A paradox of syntactic priming: why response tendencies show priming for passives, and response latencies show priming for actives

Speakers tend to repeat syntactic structures across sentences, a phenomenon called syntactic priming. Although it has been suggested that repeating syntactic structures should result in speeded responses, previous research has focused on effects in response tendencies. We investigated syntactic priming effects simultaneously in response tendencies and response latencies for active and passive transitive sentences in a picture description task. In Experiment 1, there were priming effects in response tendencies for passives and in response latencies for actives. However, when participants' pre-existing preference for actives was altered in Experiment 2, syntactic priming occurred for both actives and passives in response tendencies as well as in response latencies. This is the first investigation of the effects of structure frequency on both response tendencies and latencies in syntactic priming. We discuss the implications of these data for current theories of syntactic processing

Disfluency in dialogue:an intentional signal from the speaker?

Disfluency is a characteristic feature of spontaneous human speech, commonly seen as a consequence of problems with production. However, the question remains open as to why speakers are disfluent: Is it a mechanical by-product of planning difficulty, or do speakers use disfluency in dialogue to manage listeners' expectations? To address this question, we present two experiments investigating the production of disfluency in monologue and dialogue situations. Dialogue affected the linguistic choices made by participants, who aligned on referring expressions by choosing less frequent names for ambiguous images where those names had previously been mentioned. However, participants were no more disfluent in dialogue than in monologue situations, and the distribution of types of disfluency used remained constant. Our evidence rules out at least a straightforward interpretation of the view that disfluencies are an intentional signal in dialogue. © 2012 Psychonomic Society, Inc

Alignment to the Actions of a Robot

Alignment is a phenomenon observed in human conversation: Dialog partners’ behavior converges in many respects. Such alignment has been proposed to be automatic and the basis for communicating successfully. Recent research on human–computer dialog promotes a mediated communicative design account of alignment according to which the extent of alignment is influenced by interlocutors’ beliefs about each other. Our work aims at adding to these findings in two ways. (a) Our work investigates alignment of manual actions, instead of lexical choice. (b) Participants interact with the iCub humanoid robot, instead of an artificial computer dialog system. Our results confirm that alignment also takes place in the domain of actions. We were not able to replicate the results of the original study in general in this setting, but in accordance with its findings, participants with a high questionnaire score for emotional stability and participants who are familiar with robots align their actions more to a robot they believe to be basic than to one they believe to be advanced. Regarding alignment over the course of an interaction, the extent of alignment seems to remain constant, when participants believe the robot to be advanced, but it increases over time, when participants believe the robot to be a basic version

Bilinguals Share Syntax Unsparingly

Poster session 3Previous research suggests that bilinguals share syntactic processes and representations for constructions similar in two languages (actives/passives). However, languages often use different constructions to convey the same meaning. For example, the meaning of a causative construction in English (Jen had her computer fixed) is conveyed using an active transitive construction in Korean (Jen-NOM her computer-ACC fixed). Yet, little is known about how bilinguals represent and process such constructions. The present study aims to address the issue by investigating how Korean-English bilinguals represent cross-linguistically different constructions (causatives) in comparison to cross-linguistically similar constructions (transitives). There are, broadly speaking, two accounts of bilingual syntactic processing: the shared-syntax account and the separate-syntax account. The shared-syntax account suggests that (1) bilinguals share syntactic representations between languages and (2) the grammatical rules of one language influence syntactic processing in the other (e.g. Hartsuiker et al., 2004). In contrast, the separate-syntax account (e.g. De Bot, 1992) suggests that bilinguals store and access syntactic information separately for two languages. We evaluate these two accounts. Experiment 1 investigates how Korean-English bilinguals represent transitive structures using between-language structural priming. If syntactic processes and representations become shared for transitives in L1 and L2 as a function of proficiency (shared-syntax account), proficient Korean-English bilinguals should show a stronger between-language priming effect than less proficient bilinguals. By contrast, if syntactic representations are separate in L1 and L2 (separate-syntax account), we do not expect any priming between Korean and English. Consistent with previous research, our results showed that proficient Korean-English bilinguals exhibited a stronger priming effect than less proficient bilinguals, providing support for the shared-syntax account. Experiment 2 investigates how Korean-English bilinguals represent causative constructions that are different in the two languages. We paired a causative event (Jen having her computer fixed) either with an active transitive (Jen fixed her computer) or a causative sentence in English (Jen had her computer fixed), and asked participants to decide whether the given sentence matches the depicted event (picture-sentence verification task). If syntax is shared between L1 and L2 (shared-syntax account), a causative event should activate both causative (via its link in English) and active structures (via its link in Korean). Crucially, as transitive structures become shared between Korean and English (Exp1), the shared-syntax account predicts that a strong link between a causative event and an active structure in Korean should increasingly cause Korean-English bilinguals to mistake an active construction for an appropriate description of a causative event in English. However, if bilinguals develop distinct syntactic representations for causatives (separate-syntax account), Korean-English bilinguals should be more likely to reject than accept an active structure as a correct English description of a causative event. Our results showed that proficient bilinguals were indeed more likely to accept an active structure (as well as a causative) as an appropriate description of a causative event than less proficient bilinguals, providing support for the shared-syntax account. Taken together, our results suggest that bilinguals share syntactic processes and representations for both similar and different constructions, indicating that the bilingual system is highly integrated

Judgment of disfluency in people who stutter and people who do not stutter: Results from magnitude estimation

Two experiments used a magnitude estimation paradigm to test whether perception of disfluency is a function of whether the speaker and the listener stutter or do not stutter. Utterances produced by people who stutter werejudged as less fluent, and, critically, this held for apparently fluent utterances as well as for utterances identified as containing disfluency. Additionally, people who stutter tended to perceive utterances as less fluent, independent of who produced these utterances. We argue that these findings are consistent with a view that articulatory differences between the speech of people who stutter and people who do not stutter lead to perceptually relevant vocal differences. We suggest that these differences are detected by the speech self-monitoring system (which uses speech perception) resulting in covert repairs. Our account therefore shares characteristics with the Covert Repair (Postma & Kolk, 1993) and Vicious Circle (Vasic & Wijnen, 2005) hypotheses. 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