizée https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6603-1497 Huyghe, Richard https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9494-0102 Gygax, Pascal https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4151-8255 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2v97261t <p>In this article, we look at sign duration and signing rate in corpora of three sign languages – British Sign Language (BSL), Dutch Sign Language (NGT), and Swedish Sign Language (STS). We investigate whether token frequency and sociolinguistic variables (e.g., age, gender, region) influence the production rate of signing. Following Zipf’s law of abbreviation, we see that a sign’s duration is negatively correlated with its frequency. Both sign duration and signing rate are found to correlate with signer age, in that older signers have longer durations and lower rates than younger signers. Signers' gender, family (deaf or hearing), and age of exposure have no effect on duration or signing rate. For NGT and STS, there is no effect of region on either duration or rate. However, in the BSL data, duration and signing rate vary with region. The overall findings align with previous work on spoken languages, particularly that frequency and aging are correlated with word length and production... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2v97261t Tue, 13 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Börstell, Carl https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7549-4648 Schembri, Adam https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8814-5911 Crasborn, Onno https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4985-9097 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7v22f7p6 <p>Repeated exposure to Subject Island violations can lead to increased acceptability ratings and faster reading times (Chaves &amp; Dery, 2014, 2019; Clausen, 2011; Francom, 2009; Hiramatsu, 2000; Lu et al. 2021; Lu et al., 2022). However, it remains unclear what the nature of this effect and the driving mechanism is. The present paper describes a longitudinal investigation to test whether the effect of repeated exposure to Subject Island constructions is short-lived or whether it can spread over three weeks’ time, as measured by offline measures (Likert acceptability ratings) and online measures (self-paced reading). Using more observations and more sensitive methodologies, our work builds and improves on the only previous longitudinal study on such islands, Snyder (2022). We uncover evidence suggestive of gradual and strategic (by-construction and by-region) adaptation to Subject Island violations, indicated by faster response times, as well as higher acceptability ratings... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7v22f7p6 Mon, 5 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Chaves, Rui Pedro https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0820-6145 Francis, Elaine https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1964-3148 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5h64h4fc <p>The extraposition of a relative clause creates a discontinuous dependency between the relative clause and its host noun phrase, as in <em>A man just entered the bank who claimed to have a gun</em>. Since discontinuous dependencies are known to increase processing effort, a key question is why speakers produce them in the first place. Some factors known to affect extraposition – for example, the length of the relative clause and the main verb phrase – have received processing-based explanations, but others haven’t. We focus on two factors described by previous research: verb type and the grammatical function of the noun phrase hosting the relative clause. Specifically, extraposition from grammatical subjects is more common with unaccusative and passive verbs in English; further, extraposition is more common from grammatical objects than subjects in Dutch and German. We replicate these findings using corpus data from Persian. Further, we propose that verb type and grammatical... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5h64h4fc Mon, 5 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Bahmanian, Nasimeh https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2561-176X Bader, Markus https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9765-8970 Lago, Sol https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4966-1913 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4128807s <p>Language processing relies on memory. There exists a considerable body of literature on retrieval in sentence processing and, in particular, on cases involving recall of syntax-relevant information. There is no reason to doubt, however, that memory is involved in semantic aspects of language processing as well. In this work, we look at the case of additive presuppositions, such as those involved in interpreting the additive particle too. When one hears Mary went to the party, too, one should recall that someone other than Mary went to the party. We make the case that, as a starting hypothesis, it would be expected that the retrieval of this kind of information should share basic features of memory processes in language with the better-known cases of recall involved in syntactic parsing. In particular, we argue that, given certain assumptions and linking hypotheses, all prominent retrieval theories predict the existence of distance effects for the recall of previous information,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4128807s Mon, 5 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Winkowski, Jan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0301-8471 Dotlačil, Jakub https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5337-8432 Nouwen, Rick https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9571-4644 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3777b321 <p>Previous studies on the use of morphosyntactic gender cues for linguistic prediction show that non-native speakers’ use of grammatical gender information is influenced by various factors. In the present study, we examined the influence of differential cross-linguistic influence (DCLI), knowledge of L2 lexical gender, gender congruency, and L2 fluency. To this end, we investigated L1 Oromo L2 Amharic speakers as well as L1 Amharic speakers, using the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) and supplementary offline experiments. We investigated two groups of L2 Amharic speakers, i.e., L1 Eastern Oromo L2 Amharic and L1 Western Oromo L2 Amharic speakers. The Eastern Oromo dialect patterns with Amharic in terms of gender agreement unlike the Western Oromo dialect which does not have grammatical gender. Analyses of the participants’ proportion of eye fixations show that early exposure to the gendered Eastern Oromo dialect facilitates predictive L2 gender processing. L2 fluency, the speakers’... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3777b321 Wed, 17 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Feleke, Tekabe Legesse https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5627-2043 Lohndal, Terje https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8514-1499 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1x64s089 <p>According to the Polarity Hypothesis, the presence or absence of a processing cost for Scalar Inferences (SIs) depends on their polarity. This hypothesis predicts, among other things, that the processing of lower-bounding SIs should not be affected by cognitive load the same way upper-bounding SIs are. To date, evidence in support of this prediction comes from the comparison between upper-bounding and lower-bounding SIs elicited by disparate scalar words. In this paper, we report on two dual-task experiments testing this prediction in a more controlled way by comparing upper-bounding and lower-bounding SIs arising from the same scalar words or scale-mates operating over the same dimension. Results show that, for these more minimal comparisons, lower-bounding SIs involve comparable cognitive demands as their upper-bounding counterparts. These findings challenge the idea that load effects are consistently modulated by SI polarity and suggest instead that these effects are relatively... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1x64s089 Wed, 17 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Marty, Paul https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4459-1933 Romoli, Jacopo https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2165-4559 Sudo, Yasutada https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0248-9308 van Tiel, Bob https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4169-3179 Breheny, Richard https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7801-9914 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/71c5p23s <p>The de re/de dicto ambiguity centers on the referential and/or attributive properties of noun phrases within the scope of intentional operators, such as belief reports. For instance, in the belief report "Julie believes Elizabeth’s poem will win the competition," a de re reading of the embedded referential noun phrase "Elizabeth’s poem" entails that the referential association between this noun phrase and the target poem is true from the speaker's perspective but may not be recognized as such in the belief holder’s (i.e., Julie’s) mind. In contrast, a de dicto reading describes Julie’s beliefs as she understands the referential association in her mind.&nbsp;While both de re and de dicto readings of definite noun phrases are considered acceptable, given different supporting contexts, we show that the acceptability of de re readings is vulnerable to contextual and pragmatic manipulations. One such case involves a context in which the belief holder, Julie, holds a mistaken belief... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/71c5p23s Tue, 2 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Zhang, Yuhan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0550-9581 Davidson, Kathryn https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8844-2246 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1xc45121 <p>This paper surveys the linguistic diversity in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research by examining the languages under investigation in major international conferences from 2012 to 2023. The results showed that these studies are highly skewed towards English in particular and Indo-European languages in general. However, the overall number of languages, as well as the number and proportion of Indo-European (other than English) and non-Indo-European languages increased over time, indicating that language processing research is becoming more and more diversified. This typological bias was also found in the inspection of specific linguistic phenomena: (a) morphosyntactic alignment, richness of case morphology, canonical word order, and (b) temporal concepts. The analyses of typological bias at the general and specific levels indicate that there are gaps in various topics, and these can be filled by including more non-Indo-European languages in the investigation process.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1xc45121 Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Collart, Aymeric https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8902-0758 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/33t7f9s4 <p>Sentence acceptability judgments are often affected by a pervasive phenomenon called <em>satiation</em>: native speakers give increasingly higher ratings to initially degraded sentences after repeated exposure. Various studies have investigated the satiation effect experimentally, the vast majority of which focused on different types of island-violating sentences in English (sentences with illicit long-distance syntactic movements). However, mixed findings are reported regarding which types of island violations are affected by satiation and which ones are not. This article presents a meta-analysis of past experimental studies on the satiation of island effects in English, with the aim of providing accurate estimates of the rate of satiation for each type of island, testing whether different island effects show different rates of satiation, exploring potential factors that contributed to the heterogeneity in past results, and spotting possible publication bias. The meta-analysis... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/33t7f9s4 Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Lu, Jiayi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3314-5666 Frank, Michael https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7551-4378 Degen, Judith https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2513-0234 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66s7m316 <p>The aim of the current study is to assess the impact of the wider discourse on pronoun interpretation. We specifically look at German demonstrative pronouns (<em>dieser</em>) in comparison to personal pronouns (<em>er</em>), investigating whether <em>dieser</em>-demonstratives are influenced only by factors in the preceding sentence (specifically, sentence topicality) or whether they are additionally influenced by cues from the wider discourse (i.e., discourse topicality). We found that discourse topicality competes with sentence topicality for prominence, when the two cues are not aligned to one and the same referent. This had an impact on referential interpretation of both personal and demonstrative pronouns, with weakened interpretive biases when sentence and discourse topic did not converge on the same referent (Exp. 3). Our data further indicate that the introduction of a protagonist from a well-known novel blocked the emergence of the discourse topic as a prominence-lending... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66s7m316 Mon, 27 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Schumacher, Petra B. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0263-8502 Patterson, Clare https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0790-4892 Repp, Magdalena https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9538-012X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/65v6r2pc <p>One kind of temporal inference in discourse operates over iconicity, such that inferred temporal order follows reported order. In two preregistered experiments (combined N = 930), we asked whether this temporal inference is predictably modulated by linguistic eventuality. Based on event-structural theories of temporal interpretation, stative descriptions, corresponding to cognitively less salient states in the world, should serve as backgrounds for eventive descriptions, locating states earlier in time. Participants read descriptions like <em>Mary got/was married to John</em>. <em>She got/was pregnant</em> and indicated which happened first. Eventuality type of both sentences and reported order were crossed. We find that states tend to be ordered before events, and longer states before shorter states. Our results support a model of discourse comprehension in which eventuality framing is crucial for (temporal) inferences.</p> https://escholarship.org/uc/item/65v6r2pc Mon, 27 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Marx, Elena https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2199-3625 Wittenberg, Eva https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3188-6145 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9xr6w0z4 Language comprehension involves continuously making predictions about what will be mentioned next. If speakers take these predictions into account, one would expect that they try to be extra clear (e.g., by saying “the girl with the big earrings”) when they are going to say something less predictable. Conversely, speakers do not need to be as clear when the listener already expects the thing that they are about to mention, and can therefore suffice with a pronoun such as she. Previous research testing this hypothesis has found mixed results, with some studies finding that the referent’s predictability in discourse affects pronoun use and others finding that it does not. One explanation might be that speakers are more likely to take predictability into account when there is a co-present addressee who is predicting the next referent. To test this possibility, I conducted a language production experiment in which participants produced spoken continuations of narrative fragments.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9xr6w0z4 Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Vogels, Jorrig https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6698-504X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5p75z6br The study investigates the role of constituent order in structural priming. We report the results from a PO/DO priming experiment in German, in which we experimentally manipulated verb position in primes and targets. Significant structural priming effects occurred irrespective of whether verb position was the same in prime and target or not. However, additional similarity in constituent order was able to boost structural priming effects, with significantly stronger priming when the verb occurred in the same position in prime and target. We argue that existing one-stage and two-stage accounts of formulation struggle to account for the entire data pattern and propose an alternative account of formulation which can explain our results. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5p75z6br Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Jacob, Gunnar https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0882-5667 Katsika, Kalliopi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6736-4963 Family, Neiloufar https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0201-7119 Kholodova, Alina https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6457-9785 Allen, Shanley E.M. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5421-6750 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0pp284w3 <p>Two experiments test how college students use nonbinary they to refer to a single and specific person whose pronouns are they/them, e.g., “Alex played basketball on the neighborhood court. At one point they made a basket,” compared to matched stories about characters with binary (she/her or he/him) pronouns. Experiment 1 shows that for both types of pronouns, people use pronouns more in a one-person than a two-person context. In both experiments, people produce nonbinary they at least as frequently as binary pronouns, suggesting that any difficulty does not result in pronoun avoidance in spoken language, even though it does in written language (Arnold et al., 2022). Nevertheless, there is evidence that nonbinary they is somewhat difficult, in that people made gender errors on about 9% of trials, and they used a more acoustically prominent and disfluent-sounding pronunciation for nonbinary pronouns than binary pronouns. However, exposure &nbsp;to &nbsp;they &nbsp;in &nbsp;the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0pp284w3 Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Arnold, Jennifer E https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7519-1305 Venkatesh, Ranjani https://orcid.org/0009-0002-3795-5356 Vig, Zachary https://orcid.org/0009-0006-7198-5048 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0zm3m3hh How do alternative forms of reference to individuals—first, last, and full names—guide inferences about the gender of the referent? Given distributional correspondences between English first names and gender, first names provide probabilistic information about an individual's gender. While English last names do not vary with gender, men are more likely to be referred to by last name alone. Across four experiments, we demonstrate that inferences about gender are shaped by a persistent bias to infer that people are male, along with probabilistic information carried by the first name. When an individual was introduced by last name alone, participants overwhelmingly used <i>he </i>to subsequently refer to the person, suggesting that participants inferred that the person was male. This bias was still present when the individual was introduced using a first or full name, with participants less likely to use <i>she </i>than the distributional characteristics of the first names would... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0zm3m3hh Tue, 12 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Gardner, Bethany https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5154-2040 Brown-Schmidt, Sarah https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5647-0875 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0xs3s8kz Within the psycholinguistic literature, there has been a longstanding debate regarding whether we resolve syntactic parsing ambiguities via universal or language-specific biases. The present study investigates attachment biases in the online parsing of ‘relative clause’ (RC) attachment in Italian with respect to pseudorelative (PR) availability. Following the PR account Grillo (2012), languages are assumed to universally prefer local attachment. When languages appear to prefer non-local attachment, this is due (at least partially) to the availability of PRs. Specifically, Grillo and Costa (2014) suggest that whenever a string is ambiguous between a PR and a RC, the parser will prefer the PR parse, resulting in apparent non-local attachment. Although there is growing evidence that PR availability indeed affects offline interpretations, few studies have explored this account from an online perspective. Hence, we conducted a self-paced reading task in Italian. In that task, we directly... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0xs3s8kz Tue, 12 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Cairncross, Alex https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1040-1022 Vogelzang, Margreet https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2811-5419 Tsimpli, Ianthi https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6015-7526 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0bv8k263 <p>The general view in syntactic literature is that binding constraints can make antecedents syntactically inaccessible. However, several studies showed that antecedents which are ruled out by syntactic binding constraints still influence online processing of anaphora in some stages, suggesting that a cue-based retrieval mechanism plays a role during anaphora resolution. As in the syntactic literature, in semantic accounts like Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), formal constraints are formulated in terms of accessibility of the antecedent. We explore the discourse inaccessibility postulated in DRT by looking at its role in pronoun resolution of inter-sentential anaphoric relations in four off-line and two eye-tracking experiments. The results of the eye-tracking experiments suggest that accessibility has an effect on pronoun resolution from early on. The study quantifies evidence of inaccessible antecedents affecting pronoun resolution and shows that almost all evidence points... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0bv8k263 Tue, 12 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Schmitz, Tijn Winkowski, Jan Hoeks, Morwenna Nouwen, Rick Dotlačil, Jakub https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dw7d2qx Linguists have often observed that the sense extensions in polysemous words follow patterns. Yet, these patterns have rarely been quantified, and it is unknown whether language users are sensitive to them. We developed four regularity metrics, focusing in this initial study on metaphor patterns that apply to nouns. We further tested adult English speakers’ capacity to understand new senses in an acceptability judgement task. We compared novel senses that followed a metaphor pattern against novel senses that did not respect any pattern. Our results showed that novel senses were judged as more acceptable when they were part of a polysemy pattern as opposed to when they were not. We also assessed whether acceptability judgements were influenced by the degree of regularity of the pattern that they follow. The results confirmed the psychological validity of degree of regularity as a measure: the more regular the polysemy pattern, the more acceptable the new sense following that pattern.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dw7d2qx Tue, 27 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Lombard, Alizée https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6603-1497 Ulicheva, Anastasia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1792-2074 Korochkina, Maria https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8017-7855 Rastle, Kathleen https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3070-7555 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dg0g4kn This study focuses on inter-individual convergence effects in the perception and categorization of speech sounds. We ask to what extent two listeners can come to establish a shared set of categorization criteria in a phoneme identification task that they accomplish together. Several hypotheses &nbsp;are &nbsp;laid &nbsp;out &nbsp;in &nbsp;the &nbsp;framework &nbsp;of &nbsp;a &nbsp;Bayesian &nbsp;model &nbsp;of &nbsp;speech &nbsp;perception &nbsp;that &nbsp;we &nbsp;have &nbsp;developed &nbsp;to &nbsp;account &nbsp;for &nbsp;how &nbsp;two &nbsp;listeners &nbsp;may &nbsp;each &nbsp;infer &nbsp;the &nbsp;parameters &nbsp;that &nbsp;govern &nbsp;their partner’s responses. In our experimental paradigm, participants were asked to perform a joint &nbsp;phoneme &nbsp;identification &nbsp;task &nbsp;with &nbsp;a &nbsp;partner &nbsp;that, &nbsp;unbeknownst &nbsp;to &nbsp;them, &nbsp;was &nbsp;an &nbsp;artificial &nbsp;agent, whose responses we manipulated along two dimensions, the location... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dg0g4kn Tue, 27 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Nguyen, Noël https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3424-5340 Lancia, Leonardo https://orcid.org/0009-0005-3805-4201 Huttner, Lena https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4241-4741 Schwartz, Jean-Luc https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8969-9185 Diard, Julien https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0673-477X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m62j7p6 <p>Scientific studies of language span across many disciplines and provide evidence for social,&nbsp; cultural, cognitive, technological, and biomedical studies of human nature and behavior. As it becomes increasingly empirical and quantitative, linguistics has been facing challenges and limitations of the scientific practices that pose barriers to reproducibility and replicability. One of the&nbsp; proposed solutions to the widely acknowledged reproducibility and replicability crisis has been the implementation of transparency practices,&nbsp; e.g., open access publishing, preregistrations, sharing study materials, data, and analyses, performing study replications, and declaring conflicts of interest. Here, we have assessed the prevalence of these practices in 600 randomly sampled journal articles from linguistics across two time points. In line with similar studies in other disciplines, we found that 35% of the articles were published open access and the rates of sharing materials,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m62j7p6 Thu, 9 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Bochynska, Agata https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6211-8600 Keeble, Liam https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8181-5054 Halfacre, Caitlin https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9732-6741 Casillas, Joseph V. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8735-9910 Champagne, Irys-Amélie https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9917-0725 Chen, Kaidi https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8749-7993 Röthlisberger, Melanie https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1959-174X Buchanan, Erin M. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9689-4189 Roettger, Timo B. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1400-2739 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/74w7m671 <p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Major models of sentence comprehension assume that a verb triggers retrieval of preceding thematic arguments from memory to establish argument-verb dependencies. If so, longer argument-verb distance should lead to higher processing load at the verb (a locality effect),since the representation of the argument should suffer from decay and/or interference.However, verb-final languages have often failed to show the expected argument-verb locality effect. A possible account of the lack of the effect is that arguments and adjuncts before the verb reactivate each other, counteracting memory degradation. In a pair of self-paced reading experiments in Japanese, a verb-final language, we found evidence of such pre-verb reactivation.Specifically, there was a locality effect and a similarity-based interference effect at the head of the adverbial that follows the subject, both of which suggest the retrieval of the subject at that point. The results are difficult to... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/74w7m671 Mon, 6 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Isono, Shinnosuke https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7004-148X Hirose, Yuki https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5577-2751 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2h3118j2 <p>Expectation-driven convergence occurs when speakers shift their speech to approximate the language they expect rather than observe from their interlocutor. In Wade (2022), participants produced more monophthongal /aI/—a salient feature of Southern U.S. English—after hearing other Southern-accented features. Here, by decoupling acoustic and social information with a dialect-label manipulation task, we investigate what types of cognitive associations account for this behavior: indirect socially-mediated associations that rely on recognizing that monophthongal /aI/ and other Southern-accented variants are both associated with the social category “Southern,” or direct associations between variants that rely on tracking their common co-occurrence at the individual level. We find that both acoustic and social-label cues trigger convergence, but in-group speakers from the South rely on acoustic cues, while out-group speakers from outside of the South are best cued by social-category... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2h3118j2 Mon, 6 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Wade, Lacey R https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9382-7191 Embick, David https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6697-4428 Tamminga, Meredith https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7374-2206 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7hm28511 Though <i>each</i> and <i>every</i> are both distributive universal quantifiers, a common theme in linguistic and psycholinguistic investigations into them has been that <i>each</i> is somehow more individualistic than <i>every</i>. We offer a novel explanation for this generalization: <i>each</i> has a first-order meaning which serves as an internalized instruction to cognition to build a thought that calls for representing the (restricted) domain as a series of individuals; by contrast, every has a second-order meaning which serves as an instruction to build a thought that calls for grouping the domain. In support of this view, we show that these distinct meanings invite the use of distinct verification strategies, using a novel paradigm. In two experiments, participants who had been asked to verify sentences like <i>each/every circle is green</i> were subsequently given a change detection task. Those who evaluated <i>each</i>-sentences were better able to detect the change,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7hm28511 Thu, 14 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Knowlton, Tyler Zarus https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8207-0656 Halberda, Justin https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5619-3249 Pietroski, Paul Lidz, Jeffrey https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8829-1495 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/75n0m5c1 <p>A language user must rely on several different abilities to carry out a conversation, e.g., the ability to acknowledge the conversational contributions of others, to respond appropriately, to stay on topic, etc. There are many aspects of the development of conversational conduct that are yet unknown. In this study, the longitudinal development of conversational conduct, as in acknowledging one's interlocutor's previous turn, was traced from age 5;0 to 7;2. We also investigated whether conversational conduct was predicted by core language skill, executive functions, and specific pragmatic abilities. Previous findings of productive morphosyntactic accuracy were replicated, while findings concerning longitudinal receptive vocabulary were not. We also found connections between children's conversational responses and executive functions, working memory, and the comprehension of conversational implicatures. The results suggest that conversational conduct is dependent on inferring... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/75n0m5c1 Thu, 14 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Pagmar, David https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6665-7502 Arvidsson, Caroline https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5503-2657 Nilsson Gerholm, Tove https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7095-0525 Uddén, Julia https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6672-1298 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5bn3t780 <p>Language comprehension involves the derivation of the meaning of sentences by combining the meanings of their parts. In some cases, this can lead to ambiguity. A sentence like <i>Every hiker climbed a hill</i> allows two logical representations: One that specifies that every hiker climbed a different hill and one that specifies that every hiker climbed the same hill. The interpretations of such sentences can be primed: Exposure to a particular reading increases the likelihood that the same reading will be assigned to a subsequent similar sentence. Feiman and Snedeker (2016) observed that such priming is not modulated by overlap of the verb between prime and target. This indicates that mental logical representations specify the compositional structure of the sentence meaning without conceptual meaning content. We conducted a close replication of Feiman and Snedeker’s experiment in Dutch and found no verb-independent priming. Moreover, a comparison with a previous, within-verb... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5bn3t780 Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Slim, Mieke Sarah https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7494-2792 Lauwers, Peter https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6495-8977 Hartsuiker, Robert https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3680-6765 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4md8g417 Number agreement attraction in comprehension is a phenomenon that has been documented in various typologically diverse languages. This evidence has led to claims about the cross-linguistic uniformity of agreement attraction effects and its independence from the grammatical features of a particular language. However, recent research has shown that in Czech, number agreement attraction effects are either absent or negligible in size. This directly contradicts the cross-linguistic uniformity hypothesis. The current paper aims to further corroborate this finding and presents a direct experimental comparison of Czech and English. Two comparable self-paced reading experiments were conducted using stimuli that were translation equivalents in Czech and English. Our analyses demonstrate a preference for the null model in Czech (no agreement attraction), unlike in English, where an interaction between verb number and attractor number was preferred. Moreover, when we compare the data from... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4md8g417 Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Chromý, Jan https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6646-8026 Brand, James Liam https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2853-9169 Laurinavichyute, Anna https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3150-0206 Lacina, Radim https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7534-6204 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/44d4x732 <p>Findings of previous behavioural studies suggest that the semantic nature of what is known as the ‘masculine generic’ in Modern Standard German is indeed not generic but biased towards a masculine reading. Such findings are the cause of debates within and outside linguistic research, as they run counter to the grammarian assumption that the masculine generic form is gender-neutral. The present paper aims to explore the semantics of masculine generics, relating them to&nbsp; those&nbsp; of&nbsp; masculine&nbsp; and&nbsp; feminine&nbsp; explicit&nbsp; counterparts.&nbsp; To&nbsp; achieve&nbsp; this&nbsp; aim,&nbsp; an&nbsp; approach&nbsp; novel&nbsp; to&nbsp; this&nbsp; area&nbsp; of&nbsp; linguistic&nbsp; research&nbsp; is&nbsp; made&nbsp; use&nbsp; of:&nbsp; discriminative&nbsp; learning.&nbsp; Analysing&nbsp; semantic&nbsp; vectors&nbsp; obtained&nbsp; via&nbsp; naive&nbsp; discriminative&nbsp; learning,&nbsp; semantic&nbsp; measures&nbsp; calculated&nbsp; via&nbsp; linear&nbsp;... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/44d4x732 Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Schmitz, Dominic https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0636-5249 Schneider, Viktoria https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0557-4658 Esser, Janina https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4298-9465 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3hh1475n This article has&nbsp;been retracted by mutual agreement of the author and editors. After some investigation, the authors determined that unintentional error led to the presentation of theoretical conclusions that contradict important findings reported in the article, and it was determined that this could not be resolved with a minor correction. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3hh1475n Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Valenzuela, Javier https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0007-7943 Alcaraz-Carrión, Daniel https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5325-431X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/19d947nw Despite the increased use of different types of gender-fair forms in French, studies investigating how they are interpreted when presented in a sentence remain few. To fill this gap, we conducted a pre-registered study using a timed sentence evaluation task to examine the possibility of speakers’ establishing an anaphoric relationship between a gendered anaphoric expression (<i>femmes</i> ‘women’ or <i>hommes</i> ‘men’) and non-stereotyped role nouns as antecedents. The antecedents were presented in their masculine form or in one out of three different gender-fair forms (complete double forms: <i>les voisines et voisins</i> ‘the neighbours._FEM and neighbours._MASC’, contracted double forms: <i>les voisin·es</i> ‘the neighbours._MASC·FEM’, or gender-neutral forms: <i>le voisinage</i> ‘the neighbourhood’). In line with previous findings, the masculine form led to a male bias in the participants’ mental representations of gender. All three examined... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/19d947nw Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Tibblin, Julia https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5029-6485 Granfeldt, Jonas https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5708-9689 van de Weijer, Joost https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9843-3143 Gygax, Pascal https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4151-8255 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/83x3c2bp Several recent experimental studies have investigated the hypothesis that the passive construction is associated with the semantics “[B] (mapped onto the surface [passive] subject) is in a state or circumstance characterized by [A] (mapped onto the by-object or an understood argument) having acted upon it”. (Pinker, Lebeaux &amp; Frost, 1987). In the present work, we extend this method to a new language, Hebrew, and conduct a Bayesian mixed-effects meta-analytic synthesis which draws together the findings of similar studies conducted for English, Indonesian, Mandarin and Balinese. For Hebrew, we found that native adult speakers’ (N=60) acceptability ratings for passives with each of 56 different verbs were significantly predicted by verb-semantic-affectedness ratings provided by a separate group of 16 native adult speakers. Both for Hebrew and across languages, we found that (a) these semantic-affectedness ratings predict verbs’ acceptability in both passive and non-passive constructions,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/83x3c2bp Thu, 20 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Ambridge, Ben Arnon, Inbal Bekman, Dani https://escholarship.org/uc/item/18g1c99t <p>The present paper focuses on pseudopartitive constructions headed by quantifier, collective, or container nouns (like <i>a lot of senators</i>, <i>a group of students</i>, <i>a bottle of pills</i>) followed by a singular or a plural verb. We compared these structures with superficially similar adnominal structures of the form NP1[−PL] <i>prep</i> NP2[PL] (e.g., <i>the level of the lakes is/are</i>) in Italian in an acceptability judgment study (Experiment 1), a forced-choice task (Experiment 2), and an eye tracking reading study (Experiment 3). Two major findings were consistent across all studies. First, verb agreement in pseudopartitives always patterned differently from controls. Second, albeit an overall preference for singular verbs was observed, a gradient difference emerged between adnominal controls and pseudopartitives, and among pseudopartitives headed by different nouns. We explain such variability in terms of the availability of a measure interpretation (e.g., pills... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/18g1c99t Thu, 20 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Foppolo, Francesca https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5044-7834 Mazzaggio, Greta https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8019-7066 Franco, Ludovico https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8261-4748 Manzini, Maria Rita https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5288-4210 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0p94125d A long-standing debate in the sentence processing literature concerns the time course of syntactic and semantic information processing in online sentence comprehension. The default assumption in cue-based models of parsing is that syntactic and semantic retrieval cues simultaneously guide dependency resolution. When retrieval cues match multiple items in memory, this leads to similarity-based interference. Both semantic and syntactic interference have been shown to occur in English. However, the relative timing of syntactic vs. semantic interference remains unclear. In this cross-linguistic investigation of the time course of syntactic vs. semantic interference, the data from two eye-tracking during reading experiments (English and German) suggest that the two types of interference can in principle arise simultaneously during retrieval. However, the data also indicate that semantic cues are evaluated with a small timing lag in German compared to English. This cross-linguistic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0p94125d Thu, 1 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Mertzen, Daniela https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4471-9255 Paape, Dario https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7148-5258 Dillon, Brian https://orcid.org/0009-0001-3574-3889 Engbert, Ralf https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2909-5811 Vasishth, Shravan https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2027-1994 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rt7x84p <p>Listeners systematically extract two types of information from linguistic utterances: information about the world, and information about the speaker – i.e., their social background and personality. While both varieties of content have been widely investigated across different approaches to the study of language, research in pragmatics has mostly focused on the former kind. Here we ask how listeners reason about a speaker’s conversational choices to form an impression about their personality. In three experiments, we show that a speaker’s adherence to, or violation of, the pragmatic principles of Relevance and Informativeness, as well as the reasons underlying these violations, affect the evaluation of the speaker’s personality along the core social dimensions of Warmth and Competence. These findings highlight the value of enriching work in pragmatics with insights from sociolinguistics and social psychology about how people reason about human speech to draw inferences about... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rt7x84p Fri, 26 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Beltrama, Andrea https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0643-2424 Papafragou, Anna https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5435-1058 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6vh9d8zm Behavioral measures of word-by-word reading time provide experimental evidence to test theories of language processing. A-maze is a recent method for measuring incremental sentence processing that can localize slowdowns related to syntactic ambiguities in individual sentences. We adapted A-maze for use on longer passages and tested it on the Natural Stories corpus. Participants were able to comprehend these longer text passages that they read via the Maze task. Moreover, the Maze task yielded useable reaction time data with word predictability effects that were linearly related to surprisal, the same pattern found with other incremental methods. Crucially, Maze reaction times show a tight relationship with properties of the current word, with little spillover of effects from previous words. This superior localization is an advantage of Maze compared with other methods. Overall, we expanded the scope of experimental materials, and thus theoretical questions, that can be studied... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6vh9d8zm Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Boyce, Veronica https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8890-2775 Levy, Roger https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4493-8864 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/09v2t2cp <p></p><p>Replications are an integral part of cumulative experimental science. Yet many scientific disciplines do not replicate much because novel confirmatory findings are valued over direct replications. To provide a systematic assessment of the replication landscape in experimental linguistics, the present study estimated replication rates for over 50,000 articles across 98 journals. We used automatic string matching using the Web of Science combined with in-depth manual inspections of 274 papers. The median rate of mentioning the search string “replicat*” was as low as 1.7%. Subsequent manual analyses of articles containing the search string revealed that only 4% of these contained a direct replication, i.e., a study that aims to arrive at the same scientific conclusions as an initial study by using exactly the same methodology. Less than half of these direct replications were performed by independent researchers. Thus our data suggest that only 1 in 1250 experimental linguistic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/09v2t2cp Thu, 30 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Kobrock, Kristina https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1635-157X Roettger, Timo B. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1400-2739 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99m3z11t <p>This study investigates the real-time processing of Chinese reflexives <i>ziji </i>and <i>ta-ziji </i>in discourse when multiple constraints are involved. Our primary goal is to examine the time course of syntactic and non-syntactic constraints in reflexive resolution. The Syntactic Filter Hypothesis argues that syntactic cues are prioritized at the early stages of processing, in contrast to the Multiple Constraints Hypothesis which posits that at this stage all streams of information can be recruited. The results of two self-paced reading experiments show that in neutral contexts where no antecedent is discourse-prominent, syntactic locality and verb semantics immediately impact real-time processing of <i>ziji </i>and <i>ta-ziji</i>. Crucially, participants’ processing patterns are also influenced at an early stage by the discourse topical status of the non-local antecedents. Overall, these findings suggest that syntax, verb semantics, and discourse prominence all play important... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99m3z11t Thu, 2 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Lyu, Jun https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5974-3376 Kaiser, Elsi https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3594-4127 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7xt135c0 <p>This work tests the relative role of perception- and production-based predictors, and the relationship between them, in imitation of artificial accents varying in voice onset time (VOT), using a paradigm designed to target distinct sub-processes of imitation. We examined how explicit imitation of sentences differing systematically in voice onset time (VOT) was influenced by the type of VOT manipulation (lengthened vs. shortened) and by the presence vs. absence of voice-related variability in exposure. In contrast to previous work, participants imitated shortened as well as lengthened VOT, albeit with both qualitative and quantitative differences across the two manipulation types. The presence of voice-related variability inhibited imitation, but this inhibition was mitigated by a preceding session with no voice-related variability (i.e., sentences were acoustically identical except for VOT). We then tested the extent to which individual performance on the accent imitation task... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7xt135c0 Thu, 2 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Schertz, Jessamyn https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2492-8498 Adil, Fatima Kravchuk, A https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9p22k5j5 <p>Studies on the reading of appositive relative clauses (ARCs) have found that ARCs seem to exhibit less influence in later parsing and decision-making than similar constructions (Dillon et al. 2014, 2017), a pattern we call <i>discounting</i>. Existing accounts often link discounting to the status of ARCs as independent segments in systems of pragmatic representation. This would predict discounting for other constructions as well. In this study, we test that prediction by investigating the reading of direct discourse speech reports and causal adjuncts in English. Diagnostics supplied by the theoretical literature show that these constructions contribute the same independent segments as ARCs in two different systems of pragmatic organization: direct discourse reports contribute an independent speech act, and causal adjuncts contribute their own discourse units. Nevertheless, in a series of five experiments, we find no evidence of ARC-like discounting for either. We conclude that... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9p22k5j5 Thu, 23 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Duff, John https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6820-0717 Anand, Pranav Brasoveanu, Adrian https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8488-1113 Rysling, Amanda https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9018-0794 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2692p9z0 <p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Truth-value judgments are one of the most common measures in experimental semantics and pragmatics, yet there is no standardized way to elicit such judgments. Despite anecdotal remarks on how proper choice of prompts or response options could help disentangle pragmatic from semantic effects, little is known regarding the relation between parameters of the task and what it actually measures. We tested a range of prompts and two response options for their sensitivity to truth of the target sentence, prior evidence, and the interaction between these two factors. We found that participants attribute high value to true statements, even when they are not backed by evidence. Moreover, our results confirm that prompts vary wildly in their sensitivity to pragmatic factors, and should allow researchers to make an informed choice depending on what they want to test. There was no difference between the results generated by the response options, although the Likert... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2692p9z0 Thu, 23 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Cremers, Alexandre https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7435-6515 Fricke, Lea https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2452-9112 Onea, Edgar https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8217-4463 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/96k7g38p <p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The present study tested whether listeners hearing one form of a morpheme activate other forms of the same morpheme. Listeners performed lexical decisions while hearing Mandarin monosyllables; crucially, critical targets could be primed by related syllables that occurred 18–52 trials earlier (long-lag priming). The use of long-lag priming ensures that any facilitation effects are due to morphological relatedness and not to semantic or form relationships, which do not prime lexical decisions at long lags. Across three experiments (total N = 458), we consistently found that lexical decisions were primed when the same pronunciation of a morpheme occurred as prime and target (e.g.,&nbsp;shiL&nbsp;–&nbsp;shiL) but were not primed when two different variants of the same morpheme occurred as prime and target (e.g.,&nbsp;shiR&nbsp;–&nbsp;shiL, where both of these syllables are potential pronunciations of the same morpheme). In other words, we observed identity... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/96k7g38p Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Politzer-Ahles, Stephen https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5474-7930 Pan, Lei https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6791-3985 Lin, Jueyao https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1530-1597 Lee, Ka Keung https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1469-8326 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2ds0x32c The illusory licensing of negative polarity items has been an insightful phenomenon for accounts of human sentence processing, as its extreme selectivity has proven problematic to explain in terms of parsing principles that underlie the establishment of other item-to-item dependencies. Using speeded acceptability judgments, I provide novel experimental evidence that the NPI illusion may be restricted to a particular type of NPI—illusory licensing was replicated for German <i>jemals</i> 'ever', but was not confirmed for the attenuating NPI <i>so recht</i> 'really'. I argue that this finding challenges all current accounts of the NPI illusion, and propose an explanation that purports an interaction between a scalar NPI licensing mechanism and scalar properties of the illusory licensing context as the source of the NPI illusion. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2ds0x32c Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Schwab, Juliane https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7899-5974 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1t0290xw <p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Prior research has shown that sentences with noncanonical argument order (e.g., patient-before- agent instead of agent-before-patient order) are associated with additional online processing difficulty, but that this difficulty can be alleviated if the discourse context licenses noncanonical order. Other studies demonstrated that noncanonical sentences are prone to misinterpretation effects: comprehenders sometimes seem to form interpretations with incorrect assignments of semantic roles to argument NPs. However, those studies tested noncanonical sentences in isolation. To further clarify the source of misinterpretation effects, we designed three experiments that investigated how discourse properties licensing noncanonical order affect online processing and final interpretation. All experiments tested unambiguous active declarative sentences in German with agentive verbs and two arguments, probing both online processing difficulty (using selfpaced reading)... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1t0290xw Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Bader, Markus https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9765-8970 Meng, Michael https://escholarship.org/uc/item/18k7s6fg <p>When comprehenders predict a specific lexical noun in a highly constraining context, they also activate the grammatical features, such as gender, of that noun. Evidence for such lexically mediated prediction comes from ERP studies that show that comprehenders are surprised by adjectives and determiners that mismatch the features of a highly predictable noun. In this study, we investigated whether comprehenders can (i) predict an abstract noun phrase in an upcoming argument position (without pre-activating a specific lexical item) and (ii) assign morphosyntactic features to the head noun of that phrase. To do so we used the processing of Dutch cataphors as a test case. We tested whether seeing a cataphor in a preposed clause triggered a prediction of a feature-matching antecedent NP in main subject position. If comprehenders predicted a feature-matching subject, we reasoned that they should also expect an agreeing main verb, which comes before the subject because Dutch is a... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/18k7s6fg Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Giskes, Anna https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1405-8767 Kush, Dave https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2567-6440 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/807182h9 Rereading during sentence processing can be confirmatory, in which case it serves to increase readers' certainty in their current interpretation, or it can be revisionary, in which case it serves to correct a misinterpretation (Christianson, Luke, Hussey, &amp; Wochna, 2017). The distinction is particularly relevant in garden-path sentences, which have been argued to trigger revisionary rereading (Frazier &amp; Rayner, 1982). In two web-based experiments that compare garden-path sentences with other linguistic constructions, we investigate deliberate rereading in the recently-proposed bidirectional self-paced reading (BSPR) paradigm (Paape &amp; Vasishth, 2022). Our results show evidence for selective rereading only in very difficult garden-path sentences. Additionally, our results suggest that conscious, selective rereading is confirmatory: Readers find garden-path sentences less rather than more acceptable after selective rereading, suggesting that they reread either to confirm... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/807182h9 Fri, 25 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Paape, Dario Vasishth, Shravan https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2027-1994 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/51v9043v In English, it is possible for a morphologically singular collective noun like&nbsp;<i>government</i> to control both singular (syntactic) agreement and plural (semantic) agreement in the same sentence (e.g. <i>The government has praised themselves</i>). It has been claimed that sentences with the opposite pattern of agreeing elements are ungrammatical (e.g. *<i>The government have praised itself</i>), and there is a corresponding asymmetry in corpus frequencies of these two configurations. Across two acceptability judgement experiments, we show that the acceptability contrast is affected by the relative order of the two agreeing elements, with degraded acceptability in the case where the first agreeing element shows plural agreement and the second shows singular agreement, relative to the opposite configuration. This pattern is found both when the agreeing verb precedes the reflexive, and when the reflexive precedes the verb. Overall, the results suggest that the initial formation... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/51v9043v Fri, 25 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Sturt, Patrick https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5kn6j90b In two experiments we investigated the comprehension of pronoun forms in Chamorro, a verb-initial Austronesian language that does not distinguish morphologically between reflexive anaphors and pronominals. In Experiment 1, on object pronouns, we found that comprehenders had a preference for reflexive interpretations despite the fact that the pronoun form was not morphologically marked as reflexive. In Experiment 2, on possessor pronouns, we found that this preference was much weaker. We conclude that when a morphological distinction between reflexive anaphors and pronominals is absent, comprehenders do prefer to assign reflexive interpretations. However, this pressure is defeasible and moderated by morphosyntactic and semantic factors, such as the competition between null and overt pronoun forms and the verb’s argument structure. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5kn6j90b Tue, 25 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Wagers, Matthew https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3139-2380 Borja, Manuel F. Chung, Sandra https://escholarship.org/uc/item/13x9m1qj <p>We investigated the effect of optionality on the acquisition of new/given markers, with a special focus on grammaticalization as a stage of optional use of the emerging form. To this end, we conducted a narrative-elicitation task with 5-year-old children and adults across four typologically-distinct languages with different new/given markers: English, Hindi, Mandinka and Spanish. Our starting assumption was that the Hindi numeral ‘ek’ (one) is developing into an indefinite article, which should delay children’s acquisition because of its optional use to introduce discourse referents. Supporting the Optionality Hypothesis, Experiment 1 revealed that obligatory markers are acquired earlier than optional markers. Experiment 2 focused on Hindi and showed that 10-year-old children’s use of ‘ek’ to introduce discourse characters was higher than 5-year-olds’ and comparable to adults’, replicating this pattern of results in two different cities in Northern India. Lastly, a follow-up... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/13x9m1qj Thu, 29 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Shukla, Vishakha Long, Madeleine Rubio-Fernandez, Paula https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1p34f58m Word learning is guided by the statistical co-occurrence between spoken words and potential referents, through which learners gradually map labels to objects across situations. Given that word learning does not occur in a vacuum, rather in a communicative context, it is relevant to evaluate the role that speakers play. Because we do not evaluate the information provided by every person equally, it is reasonable to think that someone who makes lexical errors is not a reliable speaker from whom to learn new words. The current study focuses on speaker reliability in adult cross-situational word learning (CSWL). In two experiments we investigated the extent to&nbsp; which&nbsp; adults&nbsp; attend&nbsp; to&nbsp; the&nbsp; reliability&nbsp; of&nbsp; the&nbsp; speaker&nbsp; and&nbsp; how&nbsp; this&nbsp; affects&nbsp; word&nbsp; learning&nbsp; in&nbsp; a CSWL task. We varied the consistency with which a speaker mapped novel words to familiar objects. We hypothesized (1) that the speakers’... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1p34f58m Wed, 21 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Rivera-Vera, Natalia Alejandra https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5239-2585 Andringa, Sible Kronmüller, Edmundo Monaghan, Padraic Rispens, Judith Elisabeth https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5d84n2x7 <p>Research on post-repair representations of garden path sentences has found that readers systematically arrive at misinterpretations even after displaying evidence of reanalysis (Christianson et al., 2001; Ferreira et al., 2001). These comprehension errors have been attributed to the semantic interpretation associated with the incorrect parse persisting past disambiguation, but less is known about the mechanism driving this phenomenon (Sturt, 2007; Slattery et al., 2013). A speeded auditory comprehension experiment examined the depth of semantic processing as an independent influence on the strength of semantic persistence, drawing on known effects of pitch accent on the processing of focus-related semantic meaning (Fraundorf et al., 2010). Participants heard garden path sentences with early/late-closure ambiguity (e.g., <i>While Anna dressed the baby stopped crying</i>) with a sharply rising pitch accent on either the unambiguous adjunct subject or the ambiguously transitive... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5d84n2x7 Tue, 20 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Choe, June https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0701-921X Yoshida, Masaya Cole, Jennifer https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0465-4920 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dz7z3q3 <p>The idea that comprehenders predict upcoming linguistic content has become core to many theories of language processing. Experimental studies exploiting morphosyntactic and phonotactic constraints on a word form preceding a high cloze target word have been key to underpinning predictive accounts of comprehension, but investigating these tight sequential contrasts with traditional behavioral methods is difficult. The maze task, with its more focal measure of incremental processing, may provide a cheap and easy methodology to study early cues to prediction. An experiment investigating the a/an contrast (DeLong, Urbach, &amp; Kutas, 2005; Nieuwland, et al., 2018) using A-maze (Boyce, Futrell, &amp; Levy, 2020) finds that unexpected articles, as well as nouns, elicit slower focal response times. Response times are also shown to be inversely related to noun cloze probabilities, with slower responders showing larger effects of expectation. This study demonstrates that the maze task... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dz7z3q3 Mon, 19 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Husband, Edward Matthew https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6446-5582 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4673333b <p></p><p>The&nbsp; aim&nbsp; of&nbsp; the&nbsp; current&nbsp; study&nbsp; was&nbsp; to&nbsp; explore&nbsp; whether&nbsp; lexical&nbsp; processing&nbsp; in&nbsp; a&nbsp; bilingual’s&nbsp; first language (L1) can be influenced by recent experience in their second language (L2). We focussed on word forms that exist in both their languages, and have either the same meaning (cognates) or a different meaning (interlingual homographs). Our previous experiments provided evidence for the reverse form of cross-lingual priming: processing of interlingual homographs in a bilingual’s L2 is delayed by recent experience with these words in their L1, while processing of cognates can be speeded up (Poort et al., 2016; Poort &amp; Rodd, 2019b). In the current experiment, Dutch–English bilinguals (n = 106) first encountered cognates (n = 50), interlingual homographs (n = 50) and translation&nbsp; equivalents&nbsp; (n = 50)&nbsp; embedded&nbsp; in&nbsp; English&nbsp; sentences.&nbsp; After&nbsp;... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4673333b Wed, 14 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Poort, Eva Denise https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3108-9146 Rodd, Jennifer M https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8608-7244 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gh7r8g7 Scalar implicature depends on the activation of alternatives. For instance, in English, <i>finger </i>implicates 'not thumb', suggesting that <i>thumb </i>is an activated alternative. Is this because it is more specific (Quantity) and equally short (Manner)? Indeed, <i>toe </i>doesn't imply 'not big toe', perhaps because <i>big toe</i>&nbsp;is longer. As L. Horn points out, this Quantity/Manner explanation predicts that if English had the simplex Latin word <i>pollex </i>meaning 'thumb or big toe', then the asymmetry would disappear. But would it suffice for that word to exist in the language, or would the word also have to be sufficiently salient? We explore this question in four languages that are sometimes said to lack a single-word alternative for thumb: Spanish (which does have <i>pulgar</i>&nbsp;'thumb or big toe' (&lt; <i>pollex</i>), though it is a non-colloquial form), Russian, Persian, and Arabic. To gauge the salience of various ways of describing digits, we use a fill-in-the-blank... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gh7r8g7 Mon, 29 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Dionne, Danielle https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8098-3147 Coppock, Elizabeth https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3r28x18w Visual World eye tracking is a temporally fine-grained method of monitoring attention, making it a popular tool in the study of online sentence processing. Recently, while infrared eye tracking was mostly unavailable, various web-based experiment platforms have rapidly developed webcam eye tracking functionalities, which are now in urgent need of testing and evaluation. We replicated a recent Visual World study on the incremental processing of verb aspect in English using ‘out of the box’ webcam eye tracking software (jsPsych; de Leeuw, 2015) and crowdsourced participants, and fully replicated both the offline and online results of the original study. We furthermore discuss factors influencing the quality and interpretability of webcam eye tracking data, particularly with regards to temporal and spatial resolution; and conclude that remote webcam eye tracking can serve as an affordable and accessible alternative to lab-based infrared eye tracking, even for questions probing the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3r28x18w Mon, 15 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Vos, Myrte https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3896-2742 Minor, Serge https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1337-2412 Ramchand, Gillian Catriona https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8019-0630 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4b471855 We present an eyetracking study that investigates how linking is achieved during real-time comprehension of Spanish sentences with causative psych verbs and alternative case marking. This group of verbs lead to verbs’ argument structures that require direct or inverse syntax-to-semantics linking according to the type of case marking assigned to their object. The study aimed at disentangling whether processing inverse linking was more costly than direct linking, and exploring how incremental argument interpretation takes place when lexemes that accept several case markings are used. Results showed that during incremental comprehension, inverse linking is more difficult than direct linking, irrespective of word order. As for argument interpretation, the current study partially replicated the results of previous studies conducted in this language using different verb types. Findings are discussed under the light of different psycholinguistic models addressing case marking processing... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4b471855 Wed, 27 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Gattei, Carolina A https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7490-3363 Alvarez, Federico París, Luis Wainselboim, Alejandro https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6787-1888 Sevilla, Yamila https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4544-6212 Shalom, Diego https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2hf9r6jq <p></p><p>In a non-verbal aesthetic judgement task and a pre-registered production task, we tested how the orientation of the patient relative to the agent in a visual scene affects the perception and description of the depicted transitive event. Previous research has shown that a visual property like the position of the patient relative to the agent can affect speakers’ verbalization of events. Here, we investigated whether orientation constitutes another factor besides position that affects scene description. While speakers of German displayed an overall preference for scenes in which agent and patient faced each other, these scenes needed more time for sentence planning than the same scenes that showed the patient looking in the same direction and thus away from the agent. Moreover, we elicited more patient-initial sentences for face-to-face scenes than for same-direction scenes. The increase in patient-initial sentences was comparable to the increase in patient-initial sentences... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2hf9r6jq Wed, 6 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Schlenter, Judith https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8676-6629 Penke, Martina https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4686-7673 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5wq6w93j <p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Studies of agreement attraction in language production have shown that speakers systematically produce verb agreement errors in the presence of a local noun whose features differ from that of the agreement controller. However, in attraction experiments, these errors only ever occur in a subset of trials. In the present study, we applied a naturalistic scene-description paradigm to investigate how attraction affects the distribution of errors and the time-course of correctly inflected verbs. We conducted our experiment both in the lab and in an unsupervised web-based setting. The results were strikingly similar across the experimental settings for both the error and timing analyses, demonstrating that it is possible to conduct production experiments via the internet with a high level of similarity to those done in the lab. The experiments replicated the basic number attraction effect, though they elicited comparable interference from both singular... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5wq6w93j Wed, 25 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 Kandel, Margaret Wyatt, Cassidy Rae Phillips, Colin https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3886-3384