Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons^™

Cross-Modal Distraction On Simultaneous Translation: Language Interference In Spanish-English Bilinguals, Violet Young

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal (URJ)

Bilingualism has been studied extensively in multiple disciplines, yet we are still unsure how exactly bilinguals think. Though the existence of a bilingual advantage is debated, this effect has been shown in tasks using selective attention. These tasks study the effects of language interference, where two types of interference are observed: interlingual (between-languages) and intralingual (within one language). This study examines language interference in Spanish-English bilinguals using an auditory-visual simultaneous translation experimental setup. Sixteen college English monolinguals and 17 college Spanish-English bilinguals were tested. Participants translated or repeated words displayed on a screen while ignoring distractor words played through headphones ...

Verbs Of Motion: Effects Of Cross-Linguistic Transfer In Spanish-English Bilingual Children, Rebecca Smyder

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Languages populate a typological spectrum between verb-framed and satellite-framed based on how they encode Path, the trajectory of a figure related to a fixed point, in motion events. Verb-framed languages encode Path on the main verb (e.g. enter, exit, cross). Satellite-framed languages tend to encode Path in a predicative satellite like a preposition, leaving the verb slot open for the optional element of Manner or how the figure moves (e.g. walk, jump). Bilingual speakers of one of each type, like of Spanish and English respectively, experience transfer between their two languages during acquisition. This study aims to integrate ...

The Use Of Themself To Refer To A Singular Antecedent, Cassandra Davenport

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The pronouns people use, and the pronouns used to address other people are influential in the formation and perception of gender identity. It is generally accepted in the linguistics literature that English pronouns like he and she are a closed class. But this can prevent individuals who do not identify with these binary identities from having pronouns that properly reflect their gender identity. A work-around that is often pursued is to adopt the use of singular they or themself to avoid gender specification. Historically, the use of they with singular, generic antecedents originated in the fourteenth century, and the use ...

The Impact Of Text Orientation On Form Effects With Chinese, Japanese And English Readers, Huilan Yang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Does visuospatial orientation influence form priming effects in parallel ways in Chinese and English? Given the differences in how orthographic symbols are presented in Chinese versus English, one might expect to find some differences in early word recognition processes and, hence, in the nature of form priming effects. According to perceptual learning accounts, form priming effects (i.e., “form” priming effects) should be influenced by text orientation (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). In contrast, Witzel, Qiao, and Forster’s (2011) abstract letter unit account proposes that the mechanism responsible for such effect acts at a totally abstract orthographic level ...

Underspecification In Language Processing, Adam An

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Memory retrieval during sentence comprehension is sensitive to the degree of match between a retrieval’s cues and the cues of a candidate word encoded in memory. Should a candidate word’s cues mismatch with the cues of the retrieval, a disruption in retrieval latency may be experimentally evidenced by a measured disruption in reading time. However, it is unclear how this degree of match is determined for words that are encoded in memory with underspecified cues, and it is unclear how the retrieval mechanism responds to these. The current study tests how the retrieval mechanism is affected when presented ...

Eye-Movement Benchmarks In Heritage Language Reading, Olga Parshina, Anna K. Laurinavivhyute, Irina A. Sekerina

Publications and Research

This eye-tracking study establishes basic benchmarks of eye movements during reading in heritage language (HL) by Russian-speaking adults and adolescents of high (n = 21) and low proficiency (n = 27). Heritage speakers (HSs) read sentences in Cyrillic, and their eye movements were compared to those of Russian monolingual skilled adult readers, 8-yearold children and L2 learners. Reading patterns of HSs revealed longer mean fixation durations, lower skipping probabilities, and higher regressive saccade rates than in monolingual adults. High-proficient HSs were more similar to monolingual children, while low-proficient HSs performed on par with L2 learners. Low-proficient HSs differed from high-proficient HSs in ...

Beyond Exposure: Markers Of English Proficiency In School-Aged French–English Bilinguals, Erin Quirk

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilingual children show more variation in their language development than monolingual children, a fact that has been linked to their experience with their languages. Bilingual language experience also varies more than monolingual children's, both in terms of how much they hear the language spoken around them (exposure) and how much they speak the language themselves (production). This dissertation investigates the following aspects of the relationship between bilinguals’ language experience and development which are not well-understood: how children’s language production relates to their proficiency in that language, how children’s language exposure relates to receptive versus expressive and lexical ...

Testing The Perceptual Magnet Effect In Monolinguals And Bilinguals, Michael C. Stern

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous research has demonstrated an apparent warping of the perceptual space whereby the best exemplars or ‘prototypes’ of speech sound categories minimize the perceptual distance between themselves and neighboring stimuli in the same category. This phenomenon has been termed the ‘perceptual magnet effect’ (PME). The present study extends work on the PME to a speech sound category previously unstudied in this paradigm (American English /æ/), and to bilingual speech sound representation and perception. American English monolinguals and Turkish-English bilinguals completed identification tasks, category goodness rating tasks, and same-different discrimination tasks with synthesized vowel sounds from the American English /æ/ category ...

Computational Approaches To The Syntax–Prosody Interface: Using Prosody To Improve Parsing, Hussein M. Ghaly

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prosody has strong ties with syntax, since prosody can be used to resolve some syntactic ambiguities. Syntactic ambiguities have been shown to negatively impact automatic syntactic parsing, hence there is reason to believe that prosodic information can help improve parsing. This dissertation considers a number of approaches that aim to computationally examine the relationship between prosody and syntax of natural languages, while also addressing the role of syntactic phrase length, with the ultimate goal of using prosody to improve parsing.

Chapter 2 examines the effect of syntactic phrase length on prosody in double center embedded sentences in French. Data collected ...

Modeling Behavior In Truth Value Judgment Task Experiments, Brandon Waldon, Judith Degen

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Truth Value Judgment Task experiments (TVJTs) are a common means of investigating pragmatic competence, particularly with regards to scalar inference. We present a novel quantitative linking function from pragmatic competence to participant behavior on TVJTs, based upon a Bayesian probabilistic model of linguistic production. Our model captures a range of observed phenomena on TVJTs, including intermediate responses on a non-binary scale, population and individual-level variation, participant endorsement of false utterances, and variation in response due to so-called scalar diversity.

Mg Parsing As A Model Of Gradient Acceptability In Syntactic Islands, Aniello De Santo

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

It is well-known that the acceptability judgments at the core of current syntactic theories are continuous. However, an open debate is whether the source of such gradience is situated in the grammar itself, or can be derived from extra-grammatical factors. In this paper, we propose the use of a top-down parser for Minimalist grammars (Stabler, 2013; Kobele et al., 2013; Graf et al., 2017), as a formal model of how gradient acceptability can arise from categorical grammars. As a test case, we target the acceptability judgments for island effects collected by Sprouse et al. (2012a).

Modeling Conventionalization And Predictability Within Mwes At The Brain Level, Shohini Bhattasali, Murielle Popa-Fabre, Christophe Pallier, John Hale

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

While expressions have traditionally been binarized as compositional and noncompositional in linguistic theory, Multiword Expressions (MWEs) demonstrate finer-grained distinctions. Using Association Measures like Pointwise Mutual Information and Dice's Coefficient, MWEs can be characterized as having different degrees of conventionalization and predictability. Our goal is to investigate how these gradiences could reflect cognitive processes. In this study, fMRI recordings of naturalistic narrative comprehension is used to probe to what extent these computational measures and the cognitive processes they could operationalize are observable during on-line sentence processing. Our results show that Dice's Coefficent, representing lexical predictability, is a better predictor ...

Assessing The Ability Of Transformer-Based Neural Models To Represent Structurally Unbounded Dependencies, Jillian K. Da Costa, Rui P. Chaves

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Filler-gap dependencies are among the most challenging syntactic constructions for com- putational models at large. Recently, Wilcox et al. (2018) and Wilcox et al. (2019b) provide some evidence suggesting that large-scale general-purpose LSTM RNNs have learned such long-distance filler-gap dependencies. In the present work we provide evidence that such models learn filler-gap dependencies only very imperfectly, despite being trained on massive amounts of data. Finally, we compare the LSTM RNN models with more modern state-of-the-art Transformer models, and find that these have poor-to-mixed degrees of success, despite their sheer size and low perplexity.

Modeling Morphological Processing In Human Magnetoencephalography, Yohei Oseki, Alec Marantz

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

In this paper, we conduct a magnetoencephalography (MEG) lexical decision experiment and computationally model morphological processing in the human brain, especially the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) in the visual ventral stream. Five neurocomputational models of morphological processing are constructed and evaluated against human neural activities: Character Markov Model and Syllable Markov Model as "amorphous" models without morpheme units, and Morpheme Markov Model, Hidden Markov Model (HMM), and Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG) as "morphous" models with morpheme units structured linearly or hierarchically. Our MEG experiment and computational modeling demonstrate that "morphous" models outperformed "amorphous" models, PCFG was most neurologically accurate ...

The Role Of Information Theory In Gap-Filler Dependencies, Gregory Kobele, Linyang He, Ming Xiang

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

The current study examines how formal grammar and information-theoretic complexity metrics can combine to account for processing cost incurred during incremental sentence comprehension. To this end, we modeled the eye-movement reading measures obtained from an experiment on the wh-in-situ construction in Mandarin Chinese. Framing our syntactic analysis in minimalist grammars, we obtained estimates of grammatical choice-point probabilities from the Penn Chinese Tree Bank, and derived values for two different complexity metrics, suprisal and entropy reduction, at each word of the target sentences. Both metrics accounted for a small but significant amount of the eye-movement data.

A Closer Look At The Performance Of Neural Language Models On Reflexive Anaphor Licensing, Jennifer Hu, Sherry Y. Chen, Roger P. Levy

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

An emerging line of work uses psycholinguistic methods to evaluate the syntactic generalizations acquired by neural language models (NLMs). While this approach has shown NLMs to be capable of learning a wide range of linguistic knowledge, confounds in the design of previous experiments may have obscured the potential of NLMs to learn certain grammatical phenomena. Here we re-evaluate the performance of a range of NLMs on reflexive anaphor licensing. Under our paradigm, the models consistently show stronger evidence of learning than reported in previous work. Our approach demonstrates the value of well-controlled psycholinguistic methods in gaining a fine-grained understanding of ...

What Don't Rnn Language Models Learn About Filler-Gap Dependencies?, Rui P. Chaves

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

In a series of experiments, Wilcox et al. (2019,2019) provide evidence suggesting that general-purpose state-of-the-art LSTM RNN language models have not only learned English filler-gap dependencies, but also some of their associated 'island' constraints (Ross 1967). In the present paper, I cast doubt on such claims, and argue that upon closer inspection filler-gap dependencies are learned only very imperfectly, including their associated island constraints. I conjecture that the LSTM RNN models in question have more likely learned some surface statistical regularities in the dataset rather than higher-level abstract generalizations about the linguistic mechanisms underlying filler-gap constructions.

Script Knowledge Constrains Ellipses In Fragments - Evidence From Production Data And Language Modeling, Robin Lemke, Lisa Schäfer, Heiner Drenhaus, Ingo Reich

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

We investigate the effect of script-based (Schank and Abelson 1977) extralinguistic context on the omission of words in fragments. Our data elicited with a production task show that predictable words are more often omitted than unpredictable ones, as predicted by the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis (Levy & Jaeger 2007). We take into account effects of linguistic and extralinguistic context on predictability and propose a method for estimating the surprisal of words in presence of ellipsis. Our study extends previous evidence for UID in two ways: First, we show that not only local linguistic context, but also extralinguistic context determines the ...

Events And Processes In Language And Mind, Alexis Wellwood, Angela Xiaoxue He, Haley Farkas

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Semantic theories predict that the dimension for comparison given a sentence like A gleebed more than B depends on what the verb gleeb means: if gleeb expresses a property of events, the evaluation should proceed by number; if it expresses a property of processes, any of distance, duration, or number should be available. An adequate test of theories like this requires first determining, independently of language, the conditions under which people will understand a novel verb to be true of a series of events or a single ongoing process. We investigate this prior question by studying people’s representation of ...

Binding And Coreference In Vietnamese, Thuy Bui

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the real-time comprehension and final interpretation of object pronouns in Vietnamese, a language in which reflexive and non-reflexive pronominal forms have overlapping meanings. It addresses the questions of whether and how Principle B is applied as a structural constraint to determine the appropriate antecedent for pronouns in the language. The central argument is that Vietnamese speakers rely on two distinct mechanisms to resolve anaphoric relations: Within a pronoun's local domain, even though coreference is highly permissive, binding is strictly prohibited. Results from three two-alternative forced choice and three self-paced reading experiments show consistent profiles for both ...