Prediction in the processing of repair disfluencies: Evidence from the visual-world paradigm

Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigated the role of prediction in the processing of repair disfluencies (e.g., “The chef reached for some salt uh I mean some ketchup . . .”). Experiment 1 showed that listeners were more likely to fixate a critical distractor item (e.g., pepper) during the processing of repair disfluencies compared with the processing of coordination structures (e.g., “. . . some salt and also some ketchup . . .”). Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Experiment 1 for disfluency versus coordination constructions and also showed that the pattern of fixations to the critical distractor for disfluency constructions was similar to the fixation patterns for sentences employing contrastive focus (e.g., “. . . not some salt but rather some ketchup . . .”). The results suggest that similar mechanisms underlie the processing of repair disfluencies and contrastive focus, with listeners generating sets of entities that stand in semantic contrast to the reparandum in the case of disfluencies or the negated entity in the case of contrastive focus

Effects of sentence structure on processing of complex semantic expressions

Seven eye-tracking-while-reading experiments were conducted to examine how the processing of complex semantic expressions is modulated by changes to sentence structure. The results show that inanimate subject-verb integration (e.g., The pistol injured the cowboy), metonymy (e.g., The journalist offended the college), and complement coercion (e.g., The secretary began the memo) impose a processing cost on the reader when the critical constituents appear together the same clause. In contrast, processing difficulty is reduced or eliminated completely when there is a distant structural relationship between the constituents that convey the complex meaning (e.g., The pistol that injured the cowboy; The journalist offended the honor of the college; The memo that the secretary began). Two corpus analyses demonstrate that there is not a straightforward relationship between reductions in online processing difficulty due to sentence structure and frequency patterns in samples of naturally occurring language. A theoretical framework is proposed that conceptualizes the processing of a variety of complex semantic expressions as stemming from a similar processing stage reflecting the need to detect and resolve a semantic mismatch, although the precise mechanisms underlying this process likely vary depending on the specific type of semantic expression. Reductions in processing difficulty due to structural separation reflect linguistic deemphasis of a complex semantic relationship and the reader's tendency to process this deemphasized relationship at a shallow or underspecified level.Doctor of Philosoph

Processing of Self-Repairs in Stuttered and Non-Stuttered Speech.

Previous research suggests that listeners can use the presence of speech disfluencies to predict upcoming linguistic input. But how is the processing of typical disfluencies affected when the speaker also produces atypical disfluencies, as in the case of stuttering? We addressed this question in a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which participants heard self-repair disfluencies while viewing displays that contained a predictable target entity. Half the participants heard the sentences spoken by a speaker who stuttered, and half heard the sentences spoken by the same speaker who produced the sentences without stuttering. Results replicated previous work in demonstrating that listeners engage in robust predictive processing when hearing self-repair disfluencies. Crucially, the magnitude of the prediction effect was reduced when the speaker stuttered compared to when the speaker did not stutter. Overall, the results suggest that listeners’ ability to model the production system of a speaker is disrupted when the speaker stutters

Individual differences in reading: Separable effects of reading experience and processing skill

A large-scale eye-tracking study examined individual variability in measures of word recognition during reading among 546 college students, focusing on two established individual-differences measures: the Author Recognition Test (ART) and Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN). ART and RAN were only slightly correlated, suggesting that the two tasks reflect independent cognitive abilities in this large sample of participants. Further, individual variability in ART and RAN scores were related to distinct facets of word-recognition processes. Higher ART scores were associated with increased skipping rates, shorter gaze duration, and reduced effects of word frequency on gaze duration, suggesting that this measure reflects efficiency of basic processes of word recognition during reading. In contrast, faster times on RAN were associated with enhanced foveal-on-parafoveal effects, fewer first-pass regressions, and shorter second-pass reading times, suggesting that this measure reflects efficient coordination of perceptual-motor and attentional processing during reading. These results demonstrate that ART and RAN tasks make independent contributions to predicting variability in word-recognition processes during reading

Effects of animacy and noun-phrase relatedness on the processing of complex sentences

Previous work has suggested that syntactically complex object-extracted relative clauses are easier to process when the head noun phrase (NP1) is inanimate and the embedded noun phrase (NP2) is animate compared to the reverse animacy configuration, with differences in processing difficulty beginning as early as NP2 (e.g., The article that the senator… versus The senator that the article…). Two eye-tracking-while-reading experiments were conducted to better understand the source of this effect. Experiment 1 showed that having an inanimate NP1 facilitated processing even when NP2 was held constant. Experiment 2 manipulated both animacy of NP1 and the degree of semantic relatedness between the critical NPs. When NP1 and NP2 were paired arbitrarily, the early animacy effect emerged at NP2. When NP1 and NP2 were semantically related, this effect disappeared, with effects of NP1 animacy emerging in later processing stages for both the Related and Arbitrary conditions. The results indicate that differences in the animacy of NP1 influence early processing of complex sentences only when the critical NPs share no meaningful relationship