The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study

Carminati MN, Knoeferle P. The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study. Presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language and Processing (AMLaP), Riva del Garda, Italy

Overspecification and incremental referential processing: An eye-tracking study

Using eye-tracking, we examined if over-specification hinders or facilitates referential processes selection, and the extent to which this depends on the properties of the attribute mentioned in the referring expressions and the underpinning processing mode. Following spoken instructions, participants selected the referent in a visual display while their eye movements were monitored. The referring expressions were presented either simultaneously with the displays, so the attributes could be incrementally processed in sequence, or before the display presentation, so the attributes could be processed in parallel from the outset of search. Experiment 1 showed that when the attributes were processed incrementally, how quickly an earlier-mentioned attribute discriminated determined whether a late-mentioned, over-specified attribute contributed to discrimination: When color was mentioned first and fully discriminating, the referent was selected fast regardless of the second-mentioned pattern, whereas when pattern was mentioned first and fully discriminating, the second-mentioned color facilitated discrimination. Experiment 2 found that under incremental processing, color mention after a fully discriminating pattern increased fixations but delayed referent selection relative to a pattern-only description; under parallel processing, however, color mention immediately eliminated alternatives and sped up referent selection. Experiment 3 showed that pattern mention after a fully discriminating color delayed referent selection and tended to reduce fixations relative to a color-only description in both processing modes. Hence, additional attributes can speed up referent selection but only when they can discriminate much faster than alternative attributes mentioned in a more concise description, and critically, when they can be used early for referent search

Preferential Inspection of Recent Real-World Events Over Future Events: Evidence from Eye Tracking during Spoken Sentence Comprehension

Eye-tracking findings suggest people prefer to ground their spoken language comprehension by focusing on recently seen events more than anticipating future events: When the verb in NP1-VERB-ADV-NP2 sentences was referentially ambiguous between a recently depicted and an equally plausible future clipart action, listeners fixated the target of the recent action more often at the verb than the object that hadn’t yet been acted upon. We examined whether this inspection preference generalizes to real-world events, and whether it is (vs. isn’t) modulated by how often people see recent and future events acted out. In a first eye-tracking study, the experimenter performed an action (e.g., sugaring pancakes), and then a spoken sentence either referred to that action or to an equally plausible future action (e.g., sugaring strawberries). At the verb, people more often inspected the pancakes (the recent target) than the strawberries (the future target), thus replicating the recent-event preference with these real-world actions. Adverb tense, indicating a future versus past event, had no effect on participants’ visual attention. In a second study we increased the frequency of future actions such that participants saw 50/50 future and recent actions. During the verb people mostly inspected the recent action target, but subsequently they began to rely on tense, and anticipated the future target more often for future than past tense adverbs. A corpus study showed that the verbs and adverbs indicating past versus future actions were equally frequent, suggesting long-term frequency biases did not cause the recent-event preference. Thus, (a) recent real-world actions can rapidly influence comprehension (as indexed by eye gaze to objects), and (b) people prefer to first inspect a recent action target (vs. an object that will soon be acted upon), even when past and future actions occur with equal frequency. A simple frequency-of-experience account cannot accommodate these findings

An investigation into the lexical boost with nonhead nouns

In five structural priming experiments, we investigated lexical boost effects in the production of ditransitive sentences. Although the residual activation model of Pickering and Branigan (1998) suggests that a lexical boost should only occur with the repetition of a syntactic licensing head in ditransitive prepositional object (PO)/double object (DO) structures, Scheepers, Raffray, and Myachykov (2017) recently found that it also occurs with the repetition of nouns that are not syntactic heads. We manipulated the repetition of the subject (Experiments 1–3), and the verb phrase (VP) internal arguments (i.e., either theme or recipient, Experiments 4–5) in PO/DO structures. In Experiment 2, the verb was also repeated between prime and target, while in the other experiments it was not. Three different tasks for eliciting the target were employed: picture description via the oral completion of a sentence fragment (Experiments 1–2, and 4), oral completion of a sentence fragment with no visual context (Experiment 3), and oral production of a sentence from a given array of words and no visual context (Experiment 5). Priming occurred in all experiments and was stronger when the verb was repeated (Experiment 2) than when it was not (Experiment 1). However, none of the experiments showed evidence that priming was stronger when either the subject or one of the VP-internal arguments was repeated. These findings support the view that structural information is associated with syntactic heads (i.e., the verb), but not with nonheads such as the subject noun and the VP-internal arguments (Pickering & Branigan, 1998)

HOW STRONG IS GAZE AGAINST THE RECENT EVENT PREFERENCE?

Abashidze D, Knoeferle P, Carminati MN. HOW STRONG IS GAZE AGAINST THE RECENT EVENT PREFERENCE? In: Presented at the AMLaP 2014. Edinburgh, Scotland: http://www.ppls.ed.ac.uk/AMLaP/documents/programme.pdf; 2014

Eye-tracking situated language comprehension: Immediate actor gaze versus recent action events

Abashidze D, Knoeferle P, Carminati MN. Eye-tracking situated language comprehension: Immediate actor gaze versus recent action events. In: Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Pasadena, California, USA; 2015

Processing Reflexes of the Feature Hierarchy (Person>Number>Gender) and implications for linguistic theory

Carminati MN. Processing Reflexes of the Feature Hierarchy (Person>Number>Gender) and implications for linguistic theory. Lingua. 2005;115(3):259-285

The processing of Italian subject pronouns

This work investigates the processing of Italian subject pronouns, both the null and the overt pronoun, in intra-sentential anaphora. A processing hypothesis is proposed, the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis, based on the assumption that there is a division of labor, with the null pronoun preferring a more prominent antecedent than the overt one. Furthermore, it is argued that in intra-sentential anaphora antecedent prominence is determined by syntactic position, with the Spec IP position, the pre-verbal position of the subject, being more prominent than other positions lower in the syntactic tree. The predictions of the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis are tested in a series of off-line and on-line experiments investigating a variety of antecedents standardly assumed to occupy Spec IP at s-structure: referential nominative and dative subjects, expletive subjects (tested in impersonal sentences, seem-sentences, existential-there and post-verbal subject sentences), and quantified subjects. One-referent and two-referent ambiguous and unambiguous contexts are investigated. Overall, the findings support the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis, as opposed to a hypothesis based on an economy principle (favoring the null pronoun generally), or one based on avoidance of ambiguity (favoring the overt pronoun). The findings show, however, that the antecedent bias of the overt pronoun is less stable and more context-dependent than that of the null pronoun. The processing of bound variable pronouns is also investigated. The results refute Montalbetti (1984). Differences between intra- and extra-sentential anaphora are explored. It is shown that pronoun resolution in extra-sentential anaphora is less sensitive to surface syntactic position than in intra-sentential anaphora, suggesting that the representations involved in the two types of anaphora are not isomorphic. It is also argued that the Feature Hierarchy (person \u3e number \u3e gender) has processing reflexes in pronoun resolution: features high on the Feature Hierarchy are better pronoun disambiguators than features low on the hierarchy. Overall this research supports the view that intra-sentential anaphora resolution in Italian is primarily sensitive to structural factors and that being in a Spec IP position confers special prominence on an antecedent. The cross-linguistic implications for the processing of pronouns in pro-drop and non-pro languages are discussed