Talking about Relations:Factors Influencing the Production of Relational Descriptions

In a production experiment (Experiment 1) and an acceptability rating one (Experiment 2), we assessed two factors, spatial position and salience, which may influence the production of relational descriptions (such as the ball between the man and the drawer). In Experiment 1, speakers were asked to refer unambiguously to a target object (a ball). In Experiment 1a, we addressed the role of spatial position, more specifically if speakers mention the entity positioned leftmost in the scene as (first) relatum. The results showed a preference to start with the left entity, however, only as a trend, which leaves room for other factors that could influence spatial reference. Thus, in the following studies, we varied salience systematically, by making one of the relatum candidates animate (Experiment 1b), and by adding attention capture cues, first subliminally by priming one relatum candidate with a flash (Experiment 1c), then explicitly by using salient colors for objects (Experiment 1d). Results indicate that spatial position played a dominant role. Entities on the left were mentioned more often as (first) relatum than those on the right (Experiment 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d). Animacy affected reference production in one out of three studies (in Experiment 1d). When salience was manipulated by priming visual attention or by using salient colors, there were no significant effects (Experiment 1c, 1d). In the acceptability rating study (Experiment 2), participants expressed their preference for specific relata, by ranking descriptions on the basis of how good they thought the descriptions fitted the scene. Results show that participants preferred most the description that had an animate entity as the first mentioned relatum. The relevance of these results for models of reference production is discussed

Planning to speak in L1 and L2

Many thanks to Annelies van Wijngarden, Caitlin Decupyer, and student assistants in the Psychology of Language Department (Esther Kroese, Marloes Gauwamans, Jessica Aguilar Diaz, Ilse Wagemakers) for invaluable help during data collection and processing.Peer reviewedPostprin

Visual attention and structural choice in sentence production across languages

To represent the complexity of a visually perceived event, viewers need to attend selectively to different aspects of the event and its associated entities. Spoken descriptions of such complex events must encode the corresponding perceptual properties. This review discusses how the speaker’s attentional focus on one of the referents in a given event influences the structural choice in languages with different degrees of word order flexibility. First, we will discuss whether English speakers prefer to map visually salient referents onto a prominent grammatical role (e.g., Subject) or to a prominent linear position in the sentence (e.g., the sentential starting point). Comparison of this evidence with research in free word-order languages (Russian and Finnish) suggests the existence of a mapping mechanism wherein perceptual salience predominantly affects grammatical-role assignment and, to a lesser extent, assignment of linear positions

Understanding semantic competition in complex phrase comprehension and production

This thesis investigated the relationship between complex phrase comprehension and production. The work aimed to identify whether parallel competition effects exist between the two tasks; and importantly, the extent to which these effects drive from common processes and knowledge bases. In three studies, participants viewed pictures of various entities doing different actions. For each picture, they comprehended a recorded description (e.g. the teddy bear/man that the girl is hugging) about the entity being acted upon, and were asked to describe it in a production task. They also completed a number of cognitive assessments measuring vocabulary, inhibition, etc. Study 1 found that phrases containing highly similar and reversible nouns are more difficult to comprehend and produce in adults. Importantly, this difficulty varied as a function of individual inhibition skills over above vocabulary in both tasks, and production additionally recruited task-specific motor inhibition processes. Study 2 replicated the reversibility-based effects with children and adolescents. But young children differed from older participants as they experienced greater production interference and are less skilled in using certain production options to alleviate interference. Unlike adults, their language performance was predicted by variance on working memory capacity. Study 3 used eye-tracking to examine the time course of production competition. The results showed reversibility-based competition manifest at verb position, and is particularly relevant to individual’s semantic inhibition skill. This parallels previous comprehension findings, thus suggests shared competition resolution processes across tasks. Together, these findings suggest common reversibility-based competition processes underlying comprehension and production, and across development. Current models arguing for shared prediction processes in adults can potentially incorporate common inhibition mechanisms; however, our data imply that non-shared processes should also be considered. On the other hand, unlike adults, our children’s data supports the capacity-constraint account in language processing, thus suggesting a discontinuity of cognitive functioning in language development

Types of interference and their resolution in monolingual language production

There is accumulating evidence that speakers recruit inhibitory control to manage the conflicting demands of online language production, e.g., when selecting from among co-activated representations during object naming or when suppressing alternative competing terms in referential language use. However, little is known about the types of conflict resolution mechanisms underlying the production processes. The aim of this research was to assess the relative contribution of various forms of interference arising at different stages of information processing as well as their control to single- and multi-word utterance production. The systematic review of picture-word interference (PWI) studies (Study 1) was conducted to trace the origins of semantic context effects in order to address the question of whether spoken word production can be seen as a competitive process. The various manipulations of PWI task parameters in the reviewed studies produced a mixture of findings that were either contradictory, unable to discriminate between the rival theories of lexical access, or of questionable validity. Critically, manipulations of distractor format and of whole-part relations with varied association strength produced sufficiently strong evidence to discount post-lexical non-competitive accounts as the dominant explanations for observed interference effects, constraining their locus to early rather than late processing stages. The viability of competitive hypotheses was upheld; however, this is contingent on the relative contribution of pre-lexical processes, which remains to be confirmed by future research. The relative contribution of different conflict resolution mechanisms (measured by the anti-saccade, arrow flanker and Simon arrow tasks) to object naming under prepotent (the PWI task) and underdetermined competition (picture naming task with name agreement, NA, manipulation) was further investigated in Study 2, while Study 3 extended the notion of separability of the inhibitory processes to grammatical encoding (grammatical voice construction and number agreement computation). In Study 2, only the flanker effect was a significant predictor of the PWI but not NA effect, while the remaining inhibitory measures made no significant contribution to either the PWI or NA effect. Participants with smaller flanker effects, indicative of better resolution of representational conflict, were faster to name objects in the face of competing stimuli. In Study 3, only utterance repairs were reliably predicted by the flanker and anti-saccade effects. Those who resolved representational conflict or inhibited incorrect eye saccades more efficiently were found to self-correct less often during online passive voice construction than those with poorer resolution of inhibition at the representational and motor output level. No association was found between the various inhibitory measures and subject-verb agreement computation. The negative priming study with novel associations (Study 4) was an attempt at establishing the causal link between inhibition and object naming, and specifically whether inhibition that is ostensibly applied to irrelevant representations spreads to its associatively related nodes. Response times to the associated probe targets that served as distractors in previous prime trials were no different than response times to non-associated probe targets. Possible explanations are discussed for the lack of the associative negative priming effect. The studies described here implicate two types of interference resolution abilities as potential sources of variability in online production skills, with the underlying assumption that better resolution of conflict at the representational and motor output level translates to faster naming and more fluent speech. There is insufficient evidence to determine whether the representational conflict is lexical or conceptual in nature, or indeed whether it is inhibitory in the strict sense. It also remains to be established whether interference that likely ensues at the response output stage is due to some criterion checking process (self-monitoring), recruitment of an inhibitory mechanism (response blocking) or both

Minimizing dependencies across languages and speakers. Evidence from basque, polish and spanish and native and non-native bilinguals.

223 p.Within the last years, evidence for a general preference towards grammars reducing the linear distance between elements in a dependency has been accumulating (e. g., Futrell, Mahowald, and Gibson, 2015b; Gildea and Temperley, 2010). This cognitive bias towards dependency length minimization has been argued to result from communicative and cognitive pressures at play during language production. Although corpus evidence supporting this claim is quite broad insofar as grammaticalized structures are concerned (e. g., Futrell et al., 2015b; Liu, 2008; Temperley, 2007, among others), its validity rests on more shaky foundations regarding production preferences (Stallings, MacDonald, and O¿Seaghdha, 1998; Wasow, 1997; Yamashita and Chang, 2001, among others). This dissertation intends to address this gap. It examines whether dependency length minimization is an active mechanism shaping language production preferences, and explores the specific nature of this principle and its interplay with linguistic specifications and architectural properties of the human memory system. In a series of 5 cued-recall production experiments and 2 complex memory span tasks, I investigate the effect of dependency length in modulating production preferences across languages with differing grammatical properties (e.g., head-position and case marking) and across speakers (e. g., natives and non-natives and with variable working memory capacity). I begin by showing that the preference for short dependencies is better accounted by a general cognitive preference for minimizing the distance across dependents than by conceptual availability. I then show how languages as diverse as Basque, Spanish and Polish tend to choose the communicatively more efficient structures, when there is more than one available alternative to express the same meaning. Crucially, I confirm that there is consistent variation regarding this tendency both across languages and across speakers. I argue that language-specific (e. g., pluripersonal agreement) and general cognitive mechanisms (e. g., word order based-expectations) interact with the preference towards dependency length minimization. Also, I show that the degree of communicative efficiency achieved by highly proficient and early non-native bilingual speakers is lower than that reached by their native peers. Finally, I find that the bias towards shifted orders that yield shorter dependencies correlates positively with working memory. Based on these findings, I conclude that there is strong evidence supporting the claim that dependency length minimization is a pervasive force in human language production, resulting from a general cognitive constraint towards efficient communication, and also that its strength varies depending on grammatical and individual specifications compatible with information-theoretic considerations

The Spray/Load and Dative Alternations: Aligning VP Structure and Contextual Effects.

The theoretical and experimental work presented in this thesis investigates the spray/load and dative alternations. The purpose is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the alternations in terms of their syntactic structures and to account for how contextual information drives differences in the linear order of their VP arguments. This analysis shows that the syntactic structures of the spray/load and dative alternations are identical; each variant in an alternation is characterised by one of two available structures proposed in Janke and Neeleman (2012). Each structure is shown to respect a novel thematic hierarchy that is based on the value of binary feature clusters (Reinhart, 2000) rather than by direct reference to semantic labels. The choice of a particular structure is demonstrated to be affected by the non-semantic context in which the spray/load or dative sentence is generated. This is a consequence of the limited processing capacity of Working Memory and the allocation of attentional resources to a stimulus. Experimental data from an as yet untested variable of the visual context – the egocentric perception of distance – is found to interact with word order preferences of the alternations. I conclude that non-semantic contextual information interacts with the encoding of an event which ultimately has consequences for syntactic choices

Aufmerksamkeit, Prominenz und Sprachproduktion: Eine experimentelle Untersuchung jüngerer und älterer Erwachsener

Ziel dieser Doktorarbeit war es, zu umfassenden, neuartigen Einsichten hinsichtlich der Sprachproduktion jüngerer und älterer erwachsener Versuchspersonen zu gelangen und zu klären, inwiefern sich spezifische visuelle und konzeptuelle Faktoren auf die Wahl der syntaktischen Struktur und die Äußerungsplanung auswirken. Im Speziellen wurde untersucht, inwieweit eine gezielte visuelle Aufmerksamkeitslenkung auf das Patiens sowie dessen Animatheitsstatus und Position Einfluss auf die Beschreibung einer transitiven Ereignisszene nehmen. Der Wert der Dissertation besteht darin, dass sowohl für den deutschsprachigen Raum als auch international erstmals Resultate einer Untersuchung vorliegen, die die Sprachproduktion jüngerer Versuchspersonen mit der älterer Versuchspersonen in Bezug auf die genannten Fragestellungen vergleichend gegenüberstellen. Aufgrund des demographischen Wandels gewinnt gerade der Zugang zu neuem Wissen über Satzproduktions- und Satzplanungsmechanismen bei Älteren zunehmend an Bedeutung. Um die genannten Forschungsfragen zu untersuchen, wurden insgesamt fünf Bildbeschreibungsexperimente mit jüngeren und älteren deutschsprachigen Erwachsenen durchgeführt. Zusammenfassend legte die Analyse der Forschungsergebnisse sowohl Parallelen als auch Unterschiede hinsichtlich der Äußerungsproduktions- und Äußerungsplanungsmechanismen jüngerer und älterer Versuchspersonen offen. Neben dem rein wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisgewinn liefert die vorliegende Arbeit auch verschiedene Implikationen für die Gestaltung zukünftiger psycholinguistischer Bildbeschreibungsexperimente sowie klassische psycholinguistische Anwendungsfelder wie Sprachtherapie und schulischen Deutschunterricht sowie das Marketingwesen