A Psycholinguistic Model for the Marking of Discourse Relations

Discourse relations can either be explicitly marked by discourse connectives (DCs), such as therefore and but, or implicitly conveyed in natural language utterances. How speakers choose between the two options is a question that is not well understood. In this study, we propose a psycholinguistic model that predicts whether or not speakers will produce an explicit marker given the discourse relation they wish to express. Our model is based on two information-theoretic frameworks: (1) the Rational Speech Acts model, which models the pragmatic interaction between language production and interpretation by Bayesian inference, and (2) the Uniform Information Density theory, which advocates that speakers adjust linguistic redundancy to maintain a uniform rate of information transmission. Specifically, our model quantifies the utility of using or omitting a DC based on the expected surprisal of comprehension, cost of production, and availability of other signals in the rest of the utterance. Experiments based on the Penn Discourse Treebank show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art performance at predicting the presence of DCs (Patterson and Kehler, 2013), in addition to giving an explanatory account of the speaker’s choice

Gender assignment and gender agreement in advanced French interlanguage: a cross-sectional study

An analysis of 519 gender errors (out of 9,378 modifiers) in the advanced French interlanguage of 27 Dutch L1 speakers confirms earlier findings that gender assignment and/or agreement remain problematic for learners at all levels. A hypothesis derived from Pienemann's Processability Theory (1998a) that accuracy rates would be higher for gender agreement in structures involving no exchange of grammatical information between constituents was not confirmed. The analysis of interindividual and intra-individual variation in gender accuracy rates revealed effects from avoidance and generalisation strategies, from linguistic variables, sociobiographical variables and psycholinguistic variables. We argue that gender errors can originate at the lemma level, at the gender node level, or at the lexeme level. Different psycholinguistic scenarios are presented to account for intra-individual variation in gender assignment and agreement

Foreground and background text in retrieval

Our hypothesis is that certain clauses have foreground functions in text, while other clauses have background functions and that these functions are expressed or reflected in the syntactic structure of the clause. Presumably these clauses will have differing utility for automatic approaches to text understanding; a summarization system might want to utilize background clauses to capture commonalities between numbers of documents while an indexing system might use foreground clauses in order to capture specific characteristics of a certain document

Reading errors made by skilled and unskilled readers: evaluating a system that generates reports for people with poor literacy

This study evaluates a natural language generation system that creates literacy assessment reports in order to create more readable documents. Prior research assessed comprehension and reading speed on modified documents. Here, we investigate whether individuals make less reading errors after the system modifies documents to make them more readable. Preliminary results show that poor readers make more errors than good readers. The full paper will describe readers' rates of errors on documents modified for readability

The role of non-connective discourse cues and their interaction with connectives

The disambiguation and processing of coherence relations is often investigated with a focus on explicit connectives, such as but or so. Other, non-connective cues from the context also facilitate discourse inferences, although their precise disambiguating role and interaction with connectives have been largely overlooked in the psycholinguistic literature so far. This study reports on two crowdsourcing experiments that test the role of contextual cues (parallelism, antonyms, resultative verbs) in the disambiguation of contrast and consequence relations. We compare the effect of contextual cues in conceptually different relations, and with connectives that differ in their semantic precision. Using offline tasks, our results show that contextual cues significantly help disambiguating contrast and consequence relations in the absence of connectives. However, when connectives are present in the context, the effect of cues only holds if the connective is acceptable in the target relation. Overall, our study suggests that cues are decisive on their own, but only secondary in the presence of connectives. These results call for further investigation of the complex interplay between connective types, contextual cues, relation types and other linguistic and cognitive factors

Linguistic Codeswitching as a Cross-linguistic Lexical Bridge in Bilingual Communication

Most studies of linguistic codeswitching (CS) focus on what language items can be switched and how such switched items are intrasententially configurated at the surface sentence level. This study investigates linguistic CS at a rather abstract level by adopting the Bilingual Lemma Activation (BLA) Model (Wei, 2020). This model claims that lemmas (i.e., abstract entries in the mental lexicon about lexemes) are language-specific, language-specific lemmas are in contact in bilingual speech involving CS, and thus CS is cross-linguistically and lexical-conceptually driven in bilingual communication. In support of such a claim, this study provides evidence that bilinguals perform CS as a communicative strategy to make their intended meanings realized in terms of language-specific lemmas activated for the current exchange. Some typical instances of naturally occurring CS as observed in various language pairs involved in CS are described and explained at two levels of abstract lexical structure: lexical-conceptual structure and predicate-argument structure. This study offers some explanations of linguistic CS from a particular perspective and aims to explore the nature and activity of the bilingual mental lexicon during CS