ABSTRACT Sentence comprehension can be facilitated when readers anticipate the upcoming word. Notwithstanding, it remains uncertain if only the most expected word is anticipated, as postulated by the serial graded hypothesis, or if all probable words are pre-activated, as proposed by the parallel probabilistic hypothesis. To test these contrasting accounts, we compared the processing of expected and

ABSTRACT A computational model for the comprehension of single spoken words is presented that builds on an earlier model using discriminative learning. Real-valued features are extracted from the speech signal instead of discrete features. Vectors representing word meanings using one-hot encoding are replaced by real-valued semantic vectors. Instead of incremental learning with Rescorla-Wagner updating

ABSTRACT Second language (L2) learners must not only acquire L2 knowledge (i.e. vocabulary and grammar), but they must also rapidly access this knowledge. In monolinguals, efficient spoken word recognition is accomplished via lexical competition, by which listeners activate a range of candidates that compete for recognition as the signal unfolds. We examined this in adult L2 learners, investigating

ABSTRACT Speech perception involves segmenting a continuous stream of speech into its word components. This can be challenging in the case of homophonous utterances only differing in non-contrastive subphonemic features. Yet, the speech perception system seems able to discriminate subphonemic deviation in homophonous utterances, since it has been shown to elicit a mismatch response (MMN). Here, we

ABSTRACT Among existing accounts of passivisation difficulty, some argue it depends on the predicate semantics (i.e. passives are more difficult with subject-experiencer than agent-patient verbs). Inconsistent with the accounts that predict passive difficulty, Paolazzi et al. (2019) found that passives were read faster than actives at the verb and object by-phrase in a series of self-paced reading

ABSTRACT Gender characteristics of speech to do with prosody and linguistic style influence how a person is understood. We investigated electrophysiological correlates of these. Twenty-four people listened to sentences spoken by a female who manipulated her prosody by using a feminine and an imitated masculine voice and her linguistic style by using function words differentially associated with males

ABSTRACT We investigated the effect of healthy ageing on the lexical and syntactic processes involved in sentence production. Young and older adults completed a semantic interference sentence production task: we manipulated whether the target picture and distractor word were semantically related or unrelated and whether they fell within the same phrase (“the watch and the clock/hippo move apart”) or

ABSTRACT Listeners perceive high or rising pitch as stressed – at the word and sentence level (high-pitch bias). Since stressed syllables can also be low-pitched, this bias may lead to misinterpretations of word and sentence stress and thus slow down speech comprehension. We investigate the effect of immediate exposure with high- vs. low-pitched stressed syllables on the identification of word and

ABSTRACT Studies of non-native speech sound learning report considerable individual variability in learning new sounds and retaining them in memory. The current study tested whether individual variation in brain structure (measured using MRI) accounts for differences in learning or retention of non-native speech sounds. Fifty-seven participants were tested on identification and discrimination of difficult

ABSTRACT A structural priming study examined whether the mapping between grammatical functions (e.g. subject) and thematic roles (e.g. agent) persists across utterances. Specifically, we tested whether native Cantonese speakers are more likely to produce a standard subject–verb–object (SVO) active or a standard passive sentence after repeating an active sentence in object–subject–verb (OSV) order where

ABSTRACT Listeners generally detect syllables faster than phonemes in overt speech. This “syllable advantage” holds robustly for utterance-initial CV vs. C targets [Segui et al., 1981 Segui, J., Frauenfelder, U., & Mehler, J. (1981). Phoneme monitoring, syllable monitoring and lexical access. British Journal of Psychology, 72(4), 471–477. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1981.tb01776.x[Crossref] 

ABSTRACT We examined the time-course of lexical activation, deactivation, and the syntactic operation of dependency linking during the online processing of object-relative sentence constructions using eye-tracking-while-listening. We explored how manipulating temporal aspects of the language input affects the tight lexical and syntactic temporal constraints found in sentence processing. The three temporal

ABSTRACT This study investigates the impact of embodied training of pronunciation with visuospatial hand gestures cueing Mandarin aspirated plosives. Sixty-seven Catalan participants learned to pronounce and memorised novel Mandarin words containing non-native aspirated plosives with or without performing hand gestures. They were tested on perception, production, and word-meaning recognition in a pretest

ABSTRACT Two studies investigated the influence of conversational role on phonetic imitation toward human and voice-AI interlocutors. In a Word List Task, the giver instructed the receiver on which of two lists to place a word; this dialogue task is similar to simple spoken interactions users have with voice-AI systems. In a Map Task, participants completed a fill-in-the-blank worksheet with the interlocutors

ABSTRACT Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) need more exposures to learn new words in an unambiguous context compared to children with typical development (TD). However, it remains unclear whether they would be able to learn new words by extracting frequencies over multiple word-object encounters in ambiguous situations. The present study examines this question through a cross-situational

ABSTRACT Strong emotional words tend to command attention and disrupt cognitive processing. Three experiments investigated whether taboo context, defined by the inclusion of taboo distractors in a picture-word interference task, influences how a distractor’s emotional properties affect speech production. Participants named target pictures accompanied by written distractors varying in arousal and valence

ABSTRACT Language learning often involves predicting categorical outcomes based on a set of cues. Error in predicting a categorical outcome is the difference between zero or one and the outcome’s current level of activation. The current activation level of a categorical outcome is argued to be a non-linear, logistic function of activation the outcome receives from the cues. Crucially, the logistic

ABSTRACT Prediction facilitates word processing in the moment, but the longer-term consequences of prediction remain unclear. We investigated whether prediction error during language encoding enhances memory for words later on. German-speaking participants read sentences in which the gender marking of the pre-nominal article was consistent or inconsistent with the predictable noun. During subsequent

ABSTRACT To achieve successful communication, people should decode not only the literal meaning of an utterance, but also the intended meanings conveyed by the speaker. In the present study, event-related potential (ERP) technique was used to explore how working memory capacity modulates the processes of indirect replies comprehension. Conversations of Speaker A and Speaker B were constructed. Speaker

ABSTRACT Reprocessing has been speculated to be a late higher-level cognitive process in the P600 time window in event-related potential (ERP) studies. However, uncertainties regarding the P600 as an index of reprocessing have obscured the role of reprocessing in sentence comprehension. In this study, we compared meaningless pseudowords with or without a homophonic repairing clue (homophonic pseudoword

ABSTRACT Previous research has found that comprehenders sometimes predict information that is grammatically unlicensed by sentence constraints. An open question is why such grammatically unlicensed predictions occur. We examined the possibility that unlicensed predictions arise in situations of information conflict, for instance when comprehenders try to predict upcoming words while simultaneously

ABSTRACT In a novel continuous speaking-listening paradigm, we explored how speech planning was affected by concurrent listening. In Experiment 1, Dutch speakers named pictures with high versus low name agreement while ignoring Dutch speech, Chinese speech, or eight-talker babble. Both name agreement and type of auditory input influenced response timing and chunking, suggesting that representational

ABSTRACT Collocations are commonly co-occurring word pairs, such as “black coffee”. Previous research has demonstrated a processing advantage for collocations compared to novel phrases, suggesting that readers are sensitive to the frequency that words co-occur in phrases. However, a further question concerns whether this processing advantage for collocations occurs independently from effects of contextual

ABSTRACT Prior research suggests that the amount of experience an individual has with an action influences the degree to which the sensorimotor systems of their brain are involved in the subsequent perception of those actions. Less is known about how action experience and semantic knowledge impact sensorimotor involvement during imitation. To address this question, we collected electroencephalograms

ABSTRACT Context can affect language processing and learning. We here compare the influence of two different contexts (pseudo-objects, data from [Obrig, H., Mock, J., Stephan, F., Richter, M., Vignotto, M., & Rossi, S. (2017). Impact of associative word learning on phonotactic processing in 6-month-old infants: A combined EEG and fNIRS study. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 25, 185–197. https://doi

ABSTRACT Previous studies have reported that temporarily ambiguous sentences sometimes cause reading disruption (garden-path effects). These studies have interpreted their finding as indicating that the human sentence processing device (the processor) initially assigns incorrect structures and subsequently attempts revision. That is a logical interpretation. However, no previous studies have demonstrated

ABSTRACT This study extends the logic of prior studies showing phonetic convergence between interlocutors to the structural domain. We ask whether listeners’ adaptation of the syntactic forms they produce depends on their perceptions about their interlocutor's social proximity and linguistic competence, using structural priming as a measure of convergence. Two experiments compared structural priming

ABSTRACT Some previous ERP studies on the interaction between emotion and morphosyntactic processing have shown emotional modulations in a left anterior negativity (LAN) indexing the early detection of agreement mismatches, whereas others have failed to report such differences. Here we examined individual differences in the morphosyntactic processing of emotional words, which might account for the

ABSTRACT Recent constituent priming experiments show that Dutch and German prefixed verbs prime their stem, regardless of semantic transparency (e.g. Smolka et al. [(2014). ‘Verstehen’ (‘understand’) primes ‘stehen’ (‘stand’): Morphological structure overrides semantic compositionality in the lexical representation of German complex verbs. Journal of Memory and Language, 72, 16–36. https://doi.org/10

ABSTRACT In this paper, we demonstrate the effects of Information Theory measures on the processing of polysemous nouns and reveal that the sensitivity to multiple related senses can be learned from the linguistic context. We collected large-scale data and applied a correlation design to show that an increase in sense uncertainty (or sense diversity) is followed by a faster visual lexical decision

ABSTRACT Previous research suggests that native listeners may be more tolerant to syntactic errors when they are produced in a foreign accent. However, studies investigating this topic within the semantic domain remain conflicting. The current study examined the effects of mispronunciations leading to semantic abnormality in foreign-accented speech. While their EEG was recorded, native speakers of

ABSTRACT To reveal the underlying cause of disfluency, several authors related the pattern of disfluencies to difficulties at specific levels of production, using a Network Task. Given that disfluencies are multifactorial, we combined this paradigm with eye-tracking to disentangle disfluency related to word preparation difficulties from others (e.g. stalling strategies). We manipulated lexical and

ABSTRACT The present study investigates how morphological information is processed and represented in the bilingual lexicon. We employed a masked cross-language morphological priming paradigm to examine morphological decomposition and semantic transparency in bilingual lexical processing. A robust and reliable morphological priming effect was observed for both transparent compounds and opaque compounds

ABSTRACT Across three experiments, we investigated how different markers of contrastive focus affect text encoding and retention. Prior work suggests that some contrastive focus markers (e.g. contrastive pitch accents) can enhance long-term memory for discourse; we tested whether this arises from contrast alone or the realisation of linguistic focus in particular. Participants read texts containing

ABSTRACT In this preregistered study, we investigate whether themes conveyed by task partners’ narratives reveal semantic relationships between objects that would otherwise be perceived as unrelated. Such ad-hoc formation of thematic relations should result in semantic interference when naming objects related to the theme in a blocked-cyclic naming paradigm. Participants watch pre-recorded videos of

ABSTRACT Listeners can successfully interpret the intended meaning of an utterance even when it contains errors or other unexpected anomalies. The present work combines an online measure of attention to sentence referents (visual world eye-tracking) with offline judgments of sentence meaning to disclose how the interpretation of anomalous sentences unfolds over time in order to explore mechanisms of

ABSTRACT Much previous research has investigated the effect of domain-general memory processes on production and comprehension in conversation. In this paper, we present a paradigm in which common ground targets are kept consistent between a participant and two different speakers, and demonstrate a speaker effect that draws participants’ attention away from the common ground target in Experiment 1

ABSTRACT Cognitive Reserve (CR) refers to cognitive resources acquired through experiences along the lifespan that allow for flexibility in coping with neurocognitive changes. Investigating the role of CR measures across well-established psycholinguistic features can provide new insight into how CR interplays with cognition. Sixty-five Italian older adults performed a Lexical Decision, a Semantic Matching

ABSTRACT T3 sandhi in Mandarin is a phonological alternation where two adjacent T3-T3 tones are not allowed and become T[2]-T3. Although this phenomenon has been extensively studied in previous work, concerns about how T3 sandhi is represented in the mental lexicon remain controversial. We approached the issue of representation in a series of cross-modal priming experiments, including two semantic

ABSTRACT During language comprehension, comprehenders form mental representations of the described events. We investigate discourse-level and verb-level cues that guide this process. In particular, we investigate how comprehenders represent object states when events are described with manner verbs that do not entail change-of-state (e.g. hit, wash): a potential change-of-state of the object can be

ABSTRACT We investigated whether semantic context effects in speech production and comprehension are sensitive to language dominance and whether they involve domain-general executive control. We indexed these effects using semantic blocking within the cyclical semantic paradigm (corresponding to poorer performance in semantically related contexts compared to unrelated contexts) in a study that addressed

ABSTRACT Older adults are able to implicitly pick up structural regularities in the environment despite declining cognitive abilities. Here, we investigated elderly’s abilities to implicitly pick up novel linguistic constraints in speech production. Across four training days, young and healthy older Dutch-speaking adults were asked to rapidly recite Dutch phonotactic syllables. Two unrestricted consonants

ABSTRACT Research suggests that coherence processing of narratives produced by speakers with traumatic brain injury is dissociated from processing of inter-sentential cohesion and intra-sentential production. The goal of this study was to investigate the relationships between microlinguistic abilities and macrolinguistic operations in narratives produced by individuals with TBI. Narratives with variable

ABSTRACT Higher cognitive functions such as linguistic comprehension must ultimately relate to perceptual systems in the brain, though how and why this forms remains unclear. Different brain networks that mediate perception when hearing have recently been proposed to respect a taxonomic neurobiological model for the processing of different acoustic-semantic categories of real-world natural sounds.

ABSTRACT Given the association between multisensory information and inner attention, the quality of multisensory information is hypothesised to modulate the neuronal activity associated with language comprehension. To verify, we investigated the interaction effect between multisensory quality (sensory enrichment) and semantic (in)congruency during L2 sentence comprehension. English words were selected

ABSTRACT Sentences with filler-gap dependency are more difficult to process than those without, as reflected by event-related brain potentials (ERPs) such as sustained left anterior negativity (SLAN). The cognitive processes underlying SLAN may support associating a filler with a temporally distant gap in syntactic representation. Alternatively, processing filler-gap dependencies in the absence of

ABSTRACT This study aimed at examining morphological processing mechanisms involved in lexical access across the lifespan in the morphologically complex Russian language. We conducted an unprimed lexical decision experiment using number-dominant nouns in participants of a wide age range (n = 190, 9–87 years old), analysing age as a continuous factor. Additionally, we tested whether morphological processing

ABSTRACT This study aimed at examining morphological processing mechanisms involved in lexical access across the lifespan in the morphologically complex Russian language. We conducted an unprimed lexical decision experiment using number-dominant nouns in participants of a wide age range (n = 190, 9–87 years old), analysing age as a continuous factor. Additionally, we tested whether morphological processing

ABSTRACT Skilled readers may misinterpret “you that read wrong” for “you read that wrong”: a transposed-word effect. This relatively novel finding, which supports parallel word processing during sentence reading, is attributed to a combination of noisy bottom-up word position coding and top-down syntactic constraints. The present study focussed on the contribution of syntactic constraints in driving

ABSTRACT Skilled readers may misinterpret “you that read wrong” for “you read that wrong”: a transposed-word effect. This relatively novel finding, which supports parallel word processing during sentence reading, is attributed to a combination of noisy bottom-up word position coding and top-down syntactic constraints. The present study focussed on the contribution of syntactic constraints in driving

ABSTRACT This study investigated brain responses to verbal action mismatches (e.g. The brother catches/*bites the sister) and role relation mismatches (e.g. The sister catches the brother) in a picture-sentence verification task in Korean using event–related potentials (ERPs). EEG data collected from 30 native Korean speakers revealed a large N400 at the verb for the action mismatch, but an early negativity

ABSTRACT The present study investigated the impact of the MRI environment on eye-movement measures in the visual-world paradigm. 24 neurotypical young adults performed a linguistic prediction task in a typical lab setting (Lab) and 22 did so during MRI scanning (Scanner). Data analyses focused on eye-tracking data quality and the time course and magnitude of prediction effects. Data quality was reduced

ABSTRACT The present study investigated the impact of the MRI environment on eye-movement measures in the visual-world paradigm. 24 neurotypical young adults performed a linguistic prediction task in a typical lab setting (Lab) and 22 did so during MRI scanning (Scanner). Data analyses focused on eye-tracking data quality and the time course and magnitude of prediction effects. Data quality was reduced

ABSTRACT Memory is fundamental for comprehending and segmenting the flow of activity around us into units called “events”. Here, we investigate the effect of the movement dynamics of actions (ceased, ongoing) and the inner structure of events (with or without object-state change) on people's event memory. Furthermore, we investigate how describing events, and the meaning and form of verb predicates

ABSTRACT Two experiments test how phrasal prominence influences listeners' perception of vowel contrasts and how prominence information and vowel formant cues are integrated in processing. Experiment 1 finds that listeners incorporate phrasal prominence in their perception of vowels, in line with how spectral structure is modulated by prominence in speech. Experiment 2 explores how prominence information

ABSTRACT Two experiments test how phrasal prominence influences listeners' perception of vowel contrasts and how prominence information and vowel formant cues are integrated in processing. Experiment 1 finds that listeners incorporate phrasal prominence in their perception of vowels, in line with how spectral structure is modulated by prominence in speech. Experiment 2 explores how prominence information

ABSTRACT This research explores patterns of lexical activation of both languages of a bilingual when producing spoken words. Specifically, it investigates the influence of within- and cross-language measures of phonological neighbourhood, on the English picture naming performance of a diverse group of French (L1) – English (L2) late bilinguals. A novel phonological neighbourhood density measure was

ABSTRACT An important question in psycholinguistics is whether or not the semantic transparency of words plays any role during the processing of compound words. Studies of different languages have produced mixed results suggesting that semantic properties of compounding do not have a universal effect. This paper uses masked priming at three different SOAs to study the possible effects of semantic transparency

ABSTRACT Theories of language and cognition develop iteratively from ideas, experiments and models. The abstract nature of “cognitive processes” means that computational models play a critical role in this, yet bridging the gaps between models, data, and interpretations is challenging. While the how and why computations are performed is often the primary research focus, the conclusions drawn from models

ABSTRACT Monologic spoken discourse allows us to evaluate every day speech while retaining some experimental constraint. It also has clinical relevance, providing cognitive-linguistic information not measured on typical standardised tests. Here, we leverage big behavioural data (AphasiaBank) to understand how discourse genres (narrative, procedural, expositional), and unique tasks within those genres