A visual world eye-tracking study investigated the activation and persistence of
implicit causality information in spoken language comprehension. We showed that
people infer the implicit causality of ...verbs as soon as they encounter such
verbs in discourse, as is predicted by proponents of the immediate focusing
account (
Greene & McKoon,
1995
;
Koornneef
& Van Berkum, 2006
;
Van Berkum, Koornneef, Otten, & Nieuwland,
2007
). Interestingly, we observed activation of implicit
causality information even before people encountered the causal conjunction.
However, while implicit causality information was persistent as the discourse
unfolded, it did not have a privileged role as a focusing cue immediately at the
ambiguous pronoun when people were resolving its antecedent. Instead, our study
indicated that implicit causality does not affect all referents to the same
extent, rather it interacts with other cues in the discourse, especially when
one of the referents is already prominently in focus.
In this study we explore the concurrent, combined use of three research methods, statistical corpus analysis and two psycholinguistic experiments (a forced-choice and an acceptability rating task), ...using verbal synonymy in Finnish as a case in point. In addition to supporting conclusions from earlier studies concerning the relationships between corpus-based and experimental data (e. g., Featherston 2005), we show that each method adds to our understanding of the studied phenomenon, in a way which could not be achieved through any single method by itself. Most importantly, whereas relative rareness in a corpus is associated with dispreference in selection, such infrequency does not categorically always entail substantially lower acceptability. Furthermore, we show that forced-choice and acceptability rating tasks pertain to distinct linguistic processes, with category-wise incommensurable scales of measurement, and should therefore be merged with caution, if at all.
The effect of word order and prosodic focus on the tonal shape and intensity in the production of prosody was studied. The results show that the production of focus in Finnish follows a global ...pattern with regard to tonal features. The relative pitch height difference between contrasted words is the most important pitch-related factor in signaling narrow prosodic focus. Narrow focus is not localized to prosodically emphasized words only but relates to the utterance as a whole. It was also found that syntactic structure with respect to both intensity and tonal structure modulated relative prosodic prominence of individual words.
Many languages exploit suprasegmental devices in signaling word meaning. Tone languages exploit fundamental frequency whereas quantity languages rely on segmental durations to distinguish otherwise ...similar words. Traditionally, duration and tone have been taken as mutually exclusive. However, some evidence suggests that, in addition to durational cues, phonological quantity is associated with and co-signaled by changes in fundamental frequency in quantity languages such as Finnish, Estonian, and Serbo-Croat. The results from the present experiment show that the structure of disyllabic word stems in Finnish are indeed signaled tonally and that the phonological length of the stressed syllable is further tonally distinguished within the disyllabic sequence. The results further indicate that the observed association of tone and duration in perception is systematically exploited in speech production in Finnish.
The perception of prominence as a function of sentence stress in Finnish was investigated in four experiments. Listeners judged the relative prominence of two consecutive nouns in a three-word ...utterance, where the accentuation of the nouns was systematically varied by tonal means. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated both the tonal features underlying the subjects’ responses as well as the influence of word order on the perceived prominence of the two accented words. The results showed that similar tonal features regardless of other phonetic differences conditioned the subjects’ judgments of prominence. They further showed that changing the word order influenced the distribution of responses in the two experiments. Two further experiments were administered to check the possible influence of slight tonal and intensity differences in the first two experiments. Only intensity was found to affect the distribution of judgments. Furthermore, the influence was local and only affected the last of the two words. Overall the results suggest that the most important tonal features responsible for the perception of prominence form a so-called flat-hat pattern. That also indicates that different kinds of focus structure influence the perception of prominence even when the judgments are based on decisions about the place of sentence stress.
A visual-world eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of order of mention and grammatical role on resolution of ambiguous pronouns in Finnish. According to the first-mention account, ...general cognitive structure-building processes make the first-mentioned noun phrase the preferred antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun. According to the subject-preference account, the preferred antecedent is the grammatical subject of the preceding clause or sentence. Participants listened to sentences in either subject-verb-object or object-verb-subject order; each was followed by a sentence containing an ambiguous pronoun that referred to either the subject or the object. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they looked at pictures representing the two possible antecedents of each pronoun. Analyses of the fixations on the pictures showed that listeners used both order-of-mention and grammatical-role information to resolve ambiguous pronouns.
The present study investigated sub- and supralexical effects in morphological processing for inflected and pseudo complex words and pseudo words in lexical decision with masked and cross-modal ...priming. The results showed that the early stage of morphological processing is not only sensitive to whether the orthographic string can be segmented into an existing stem and affix, but also whether the full form is an existing word the meaning of which differs from the meaning of the segmented stem. It is thus likely that from early on morphological processing is probably not governed by morpho-orthographic processes alone, but is most likely sensitive to top-down information, perhaps originating from supralexical semantic connections between the words morphological family members. In addition, whereas semantic interpretability has a clear advantage later in processing, this stage seems to be sensitive to bottom-up form information as well. In a detailed theoretical discussion we show how these findings, along with earlier findings, are explained by a model that assumes that morphological information is represented at two interactive levels, corresponding to sublexical form (orthographic) and supralexical (semantic) information mediated by a lexical level. This allows supralexical (semantic) effects to feed top-down, predicting differences between regular inflected and pseudo complex words at the lexical level, affecting the early phases of processing for these words.
Exploiting Degrees of Inflectional Ambiguity Järvikivi, Juhani; Pyykkönen, Pirita; Niemi, Jussi
Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition,
01/2009, Letnik:
35, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The authors compared sublexical and supralexical approaches to morphological processing with unambiguous and ambiguous inflected words and words with ambiguous stems in 3 masked and unmasked priming ...experiments in Finnish. Experiment 1 showed equal facilitation for all prime types with a short 60-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) but significant facilitation for unambiguous words only with a long 300-ms SOA. Experiment 2 showed that all potential readings of ambiguous inflections were activated under a short SOA. Whereas the prime-target form overlap did not affect the results under a short SOA, it significantly modulated the results with a long SOA. Experiment 3 confirmed that the results from masked priming were modulated by the morphological structure of the words but not by the prime-target form overlap alone. The results support approaches in which early prelexical morphological processing is driven by morph-based segmentation and form is used to cue selection between 2 candidates only during later processing.
The relationship between the ways in which words are pronounced and spelled has been shown to affect spoken word processing, and a consistent relationship between pronunciation and spelling has been ...reported as a possible cause of unreduced pronunciations being easier to process than reduced counterparts although reduced pronunciations occur more frequently. In the present study, we investigate the effect of pronunciation-to-spelling consistency for reduced and unreduced pronunciations in L1 and L2 listeners of a logographic language. More precisely, we compare L1 and L2 Japanese listeners to probe whether they use orthographic information differently when processing reduced and unreduced speech. Using pupillometry, the current study provides evidence that extends the hypothesis about the role of orthography in the processing of reduced speech. Orthographic realization matters in processing for L1 and L2 advanced listeners. More specifically, how consistent the orthographic realization is with its phonological form (phonology-to-orthography consistency) modulates the extent to which reduced pronunciation induces additional processing costs. The results are further discussed in terms of their implications for how listeners process reduced speech and the role of the orthographic form in speech processing.
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