In thi s pap e r, w e report th e results of a preliminary study in which we explo r e th e limin... more In thi s pap e r, w e report th e results of a preliminary study in which we explo r e th e limin g of produ c tions of short noun phrases vs . word lists by native G e rman speakers and adv anced learner s of G e rman . Th e phra ses/ word lists consisted of a noun preceded by two adje c tives that app e ar e d in ei th e r a mor e usual sequence or unusual (but grammatical ) sequence . Participants we r e ask ed to ei th er produce the words as a list or as a phrase (which required the adjectives to agree with the noun in number and gender. Although both g roup produ ce d e rror-fr ee utt e ranc es and showed similar response tim es to utter the lists , th e native German speakers , but not the second language speakers, were significantly slowed by the unusual adjective order, but only when they were producing phrases.
The goal of this study is to examine whether bilingual speakers can inhibit one language while na... more The goal of this study is to examine whether bilingual speakers can inhibit one language while naming pictures in the other. In two picture-word interference task experiments, Spanish-English and English-Spanish bilinguals named pictures in Spanish. We used language-neutral (nonword) interfering stimuli to probe the phonological activation of the nontarget language (English). Three different interfering stimulus conditions were presented: nonwords phonologically related to the Spanish picture name (Phono-Spanish), nonwords phonologically related to the English picture name (Phono-English) and phonologically unrelated nonwords (Unrelated). When participants named pictures in Spanish (Experiment 1), facilitation was found for both groups in the Phono-Spanish condition. No interference was found in the Phono-English condition for either group. From this result and the results of a control experiment in which participants named pictures in English (Experiment 2), we argue that under som...
In this paper we examine the effects of prior language learning experience and working memory cap... more In this paper we examine the effects of prior language learning experience and working memory capacity on learning a novel language. Participants with a range of proficiency in a second language were trained on a third language. They were presented with 20 Turkish words (to test word-learning) and their plural counterparts (to test rule-learning). After training, participants were asked to judge whether a given label correctly matched the pictured object (comprehension) and to verbally produce the correct label for a given object (production). The comprehension test took place immediately after training and again a week later. The production test was administered after the second comprehension test. We found that performance on the initial comprehension test was predicted by working memory span but not L2 proficiency; L2 proficiency predicted learning performance only for the delayed tests. This suggests that the two variables – L2 Proficiency and Working Memory – play different rol...
Instructions: Complete the following sentences by circling the correct word in the parentheses 1.... more Instructions: Complete the following sentences by circling the correct word in the parentheses 1. The lonely grandfather made_____(himself/herself) a cup of coffee. 2. The overweight cowboy denied____(himself/herself) a hamburger. 3. The successful man congratulated_____(herself/himself) on the promotion. 4. The gracious wife introduced_____(himself/herself) to the guests. 5. The infamous princess looked at _______(himself/herself) in the mirror. 6. The landlady worked_____(himself/herself) into a frenzy. 7. The careless pedestrians found _____(themselves/himself) covered with mud. 8. The famous actresses prepared____ (themselves/herself) to face the crowd. 9. The dirty soldiers cleaned_____(themselves/himself) before going to bed. 10. The mother amused the father because____(he/she) told funny jokes. 11. The congressman disappointed the chairwoman because _____(he/she) lost the election. 12. The brother annoyed the sister because ______ (he/she) kept lying to people. 13. The widow envied the bachelor because _____ (he/she) won the national lottery. 14. The actress praised the actor because ______ (he/she) had given a good presentation. 15. The grandfather congratulated the granddaughter because_____ (he/she) won the reading competition.
Publisher Summary This chapter explains that overarching agrammatism during comprehension involve... more Publisher Summary This chapter explains that overarching agrammatism during comprehension involves production. Sentences contain primarily content words (such as nouns and verbs); frequently omitted are function words such as “the, of, is, that, who, and by” and other closed class elements such as inflectional endings like past tense. Apparently, comprehension of sentences by non-fluent aphasics is quite good. Sentence representations are impaired. According to one variant, the representations contain no functional elements possibly because such elements are unstressed. Sentence processing is impaired. There are many models which implicate sentence processing routines rather than sentence representations per se as the locus of the deficit. Both result in sentence interpretation failure. This research suggests that Broca's area is necessary for the rehearsal of verbal material. If so, then impairment to Broca's area may disrupt rehearsal. If rehearsal is disrupted, then the tasks which implicitly require it will induce poor performance. It is not a giant leap to speculate that rehearsal of verbal material requires the same mechanisms as those which generate language. It makes sense that an impairment of language production coincides with an impairment of language rehearsal.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - J PSYCHOLINGUIST RES, 2002
Languages differ with respect to how aspects of motion events tend to be lexicalized. English typ... more Languages differ with respect to how aspects of motion events tend to be lexicalized. English typically conflates MOTION with MANNER, but Japanese and Spanish typically do not. We report a set of experiments that assessed the effect of this cross-linguistic difference on participants' decisions in a similarity-judgment task about scenes containing novel animations as stimuli. In Experiment 1, which required participants to encode the stimuli briefly into memory, we observed a language effect; in Experiment 2, which required participants to analyze the same stimuli, but not remember them, the language effect disappeared. Hence, these experiments reveal a task-dependent effect, which, we argue, points to working memory as the source of the language effect observed in Experiment 1 and, potentially, other experiments that have shown a linguistic relativity effect.
This paper presents three studies which examine the susceptibility of sentence comprehension to i... more This paper presents three studies which examine the susceptibility of sentence comprehension to intrusion by extra-sentential probe words in two on-line dual-task techniques commonly used to study sentence processing: the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm and the unimodal all-visual lexical priming paradigm. It provides both a general review and a direct empirical examination of the effects of task-demand in the on-line study of sentence comprehension. In all three studies, sentential materials were presented to participants together with a target probe word which constituted either a better or a worse continuation of the sentence at a point at which it was presented. Materials were identical for all three studies. The manner of presentation of the sentence materials was, however, manipulated; presentation was either visual, auditory (normal rate) or auditory (slow rate). The results demonstrate that a technique in which a visual target probe interrupts ongoing sentence processin...
Suppression Task. We used a task modeled on Gernsbacher et. al. (1991) Lewis and colleagues 3,4 m... more Suppression Task. We used a task modeled on Gernsbacher et. al. (1991) Lewis and colleagues 3,4 measured the monocular visual field extent of 3-, 4-, and 6-month-old infants using 6-Hz flickering or non-flickering lights. The results showed larger measured visual field extent for flickering stimuli than for non-flickering stimuli in 3-and 6-month-old infants in the temporal visual field, but not in the nasal visual field. No effect of flicker was reported for 4-month-old infants in either the temporal or nasal visual field.
The Reading Matrix : an International Online Journal, 2017
In the present study, we examine sentence reading in low-proficiency Spanish learners using an ey... more In the present study, we examine sentence reading in low-proficiency Spanish learners using an eye-tracking methodology. This method reveals the real-time, uninterrupted process of reading comprehension, and can therefore shed light on L2 learners’ functional proficiency. We created sentence pairs that were identical except for one word. The contrasting words in the sentence pairs differed in processing difficulty; in this case, the more difficult word had a lower frequency of occurrence. The effect of frequency on reading typically manifests as longer reading times, particularly when readers first encounter the critical word. The relative difficulty created by a low-frequency word is usually localized to the word itself. Results show a significant difficulty effect for both the learner group and control group. However, they also show that although the effect was localized in the control group, it was not localized in the learners: difficulty “spilled over” into the subsequent regio...
Attraction interference in language comprehension and production may be as a result of common or ... more Attraction interference in language comprehension and production may be as a result of common or different processes. In the present paper, we investigate attraction interference during language comprehension, focusing on the contexts in which interference arises and the time-course of these effects. Using evidence from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and sentence judgment times, we show that agreement attraction in comprehension is best explained as morphosyntactic interference during memory retrieval. This stands in contrast to attraction as a message-level process involving the representation of the subject NP's number features, which is a strong contributor to attraction in production. We thus argue that the cognitive antecedents of agreement attraction in comprehension are non-identical with those of attraction in production, and moreover, that attraction in comprehension is primarily a consequence of similarity-based interference in cue-based memory retrieval process...
This study reports the results of a study in which participants were asked to repeat a sentence a... more This study reports the results of a study in which participants were asked to repeat a sentence and produce a tag question (eg The girl behind the headmaster got punished, didn't she?). Holding the head noun phrase con-stant, three properties of the noun phrase within the modifier ...
In thi s pap e r, w e report th e results of a preliminary study in which we explo r e th e limin... more In thi s pap e r, w e report th e results of a preliminary study in which we explo r e th e limin g of produ c tions of short noun phrases vs . word lists by native G e rman speakers and adv anced learner s of G e rman . Th e phra ses/ word lists consisted of a noun preceded by two adje c tives that app e ar e d in ei th e r a mor e usual sequence or unusual (but grammatical ) sequence . Participants we r e ask ed to ei th er produce the words as a list or as a phrase (which required the adjectives to agree with the noun in number and gender. Although both g roup produ ce d e rror-fr ee utt e ranc es and showed similar response tim es to utter the lists , th e native German speakers , but not the second language speakers, were significantly slowed by the unusual adjective order, but only when they were producing phrases.
The goal of this study is to examine whether bilingual speakers can inhibit one language while na... more The goal of this study is to examine whether bilingual speakers can inhibit one language while naming pictures in the other. In two picture-word interference task experiments, Spanish-English and English-Spanish bilinguals named pictures in Spanish. We used language-neutral (nonword) interfering stimuli to probe the phonological activation of the nontarget language (English). Three different interfering stimulus conditions were presented: nonwords phonologically related to the Spanish picture name (Phono-Spanish), nonwords phonologically related to the English picture name (Phono-English) and phonologically unrelated nonwords (Unrelated). When participants named pictures in Spanish (Experiment 1), facilitation was found for both groups in the Phono-Spanish condition. No interference was found in the Phono-English condition for either group. From this result and the results of a control experiment in which participants named pictures in English (Experiment 2), we argue that under som...
In this paper we examine the effects of prior language learning experience and working memory cap... more In this paper we examine the effects of prior language learning experience and working memory capacity on learning a novel language. Participants with a range of proficiency in a second language were trained on a third language. They were presented with 20 Turkish words (to test word-learning) and their plural counterparts (to test rule-learning). After training, participants were asked to judge whether a given label correctly matched the pictured object (comprehension) and to verbally produce the correct label for a given object (production). The comprehension test took place immediately after training and again a week later. The production test was administered after the second comprehension test. We found that performance on the initial comprehension test was predicted by working memory span but not L2 proficiency; L2 proficiency predicted learning performance only for the delayed tests. This suggests that the two variables – L2 Proficiency and Working Memory – play different rol...
Instructions: Complete the following sentences by circling the correct word in the parentheses 1.... more Instructions: Complete the following sentences by circling the correct word in the parentheses 1. The lonely grandfather made_____(himself/herself) a cup of coffee. 2. The overweight cowboy denied____(himself/herself) a hamburger. 3. The successful man congratulated_____(herself/himself) on the promotion. 4. The gracious wife introduced_____(himself/herself) to the guests. 5. The infamous princess looked at _______(himself/herself) in the mirror. 6. The landlady worked_____(himself/herself) into a frenzy. 7. The careless pedestrians found _____(themselves/himself) covered with mud. 8. The famous actresses prepared____ (themselves/herself) to face the crowd. 9. The dirty soldiers cleaned_____(themselves/himself) before going to bed. 10. The mother amused the father because____(he/she) told funny jokes. 11. The congressman disappointed the chairwoman because _____(he/she) lost the election. 12. The brother annoyed the sister because ______ (he/she) kept lying to people. 13. The widow envied the bachelor because _____ (he/she) won the national lottery. 14. The actress praised the actor because ______ (he/she) had given a good presentation. 15. The grandfather congratulated the granddaughter because_____ (he/she) won the reading competition.
Publisher Summary This chapter explains that overarching agrammatism during comprehension involve... more Publisher Summary This chapter explains that overarching agrammatism during comprehension involves production. Sentences contain primarily content words (such as nouns and verbs); frequently omitted are function words such as “the, of, is, that, who, and by” and other closed class elements such as inflectional endings like past tense. Apparently, comprehension of sentences by non-fluent aphasics is quite good. Sentence representations are impaired. According to one variant, the representations contain no functional elements possibly because such elements are unstressed. Sentence processing is impaired. There are many models which implicate sentence processing routines rather than sentence representations per se as the locus of the deficit. Both result in sentence interpretation failure. This research suggests that Broca's area is necessary for the rehearsal of verbal material. If so, then impairment to Broca's area may disrupt rehearsal. If rehearsal is disrupted, then the tasks which implicitly require it will induce poor performance. It is not a giant leap to speculate that rehearsal of verbal material requires the same mechanisms as those which generate language. It makes sense that an impairment of language production coincides with an impairment of language rehearsal.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - J PSYCHOLINGUIST RES, 2002
Languages differ with respect to how aspects of motion events tend to be lexicalized. English typ... more Languages differ with respect to how aspects of motion events tend to be lexicalized. English typically conflates MOTION with MANNER, but Japanese and Spanish typically do not. We report a set of experiments that assessed the effect of this cross-linguistic difference on participants' decisions in a similarity-judgment task about scenes containing novel animations as stimuli. In Experiment 1, which required participants to encode the stimuli briefly into memory, we observed a language effect; in Experiment 2, which required participants to analyze the same stimuli, but not remember them, the language effect disappeared. Hence, these experiments reveal a task-dependent effect, which, we argue, points to working memory as the source of the language effect observed in Experiment 1 and, potentially, other experiments that have shown a linguistic relativity effect.
This paper presents three studies which examine the susceptibility of sentence comprehension to i... more This paper presents three studies which examine the susceptibility of sentence comprehension to intrusion by extra-sentential probe words in two on-line dual-task techniques commonly used to study sentence processing: the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm and the unimodal all-visual lexical priming paradigm. It provides both a general review and a direct empirical examination of the effects of task-demand in the on-line study of sentence comprehension. In all three studies, sentential materials were presented to participants together with a target probe word which constituted either a better or a worse continuation of the sentence at a point at which it was presented. Materials were identical for all three studies. The manner of presentation of the sentence materials was, however, manipulated; presentation was either visual, auditory (normal rate) or auditory (slow rate). The results demonstrate that a technique in which a visual target probe interrupts ongoing sentence processin...
Suppression Task. We used a task modeled on Gernsbacher et. al. (1991) Lewis and colleagues 3,4 m... more Suppression Task. We used a task modeled on Gernsbacher et. al. (1991) Lewis and colleagues 3,4 measured the monocular visual field extent of 3-, 4-, and 6-month-old infants using 6-Hz flickering or non-flickering lights. The results showed larger measured visual field extent for flickering stimuli than for non-flickering stimuli in 3-and 6-month-old infants in the temporal visual field, but not in the nasal visual field. No effect of flicker was reported for 4-month-old infants in either the temporal or nasal visual field.
The Reading Matrix : an International Online Journal, 2017
In the present study, we examine sentence reading in low-proficiency Spanish learners using an ey... more In the present study, we examine sentence reading in low-proficiency Spanish learners using an eye-tracking methodology. This method reveals the real-time, uninterrupted process of reading comprehension, and can therefore shed light on L2 learners’ functional proficiency. We created sentence pairs that were identical except for one word. The contrasting words in the sentence pairs differed in processing difficulty; in this case, the more difficult word had a lower frequency of occurrence. The effect of frequency on reading typically manifests as longer reading times, particularly when readers first encounter the critical word. The relative difficulty created by a low-frequency word is usually localized to the word itself. Results show a significant difficulty effect for both the learner group and control group. However, they also show that although the effect was localized in the control group, it was not localized in the learners: difficulty “spilled over” into the subsequent regio...
Attraction interference in language comprehension and production may be as a result of common or ... more Attraction interference in language comprehension and production may be as a result of common or different processes. In the present paper, we investigate attraction interference during language comprehension, focusing on the contexts in which interference arises and the time-course of these effects. Using evidence from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and sentence judgment times, we show that agreement attraction in comprehension is best explained as morphosyntactic interference during memory retrieval. This stands in contrast to attraction as a message-level process involving the representation of the subject NP's number features, which is a strong contributor to attraction in production. We thus argue that the cognitive antecedents of agreement attraction in comprehension are non-identical with those of attraction in production, and moreover, that attraction in comprehension is primarily a consequence of similarity-based interference in cue-based memory retrieval process...
This study reports the results of a study in which participants were asked to repeat a sentence a... more This study reports the results of a study in which participants were asked to repeat a sentence and produce a tag question (eg The girl behind the headmaster got punished, didn't she?). Holding the head noun phrase con-stant, three properties of the noun phrase within the modifier ...
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