Presentations

Abstract

Individual differences in language processing are prevalent in our daily lives. However, for decades, psycholinguistic research has largely ignored variation in the normal range of abilities. Recently, scientists have begun to acknowledge the importance of inter-individual variability for a comprehensive characterization of the language system. In spite of this change of attitude, empirical research on individual differences is still sparse, which is in part due to the lack of a suitable research tool. Here, we present a novel battery of behavioral tests for assessing individual differences in language skills in younger adults. The Dutch prototype comprises 29 subtests and assesses many aspects of language knowledge (grammar and vocabulary), linguistic processing skills (word and sentence level) and general cognitive abilities involved in using language (e.g., WM, IQ). Using the battery, researchers can determine performance profiles for individuals and link them to neurobiological or genetic data.

Abstract

It is unknown whether modality affects the efficiency with which we learn novel word forms and their meanings. In this study, 60 participants were trained on 24 pseudowords, each paired with a pictorial meaning (novel object). Following a 20 minute filler task participants were tested on their ability to identify the picture-word form pairs on which they were trained when presented amongst foils. Word forms were presented in either their written or spoken form, with exposure to the written form equal to the speech duration of the spoken form. The between subjects design generated four participant groups 1) written training, written test; 2) written training, spoken test; 3) spoken training, written test; 4) spoken training, spoken test. Our results show a written training advantage: participants trained on written words were more accurate on the matching task. An ongoing follow-up experiment tests whether the written advantage is caused by additional time with the full word form, given that words can be read faster than the time taken for the spoken form to unfold. To test this, in training, written words were presented with sufficient time for participants to read, yet maximally half the duration of the spoken form in experiment 1.

Abstract

It is unknown whether modality affects the efficiency with which humans learn novel word forms and their meanings, with previous studies reporting both written and auditory advantages. The current study implements controls whose absence in previous work likely offers explanation for such contradictory findings. In two novel word learning experiments, participants were trained and tested on pseudoword - novel object pairs, with controls on: modality of test, modality of meaning, duration of exposure and transparency of word form. In both experiments word forms were presented in either their written or spoken form, each paired with a pictorial meaning (novel object). Following a 20-minute filler task, participants were tested on their ability to identify the picture-word form pairs on which they were trained. A between subjects design generated four participant groups per experiment 1) written training, written test; 2) written training, spoken test; 3) spoken training, written test; 4) spoken training, spoken test. In Experiment 1 the written stimulus was presented for a time period equal to the duration of the spoken form. Results showed that when the duration of exposure was equal, participants displayed a written training benefit. Given words can be read faster than the time taken for the spoken form to unfold, in Experiment 2 the written form was presented for 300 ms, sufficient time to read the word yet 65% shorter than the duration of the spoken form. No modality effect was observed under these conditions, when exposure to the word form was equivalent. These results demonstrate, at least for proficient readers, that when exposure to the word form is controlled across modalities the efficiency with which word form-meaning associations are learnt does not differ. Our results therefore suggest that, although we typically begin as aural-only word learners, we ultimately converge on developing learning mechanisms that learn equally efficiently from both written and spoken materials.

Abstract

Listeners are known to use contextual speech rate in processing temporally ambiguous speech sounds. For instance, a fast adjacent speech context makes a vowel sound relatively long, whereas a slow context makes it sound relatively short (Reinisch & Sjerps, 2013). Besides the local contextual speech rate, listeners also track talker-specific habitual speech rates (Reinisch, 2016; Maslowski et al., in press). However, effects of one’s own speech rate on the perception of another talker’s speech are yet unexplored. Such effects are potentially important, given that, in dialogue, a listener’s own speech often constitutes the context for the interlocutor’s speech. Three experiments tested the contribution of self-produced speech on perception of the habitual speech rate of another talker. In Experiment 1, one group of participants was instructed to speak fast (high-rate group), whereas another group had to speak slowly (low-rate group; 16 participants per group). The two groups were compared on their perception of ambiguous Dutch /A/-/a:/ vowels embedded in neutral rate speech from another talker. In Experiment 2, the same participants listened to playback of their own speech, whilst evaluating target vowels in neutral rate speech as before. Neither of these experiments provided support for the involvement of self-produced speech in perception of another talker's speech rate. Experiment 3 repeated Experiment 2 with a new participant sample, who did not know the participants from the previous two experiments. Here, a group effect was found on perception of the neutral rate talker. This result replicates the finding of Maslowski et al. that habitual speech rates are perceived relative to each other (i.e., neutral rate sounds fast in the presence of a slower talker and vice versa), with naturally produced speech. Taken together, the findings show that self-produced speech is processed differently from speech produced by others. They carry implications for our understanding of the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved in rate-dependent speech perception and the link between production and perception in dialogue settings.

Abstract

Listeners are continuously exposed to a broad range of speech rates. Earlier work has shown that listeners perceive phonetic category boundaries relative to contextual speech rate. This process of rate-dependent speech perception has been suggested to occur across talker changes, with the speech rate of talker A influencing perception of talker B. This study tested whether a ‘global’ speech rate calculated over multiple talkers and over a longer period of time affected perception of the temporal Dutch vowel contrast /ɑ/-/a:/. First, Experiment 1 demonstrated that listeners more often reported hearing long /a:/ in fast contexts than in ‘neutral rate’ contexts, replicating earlier findings. Then, in Experiment 2, one participant group was exposed to ‘neutral’ speech from talker A intermixed with slow speech from talker B. Another group listened to the same ‘neutral’ speech from talker A, but to fast speech from talker B. Between-group comparison in the ‘neutral’ condition revealed that Group 1 reported more long /a:/ than Group 2, indicating that A’s ‘neutral’ speech sounded faster when B was slower. Finally, Experiment 3 tested whether talking at slow or fast rates oneself elicits the same ‘global’ rate effects. However, no evidence was found that self-produced speech modulated perception of talker A. This study corroborates the idea that ‘global’ rate-dependent effects occur across talkers, but are insensitive to one’s own speech rate. Results are interpreted in light of the general auditory mechanisms thought to underlie rate normalization, with implications for our understanding of dialogue.

Abstract

Serial naming deficits have been identified as core symptoms of developmental dyslexia. A prominent hypothesis is that naming delays are due to inefficient phonological encoding, yet the exact nature of this underlying impairment remains largely underspecified. Here we used recordings of eye movements and word onset latencies to examine at what processing level the dyslexic naming deficit emerges: localized at an early stage of lexical encoding or rather later at the level of phonetic or motor planning. 23 dyslexic and 25 control adult readers were tested on a serial object naming task for 30 items and an analogous reading task, where phonological neighborhood density and word-frequency were manipulated. Results showed that both word properties influenced early stages of phonological activation (first fixation and first-pass duration) equally in both groups of participants. Moreover, in the control group any difficulty appeared to be resolved early in the reading process, while for dyslexic readers a processing disadvantage for low-frequency words and for words with sparse neighborhood also emerged in a measure that included late stages of output planning (eye-voice span). Thus, our findings suggest suboptimal phonetic and/or articulatory planning in dyslexia.

Abstract

Natural conversations are characterized by smooth transitions of turns between interlocutors. For instance, speakers often respond to questions or requests within half a second. As planning the first word of an utterance can easily take a second or more, this suggests that utterance planning often overlaps with listening to the preceding speaker's utterance. A specific proposal concerning the temporal coordination of listening and speech planning has recently been made by Levinson and Torreira (2016, Frontiers in Psychology; Levinson, 2016, Trends in Cognitive Sciences). They propose that speakers initiate their speech planning as soon as they have understood the speech act and gist of the preceding utterance. However, direct evidence for simultaneous listening and speech planning is scarce. I will first review studies demonstrating that both comprehending spoken utterances and planning them require processing capacity and that these processes can substantially interfere with each other. These data suggest that concurrent speech planning and listening should be cognitively quite challenging. In the second part of the talk I will turn to studies examining directly when utterance planning in dialogue begins. These studies indicate that (regrettably) there are probably no hard-and-fast rules for the temporal coordination of listening and speech planning. I will argue that (regrettably again) we need models that are far more complex than Levinson and Torreira's proposal to understand how listening and speech planning are coordinated in conversation

Abstract

Janssen and Barber (2012) reported two studies on the production of complex noun phrases (Spanish and French noun-adjective and noun-noun phrases). They found that production latencies depended only on the frequencies of the phrases, but not on the frequencies of the individual words. This pattern may be seen as evidence for lexical storage of phrases and against the traditional “words & rules” view of the representation of linguistic knowledge. We will discuss a series of experiments on the production of Dutch adjective-noun phrases. We replicated the phrase frequency effect seen by Janssen and Barber, but also found a robust effect of the frequency of the first word of the phrase. We argue that the phrase frequency effect arises during the conceptual preparation of the utterance and that the results are consistent with the view that phrases are composed by combining individual words, in line with the “words & rules” view.

Abstract

A recurring criticism in the field of psycholinguistics and is the lack of ecological validity of experimental designs. For example, many experiments on sentence comprehension are conducted enclosed booths, where sentences are presented word by word on a computer screen. In addition, very often participants are instructed to make judgments that relate directly to the experimental manipulation. Thus, the contexts in which these processes are studied is quite restricted, which calls into question the generalizability of the results to more naturalistic environments. A possible solution to this problem is the use of virtual reality (VR) in psycholinguistic experiments. By immersing participants into a virtual environment, ecological validity can be increased while experimental control is maintained.
In the current experiment we combine electroencephalography (EEG) and VR to look at semantic processing in a more naturalistic setting. During the experiment, participants move through a visually rich virtual restaurant. Tables and avatars are placed in the restaurant and participants are instructed to stop at each table and look at the object (e.g. a plate with a steak) in front of the avatar. Then, the avatar will produce an utterance to accompany the object (e.g. “I think this steak is very nice”), in which the noun will either match (e.g. steak) or mismatch (e.g. mandarin) with the item on the table. Based on previous research, we predict a modulation of the N400, which should be larger in the mismatch than the match condition. Implications of the use of virtual reality for experimental research will be discussed.

Abstract

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Abstract

Recently many authors have stressed that domain-general cognitive processes may affect performance in linguistic tasks. This challenges the traditional view that speaking and listening are fairly modular processes. Going beyond this broad claim, we aim to determine exactly how domain-general processes influence linguistic processes. In the present study we examined the influence of selective inhibition (invoked to suppress responses to potent competitors to target stimuli and taking some time to build up) on performance in two classic word production tasks, the semantic blocking task (naming sets of objects that do vs. do not belong to the same semantic category) and the pictureword interference task (naming pictures accompanied by categorically related vs. unrelated words). Both tasks were completed by the same participants. Analyses of the size of the interference effects for fast and slower responses (using delta plots) and of the correlations of the effect sizes in the two tasks demonstrated that selective inhibition was recruited in both tasks. We propose that the process supported by selective inhibition is lemma selection. We discuss the implications for theories concerning the origin of the interference effects in the two paradigms and the nature of lexical selection processes.

Abstract

In sentence comprehension, readers and listeners often anticipate upcoming information (e.g., Altmann & Kamide, 1999). We investigated two aspects of this process, namely 1) what is pre-activated when anticipating an upcoming word (the contents of predictions), and 2) which cognitive mechanisms are involved. The contents of predictions at the level of meaning could be restricted to functional semantic attributes (e.g., edibility; Altmann & Kamide, 1999). However, when words are processed other types of information can also be activated, such as object shape representations. It is unknown whether this type of information is already activated when upcoming words are predicted. Forty-five adult participants listened to predictable words in sentence contexts (e.g., "In 1969 Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon.") while looking at visual displays of four objects. Their eye movements were recorded. There were three conditions: target present (e.g., a moon and three distractor objects that were unrelated to the predictable word in terms of semantics, shape, and phonology), shape competitor (e.g., a tomato and three unrelated distractors), and distractors only (e.g., rice and three other unrelated objects). Across lists, the same pictures and sentences were used in the different conditions. We found that participants already showed a significant bias for the target object (moon) over unrelated distractors several seconds before the target was mentioned, demonstrating that they were predicting. Importantly, there was also a smaller but significant shape competitor (tomato) preference starting at about a second before critical word onset, consistent with predictions involving the referent’s shape. The mechanisms of predictions could be specific to language tasks, or language could use processing principles that are also used in other domains of cognition. We investigated whether performance in non-linguistic prediction is related to prediction in language processing, taking an individual differences approach. In addition to the language processing task, the participants performed a simple cueing task (after Posner, Nissen, & Ogden, 1978). They pressed one of two buttons (left/right) to indicate the location of an X symbol on the screen. On half of the trials, the X was preceded by a neutral cue (+). On the other half, an arrow cue pointing left (<) or right (>) indicated the upcoming X's location with 80% validity (i.e., the arrow cue was correct 80% of the time). The SOA between cue and target was 500 ms. Prediction was quantified as the mean response latency difference between the neutral and valid condition. This measure correlated positively with individual participants' anticipatory target and shape competitor preference (r = .27; r = .45), and was a significant predictor of anticipatory looks in linear mixed-effects regression models of the data. Participants who showed more facilitation from the arrow cues predicted to a higher degree in the linguistic task. This suggests that prediction in language processing may use mechanisms that are also used in other domains of cognition. References Altmann, G. T. M., & Kamide, Y. (1999). Incremental interpretation at verbs: Restricting the domain of subsequent reference. Cognition, 73(3), 247-264. Posner, M. I., Nissen, M. J., & Ogden, W. C. (1978). Attended and unattended processing modes: The role of set for spatial location. In: H.L. Pick, & I.J. Saltzman (Eds.), Modes of perceiving and processing information. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Abstract

Studies of lexical access in speech planning often use priming or interference paradigms, where a target picture is combined with a written prime or distracter word. A difficulty in interpreting the results of studies using interference paradigms with clearly visible distracters is that effects arising during lexical access cannot be distinguished from effects arising during self-monitoring. A difficulty with using masked priming paradigms is that the effects tend to be small and fragile. We report a series of picture naming experiments using both the conventional masked priming procedure and the sandwich priming procedure first used in lexical decision experiments by Lupker and masked prime the participants are briefly (i.e., 33 ms) presented the name of the target picture. Although neither categorically nor phonologically related primes significantly affected picture naming in the traditional masked priming experiments, in the sandwich priming experiments: (a) categorically related primes (e.g. “dog-cat”) interfered more than unrelated distracters with picture naming and (b) phonologically related primes (“mat-cat”) facilitated picture naming. The theoretical implications of these findings will be discussed. Lupker, S.J., & Davis, C.J. (2009). Sandwich priming: A method for overcoming the limitations of masked priming by reducing lexical competition effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 35, 618-639.

Abstract

Models of the mental representation of morphologically complex words traditionally fall into one of two categories, Single-Route or Dual-Route models. The former further distinguish between Full-Listing (e.g. Butterworth, 1983) and Decomposition (e.g. Taft & Forster, 1976), while the latter assume different systems governing the access of mono- vs. polymorphemic words (e.g. Pinker & Prince, 1994; Pinker & Ullman, 2002). One of the main arguments against decomposition and continuous online computations is the cognitive resources this process would require. Turning this reasoning around, taxing someone's working memory capacities should then uniquely affect the computation of bimorphemic verb forms. We tested this hypothesis on 48 Dutch native speakers with a lexical decision task, comparing reaction times for Dutch regular past tense forms to frequency-matched irregular past tense forms, both under low and under high cognitive load. We found that frequency influenced reactions to monomorphemic but not to bimorphemic forms (F(1, 47) = 4.734, p = .035), favoring a listing account for the former but a computational procedure for the latter forms. This interaction, however, was present only for a certain group of people (F(1, 23) = 6.279, p = .02), namely those whose reaction times were hardly affected by the load manipulation and who thus may be thought of as having larger working memory capacities. On the other hand, participants who showed a strong load effect had no interaction between number of morphemes and frequency (F(1, 23) = .575, ns), indicating that they process monomorphemic and bimorphemic forms in a similar manner. It seems that cognitive capacities influence the storage of and access to polymorphemic verb forms. While people with greater working memory skills use these resources to compute morphologically complex inflections on-line, people with smaller cognitive capacities seem to rely on a list-like storage for bimorphemic forms as well.