Next speakers plan word forms in overlap with the incoming turn: evidence from gaze-contingent switch task performance

Cognition

Comprehenders are known to generate expectations about upcoming linguistic input at the sentence and discourse level. However, most previous studies on prediction focused mainly on word-induced brain activity rather than examining neural activity preceding a critical stimulus in discourse processing, where prediction actually takes place. In this EEG study, participants were presented with multiple sentences resembling a discourse including conditional sentences with either only if or if, which are characterized by different semantics, triggering stronger or weaker predictions about the possible continuation of the presented discourses, respectively. Results revealed that discourses including only if, as compared to discourses with bare if, triggered an increased predictive neural activity before the expected critical word, resembling the readiness potential. Moreover, word-induced P300 brain responses were found …

Proceedings of the 27th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue

We present a collection of (currently) about 5.500 commands directed to voice-controlled virtual assistants (VAs) by sixteen initial users of a VA system in their homes. The collection comprises recordings captured by the VA itself and with a conditional voice recorder (CVR) selectively capturing recordings including the VA-directed commands plus some surrounding context. Next to a description of the collection, we present initial findings on the patterns of use of the VA systems during the first weeks after installation, including usage timing, the development of usage frequency, distributions of sentence structures across commands, and (the development of) command success rates. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the applied collection-specific recording approach and describe potential research questions that can be investigated in the future, based on the collection, as well as the merit of combining quantitative corpus linguistic approaches with qualitative in-depth analyses of single cases.

Linguistics Vanguard

Comprehending conditional statements is fundamental for hypothetical reasoning about situations. However, the online comprehension of conditional statements containing different conditional connectives is still debated. We report two self-paced reading experiments on German conditionals presenting the conditional connectives wenn (‘if’) and nur wenn (‘only if’) in identical discourse contexts. In Experiment 1, participants read a conditional sentence followed by the confirmed antecedent p and the confirmed or negated consequent q. The final, critical sentence was presented word by word and contained a positive or negative quantifier (ein/kein ‘one/no’). Reading times of the two quantifiers did not differ between the two conditional connectives. In Experiment 2, presenting a negated antecedent, reading times for the critical positive quantifier (ein) did not differ between conditional connectives, while reading …

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

In this paper, the meaning and processing of the German conditional connectives (CCs) such as wenn ‘if’ and nur wenn ‘only if’ are investigated. In Experiment 1, participants read short scenarios containing a conditional sentence (i.e., If P, Q.) with wenn/nur wenn ‘if/only if’ and a confirmed or negated antecedent (i.e., P/not-P), and subsequently completed the final sentence about Q (with or without negation). In Experiment 2, participants rated the truth or falsity of the consequent Q after reading a conditional sentence with wenn or nur wenn and a confirmed or negated antecedent (i.e., If P, Q. P/not-P. // Therefore, Q?). Both experiments showed that neither wenn nor nur wenn were interpreted as biconditional CCs. Modus Ponens (If P, Q. P. // Therefore, Q) was validated for wenn, whereas it was not validated in the case of nur wenn. While Denial of the Antecedent (If P, Q. not-P. // Therefore, not-Q.) was validated in …

Proceedings of the 25th workshop on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue, SemDial25

In conversation, speakers need to plan and comprehend language in parallel in order to meet the tight timing constraints of turn taking. Given that language comprehension and speech production planning both require cognitive resources and engage overlapping neural circuits, these two tasks may interfere with one another in dialogue situations. Interference effects have been reported on a number of linguistic processing levels, including lexicosemantics. This paper reports a study on semantic processing efficiency during language comprehension in overlap with speech planning, where participants responded verbally to questions containing semantic illusions. Participants rejected a smaller proportion of the illusions when planning their response in overlap with the illusory word than when planning their response after the end of the question. The obtained results indicate that speech planning interferes with language comprehension in dialogue situations, leading to reduced semantic processing of the incoming turn. Potential explanatory processing accounts are discussed.

Writing a thesis is a journey. Just like in an interesting conversation, the turns it might take are unclear as the candidate sets out with a more or less specific goal in mind, yet still unprepared to immediately approach that goal without any meandering. For the candidate, learning to navigate the ups and downs of that journey is the real value of that special phase in life. Learning to deal with unforeseen problems, frustration, curiosity, critique, mistakes, pride, confusion, and an amazement about the sheer complexities of human social interaction are fundamental to the young scientist as a person, and are a pre-requisite for successfully adding a valuable piece to the understanding of any relevant problem studied in the humanities.I am very grateful for having undertaken that journey and for all its phases along the way. Grateful especially for the encouragement I received to take up higher studies, particularly by Sabine Fiedler and Steven Roodenrys, and for the teachings that convinced me that my interest in the fine coordination in social interaction is of general academic value. In that respect, special thanks goes to Thomas Pechmann, who recommended me going to Nijmegen to pursue the quest for understanding how people manage conversation, and to Nick Enfield, who encouraged me to take up a PhD on the psycholinguistics of interaction. Centrally, my gratitude goes to Steve Levinson, who repeatedly pushed me to simultaneously stick to the specific questions I set out to pursue and at the same time to not lose sight of the grand picture that motivated me to ask these questions in the first place. All along the way, Steve was a role model for me …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

Comprehenders across languages tend to interpret role-ambiguous arguments as the subject or the agent of a sentence during parsing. However, the evidence for such a subject/agent preference rests on the comprehension of transitive, active-voice sentences where agents/subjects canonically precede patients/objects. The evidence is thus potentially confounded by the canonical order of arguments. Transitive sentence stimuli additionally conflate the semantic agent role and the syntactic subject function. We resolve these two confounds in an experiment on the comprehension of intransitive sentences in Basque. When exposed to sentence-initial role-ambiguous arguments, comprehenders preferentially interpreted these as agents and had to revise their interpretation when the verb disambiguated to patient-initial readings. The revision was reflected in an N400 component in ERPs and a decrease in power in …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

We investigated prediction skills of adult heritage speakers and the role of written and spoken language experience on predictive processing. Using visual world eye-tracking, we focused on predictive use of case-marking cues in verb-medial and verb-final sentences in Turkish with adult Turkish heritage speakers (N = 25) and Turkish monolingual speakers (N = 24). Heritage speakers predicted in verb-medial sentences (when verb-semantic and case-marking cues were available), but not in verb-final sentences (when only case-marking cues were available) while monolinguals predicted in both. Prediction skills of heritage speakers were modulated by their spoken language experience in Turkish and written language experience in both languages. Overall, these results strongly suggest that verb-semantic information is needed to scaffold the use of morphosyntactic cues for prediction in heritage speakers …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

In two grammatical decision experiments, we used fast-priming as a novel method for uncovering the syntactic processes involved in written sentence comprehension while limiting the influence of strategic processes. Targets were sequences of four words that could be grammatically correct or not. Targets (e.g. they see the moon) were preceded by the brief (170 ms) presentation of four types of prime: (1) same syntactic structure / same verb (you see a friend); (2) same structure / different verb (she writes a book); (3) different structure / same verb (he sees him now); or (4) different structure / different verb (stay in our hotel). Same structure primes facilitated decisions to grammatical targets in error rates, and this effect did not significantly interact with the facilitatory effect of a shared verb. These results provide evidence for structural priming of sentence reading in conditions that greatly limit any role for strategic …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

Formal analysis of the minimal computational complexity of verification algorithms for natural language quantifiers implies that different classes of quantifiers demand the engagement of different cognitive resources for their verification. In particular, sentences containing proportional quantifiers, e.g. “most”, provably require a memory component, whereas non-proportional quantifiers, e.g. “all”, “three”, do not. In an ERP study, we tested whether previously observed differences between these classes were modulated by memory load. Participants performed a picture-sentence verification task while they had to remember a string of 2 or 4 digits to be compared to a second string at the end of a trial. Relative to non-proportional quantifiers, proportional quantifiers elicited a sentence-internal sustained negativity. Additionally, an interaction between Digit-Load and Quantifier-Class was observed at the sentence-final word …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

In this study, we conducted a behavioural experiment using literal, idiomatic, conventional and novel metaphorical action sentences. Participants viewed an action video, immediately after a sentence containing a verb that did (matching modality) or did not (mismatching modality) match the observed action. All the sentences were presented both in the matching modality and the mismatching modality. Participants had to indicate whether the sentence made sense or not by pressing a designated response key. We recorded participants' reaction times and accuracy. We found no significant differences between the matching and mismatching modality in the idiomatic condition. Instead, we found a facilitation effect for the literal and the metaphorical conventional condition in the matching modality compared to the mismatching modality and an interference effect for the metaphorical novel condition in the matching …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

The interpretation of novel noun-noun compounds (NNCs, e.g. “devil salary”) requires the combination of nouns in the absence of syntactic cues, an interesting facet of complex meaning creation. Here we examine unconstrained interpretations of a large set of novel NNCs, to investigate how NNC constituents are combined into novel complex meanings. The data show that words’ lexical-semantic features (e.g. material, agentivity, imageability, semantic similarity) differentially contribute to the grammatical relations and the semantics of NNC interpretations. Further, we demonstrate that passive interpretations incur higher processing cost (longer interpretation times and more eye-movements) than active interpretations. Finally, we show that large language models (GPT-2, BERT, RoBERTa) can predict whether a NNC is interpretable by human participants and estimate differences in processing cost, but do not exhibit …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

The sentences “More than half of the students passed the exam” and “Fewer than half of the students failed the exam” describe the same set of situations, and yet the former results in shorter reaction times in verification tasks. The two-step model explains this result by postulating that negative quantifiers contain hidden negation, which involves an extra processing stage. To test this theory, we applied a novel EEG analysis technique focused on detecting cognitive stages (HsMM-MVPA) to data from a picture-sentence verification task. We estimated the number of processing stages during reading and verification of quantified sentences (e.g. “Fewer than half of the dots are blue”) that followed the presentation of pictures containing coloured geometric shapes. We did not find evidence for an extra step during the verification of sentences with fewer than half. We provide an alternative interpretation of our results in line …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

The sentences “More than half of the students passed the exam” and “Fewer than half of the students failed the exam” describe the same set of situations, and yet the former results in shorter reaction times in verification tasks. The two-step model explains this result by postulating that negative quantifiers contain hidden negation, which involves an extra processing stage. To test this theory, we applied a novel EEG analysis technique focused on detecting cognitive stages (HsMM-MVPA) to data from a picture-sentence verification task. We estimated the number of processing stages during reading and verification of quantified sentences (e.g. “Fewer than half of the dots are blue”) that followed the presentation of pictures containing coloured geometric shapes. We did not find evidence for an extra step during the verification of sentences with fewer than half. We provide an alternative interpretation of our results in line …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

The sentences “More than half of the students passed the exam” and “Fewer than half of the students failed the exam” describe the same set of situations, and yet the former results in shorter reaction times in verification tasks. The two-step model explains this result by postulating that negative quantifiers contain hidden negation, which involves an extra processing stage. To test this theory, we applied a novel EEG analysis technique focused on detecting cognitive stages (HsMM-MVPA) to data from a picture-sentence verification task. We estimated the number of processing stages during reading and verification of quantified sentences (e.g. “Fewer than half of the dots are blue”) that followed the presentation of pictures containing coloured geometric shapes. We did not find evidence for an extra step during the verification of sentences with fewer than half. We provide an alternative interpretation of our results in line …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

A reflexive referentially depends on another NP. Long-standing inquiries in sentence processing literature revolve around whether and how forming this coreference relation during online sentence processing is susceptible to similarity-based interference. To address these questions, we conducted four experiments using L-maze tasks. The results revealed (delayed) interference in ungrammatical sentences, indicating facilitatory interference. We also found that structural information associated with a distractor and related to clause finiteness may influence memory retrieval. Interference effects were not observed in grammatical sentences across all experiments. These results suggest that online reflexive resolution may be susceptible to interference only when the reflexive mismatches its structurally accessible antecedent in features, and that structural information may influence how a distractor interferes with …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

Shared attention across individuals is a crucial component of joint activities, modulating how we perceive relevant information. In this study, we explored shared attention in language production and memory across separate representation levels. In a shared go/no-go task, pairs of participants responded to objects displayed on a screen: One participant reacted according to the animacy of the object (semantic task), while her partner reacted to the first letter/phoneme (phoneme-monitoring task). Objects could require a response from either one participant, both participants or nobody. Only participants assigned to the phoneme-monitoring task were faster at responding to the joint than to alone trials. However, results from a memory recall test showed that for both partners recall was more accurate for those items to which the partner responded and for jointly responded items. Overall, our findings suggest that partners …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

The interpretation of novel noun-noun compounds (NNCs, e.g. “devil salary”) requires the combination of nouns in the absence of syntactic cues, an interesting facet of complex meaning creation. Here we examine unconstrained interpretations of a large set of novel NNCs, to investigate how NNC constituents are combined into novel complex meanings. The data show that words’ lexical-semantic features (e.g. material, agentivity, imageability, semantic similarity) differentially contribute to the grammatical relations and the semantics of NNC interpretations. Further, we demonstrate that passive interpretations incur higher processing cost (longer interpretation times and more eye-movements) than active interpretations. Finally, we show that large language models (GPT-2, BERT, RoBERTa) can predict whether a NNC is interpretable by human participants and estimate differences in processing cost, but do not exhibit …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

The present study explored the role of constituent frequency and distractor type in complex word learning. Skilled readers were trained to associate novel letter strings with one out of two pictures, with one picture serving as the target, and the other as a distractor. A facilitatory effect of first-constituent frequency was found only in trials where distractors promoted first-constituent learning, and a facilitatory effect of second-constituent frequency only in trials where distractors promoted second-constituent learning, but not vice versa. Learning occurred in the absence of any pre-existing knowledge about the constituent morphemes and any explicit reference to the constituents during learning. The results point to the important role of constituent frequency and distractor type in novel word learning and provide insights into the mechanisms involved in the implicit acquisition of morphological knowledge in adult learners, that …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

This paper explores the nature of the differences in the processing of morphologically regular and irregular forms in the brain. Verbs cannot be simply divided into regular and irregular in Russian – there are many inflextional classes that differ in defaultness, type frequency, and productivity. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we chose three verb classes that allow teasing these factors apart and asked 24 subjects to select verb forms agreeing with different pronouns. We combined measures for local brain activity and generalised psychophysiological interactions. We revealed that regularity effects are primarily driven by defaultness associated with more effective and automated processing in the left-lateralised fronto-temporal combinatorial brain network rather than by productivity or type frequency.

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

Comprehenders across languages tend to interpret role-ambiguous arguments as the subject or the agent of a sentence during parsing. However, the evidence for such a subject/agent preference rests on the comprehension of transitive, active-voice sentences where agents/subjects canonically precede patients/objects. The evidence is thus potentially confounded by the canonical order of arguments. Transitive sentence stimuli additionally conflate the semantic agent role and the syntactic subject function. We resolve these two confounds in an experiment on the comprehension of intransitive sentences in Basque. When exposed to sentence-initial role-ambiguous arguments, comprehenders preferentially interpreted these as agents and had to revise their interpretation when the verb disambiguated to patient-initial readings. The revision was reflected in an N400 component in ERPs and a decrease in power in …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

Although there is compelling evidence for cascading activation in adult lexical planning, there is little research on how and when cascaded processing develops. We use a picture naming task to compare word planning in adults and five-year-old children. We manipulated image codability (name agreement) and name frequency, factors that affect lexical selection and phonological encoding, respectively. These factors had qualitatively similar influences on naming response time in both populations, suggesting similar underlying planning processes. Critically, we found an under-additive interaction between codability and frequency such that the frequency effect was attenuated when name agreement was low. This interaction generalises across experiments and languages and can be simulated in a planning architecture in which phonological forms become activated before lexical selection is complete. These …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

Transforming linguistic codes into articulated speech is thought to rely on different phonetic (motor speech) encoding/planning processes for practiced sequences and for unpracticed/uncommon speech sequences. However, transforming phonological codes into articulation likely involves processes beyond phonetic planning, going on even during articulation. Here we sought behavioural, acoustic and brain dynamics differences in the preparation of matched common/legal and uncommon/illegal speech sequences in 20 participants. Illegal syllables were initialised faster – contrary to what is generally expected -, had longer acoustic duration and differed from legal syllables in ERP waveform amplitudes and microstates in a time-window preceding and following the vocal onset. The pattern of results suggests that speech plans are of different size for legal and illegal syllables, and impact on the parametrisation of …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

Across four eye-tracking studies and one self-paced reading study, we test whether attraction in subject-verb agreement is affected by (a) the relative linear positions of target and distractor, and (b) the active dependency status of the distractor. We find an effect of relative position, with greater attraction in retro-active interference configurations, where the distractor is linearly closer to the critical verb (Subject…Distractor…V) than in pro-active interference where it is more distant (Distractor…Subject…V). However, within pro-active interference configurations, attraction was not affected by the active dependency status of the distractor: attraction effects were similarly small whether or not the distractor was waiting to complete an upcoming dependency at the critical verb, with Bayes Factor analyses showing evidence in favour of a null effect of active dependency status. We discuss these findings in terms of the decay of …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

We examined the cognitive processes underlying the comprehension of reduced word pronunciation variants in natives and advanced learners of French. In a passive listening visual world task, participants heard sentences containing either a reduced or a full form and saw pictures representing the target word, a phonological competitor and two neutral distractors. After each sentence they saw a picture and had to decide whether it matched the content of that sentence. Eye movements and EEG were recorded simultaneously. Because the two recordings offer complementary information about cognitive processes, we developed methods for analysing the signals in combination. We found a stronger effect of reduction on phonetic processing and semantic integration in learners than in natives, but the effects are different from the N100/N400 and P600 effects found in previous research. Time-locking EEG signals on …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

Dyslexia is theorised to be caused by phonological deficits, visuo-attentional deficits, or some combination of the two. The present study contrasted phonological and visuo-attentional theories of dyslexia using a lexical decision task administered to adult participants with and without dyslexia. Homophone and pseudo-homophone stimuli were included to explore whether the two groups differed in their reliance on phonological encoding. Transposed-letter stimuli, including both TL neighbours and TL non-words, measured potential orthographic impairment predicted by visuo-attentional deficit theories. The findings revealed no significant difference in response time or accuracy between the groups for the homophone and pseudo-homophone stimuli. However, dyslexics were significantly slower and less accurate in their responses to the TL stimuli than controls. Thus, dyslexics presented deficits consistent with visuo …