Interaction of stimulus and contextual information during reading: Identifying words within sentences

In general, studies on the effects of a sentence context on word identification have focused on how context affects the efficiency of processing a single target word, presented separately from the context. Such studies probably would be incapable of measuring contextual facilitation resulting from cascaded or parallel processing of neighboring words within a sentence. To measure these and other types of facilitation, we presented entire phrases and sentences for subjects to read as fast as possible and to monitor for nonwords. Subjects read at rates representative of natural reading. Experiment 1 demonstrated a large contextual facilitation effect on decision time. Experiment 2 showed that facilitation is caused by specific semantic information and, perhaps to a greater degree, by nonpredictive syntactic information. Experiment 3 showed that the amount of facilitation is greater than could be accounted for by separate contributions from autonomous word level and sentence level processes. These results present difficulties for an autonomous model of reading, but are consistent with interactive models, in which the results of ongoing sentential analyses are combined with stimulus information to identify words.     

语义相关性对副中央凹-中央凹效应的影响

阅读时词汇加工的注意分配是序列的还是平行的,是所有眼动控制模型需解答的关键问题。对此,可通过分析副中央窝-中央窝效应（POF效应）进行解释。以往研究结果的争议在于POF效应是否为误差眼跳。本研究为控制眼跳误差,采用分心阅读范式,考察词n与词n－1的语义相关性对词n－1加工的影响,探讨中文阅读的POF效应。实验以26名大学生为被试,选取高频双字词为词n－1,低频双字词为词n。结果发现当词n－1与词n语义相关性高时,词n－1的凝视时间更短,再注视率更低,出现同向的POF效应。本研究在一定条件下支持SWIFT模型为代表的平行加工假设。     

Word identification: Imageability, semantics, and the content-functor distinction

It has often been suggested that different special-purpose mechanisms underlie the processing of content words and function words. The received view is that processing differences in various tasks arise because of differences between these word classes in terms of their semantic/syntactic function, despite the fact that these tasks often involve word processing in the absence of any sentence context. It is also well known that the ease with which a word arouses a sensory impression is often a good predictor of word-processing performance, yet the literature largely ignores the fact that, typically, imageability and word class are confounded factors. A series of three experiments shows that in the context of a Stroop task, the typical content-function word difference can be obtained, but that this word class difference disappears completely when the items are matched on the dimension of imageability. It is suggested that the processing of decontextualized content and function words does not necessarily engage distinct special purpose processing mechanisms. Implications for understanding previously published work on word class effects in other paradigms are briefly noted.     

Parafoveal preview during reading: effects of sentence position

Two experiments examined parafoveal preview for words located in the middle of sentences and at sentence boundaries. Parafoveal processing was shown to occur for words at sentence-initial, mid-sentence, and sentence-final positions. Both Experiments 1 and 2 showed reduced effects of preview on regressions out for sentence-initial words. In addition, Experiment 2 showed reduced preview effects on first-pass reading times for sentence-initial words. These effects of sentence position on preview could result from either reduced parafoveal processing for sentence-initial words or other processes specific to word reading at sentence boundaries. In addition to the effects of preview, the experiments also demonstrate variability in the effects of sentence wrap-up on different reading measures, indicating that the presence and time course of wrap-up effects may be modulated by text-specific factors. We also report simulations of Experiment 2 using version 10 of E-Z Reader (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009), designed to explore the possible mechanisms underlying parafoveal preview at sentence boundaries.     

Interpretation-based processing: a unified theory of semantic sentence comprehension

We present interpretation-based processing—a theory of sentence processing that builds a syntactic and a semantic representation for a sentence and assigns an interpretation to the sentence as soon as possible. That interpretation can further participate in comprehension and in lexical processing and is vital for relating the sentence to the prior discourse. Our theory offers a unified account of the processing of literal sentences, metaphoric sentences, and sentences containing semantic illusions. It also explains how text can prime lexical access. We show that word literality is a matter of degree and that the speed and quality of comprehension depend both on how similar words are to their antecedents in the preceding text and how salient the sentence is with respect to the preceding text. Interpretation-based processing also reconciles superficially contradictory findings about the difference in processing times for metaphors and literals. The theory has been implemented in ACT-R [Anderson and Lebiere, The Atomic Components of Thought, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, Mahwah, NJ, 1998].     

Measuring lexical access during sentence processing

The results from “on-line” investigations of sentence comprehension are often difficult to interpret since it is not always apparent what component processes are reflected in the response measure. The results of two experiments reported here indicate that response latencies from phoneme-triggered lexical decision (PTLD) reflect the time needed for lexical access during sentence processing. Listeners were presented with sentences and were asked to make a word/nonword judgment for items beginning with a particular word-initial target phoneme. Speed of lexical access was manipulated by varying the semantic predictability of the target-bearing word. WORD judgments were faster for words that were preceded by semantically related verbs than were WORD judgments for words that were preceded by neutral verbs. The present results are consistent with other studies showing semantic facilitation of lexical access during the processing of fluent speech. It is argued that the phoneme-triggered lexical-decision task is a more suitable measure of lexical access during sentence processing than phoneme monitoring (Foss, 1969) or word monitoring (Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 19751. In addition, it is pointed out that the phoneme-triggered lexical-decision task lends itself to modifications which should enable investigators to study various aspects of on-line sentence processing.     

世界知识在句子理解中的整合时程

Hagoort等(2004)应用背离范式发现世界知识和单词意义在句末的整合是同时进行的。本研究将背离信息提前到句首短语中,旨在探讨世界知识在句子阅读过程中被整合的时程特征。实验采用四词句子为材料,其中第二个词（目标词）含有单词意义或世界知识背离信息,记录并比较被试在阅读后三个词时诱发的脑电变化。结果发现：与正确句子比较,无论是单词意义背离还是世界知识背离,背离目标词均引发出经典的N400,二者在峰值时间和始潜时上无显著差异,但世界知识背离信息诱发的N400波幅值相对较小。句中的后继单词不再诱发类似的N400;但到句子结尾,两类含有背离信息句子的句末正常单词又诱发出类似N400的一个负波。结果提示,在句子理解过程中,世界知识的整合与单词意义的整合相似,可能是随着句子理解过程即时进行的,整合的结果不影响后继信息的加工;但到了句末,读者在对整个句子内容作真实性判断时会对先前进行过的整合再进行考察。     

The influence of lexical and conceptual constraints on reading mixed-language sentences: Evidence from eye fixations and naming times

In two experiments, we explored the degree to which sentence context effects operate at a lexical or conceptual level by examining the processing of mixed-language sentences by fluent Spanish-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1, subjects’ eye movements were monitored while they read English sentences in which sentence constraint, word frequency, and language of target word were manipulated. A frequency × constraint interaction was found when target words appeared in Spanish, but not in English. First fixation durations were longer for high-frequency Spanish words when these were embedded in high-constraint sentences than in low-constraint sentences. This result suggests that the conceptual restrictions produced by the sentence context were met, but that the lexical restrictions were not. The same result did not occur for low-frequency Spanish words, presumably because the slower access of low-frequency words provided more processing time for the resolution of this conflict. Similar results were found in Experiment 2 using rapid serial visual presentation when subjects named the target words aloud. It appears that sentence context effects are influenced by both semantic/conceptual and lexical information.     

Is phonological short-term memory related to phonological analysis stages in auditory sentence processing?

Despite extensive research, the role of phonological short-term memory (STM) during oral sentence comprehension remains unclear. We tested the hypothesis that phonological STM is involved in phonological analysis stages of the incoming words, but not in sentence comprehension per se. We compared phonological STM capacity and processing times for natural sentences and sentences containing phonetically ambiguous words. The sentences were presented for an auditory sentence anomaly judgement task and processing times for each word were measured. STM was measured via nonword and word immediate serial recall tasks, indexing phonological and lexicosemantic STM capacity, respectively. Significantly increased processing times were observed for phonetically ambiguous words, relative to natural stimuli in same sentence positions. Phonological STM capacity correlated with the size of this phonetic ambiguity effect. However, phonological STM capacity did not correlate with measures of later semantic integration processes while lexicosemantic STM did. This study suggests that phonological STM is associated with phonological analysis processes during sentence processing.     

语义整合的早期加工:来自ERPs的证据

本研究借助ERPs技术,通过操纵关键词与当前语境的语义合理性关系,考察在严格限定关键词词频变异性的情况下,语义整合过程能否反映在P2效应上。ERPs结果发现关键词呈现后,语义合理相比违背条件在右侧脑区诱发了更大的P2成分。该结果支持如果关键词低水平的变量信息(词频等)得到适当控制,ERPs技术可以检测到发生在250ms以前的语义整合过程。     

Differential cognitive processing of Kanji and Kana words: do orthographic and semantic codes function in parallel in word matching task.

Relative engagements of the orthographic and semantic codes in Kanji and Hiragana word recognition were investigated. In Exp. 1, subjects judged whether the pairs of Kanji words (prime and target) presented sequentially were physically identical to each other in the word condition. In the sentence condition, subjects decided whether the target word was valid for the prime sentence presented in advance. The results showed that the response times to the target swords orthographically similar (to the prime) were significantly slower than to semantically related target words in the word condition and that this was also the case in the sentence condition. In Exp. 2, subjects judged whether the target word written in Hiragana was physically identical to the prime word in the word condition. In the sentence condition, subjects decided if the target word was valid for the previously presented prime sentence. Analysis indicated that response times to orthographically similar words were slower than to semantically related words in the word condition but not in the sentence condition wherein the response times to the semantically and orthographically similar words were largely the same. Based on these results, differential contributions of orthographic and semantic codes in cognitive processing of Japanese Kanji and Hiragana words was discussed.     

Similarity Judgment Within and Across Categories: A Comprehensive Model Comparison

Similarity is one of the most important relations humans perceive, arguably subserving category learning and categorization, generalization and discrimination, judgment and decision making, and other cognitive functions. Researchers have proposed a wide range of representations and metrics that could be at play in similarity judgment, yet have not comprehensively compared the power of these representations and metrics for predicting similarity within and across different semantic categories. We performed such a comparison by pairing nine prominent vector semantic representations with seven established similarity metrics that could operate on these representations, as well as supervised methods for dimensional weighting in the similarity function. This approach yields a factorial model structure with 126 distinct representation-metric pairs, which we tested on a novel dataset of similarity judgments between pairs of cohyponymic words in eight categories. We found that cosine similarity and Pearson correlation were the overall best performing unweighted similarity functions, and that word vectors derived from free association norms often outperformed word vectors derived from text (including those specialized for similarity). Importantly, models that used human similarity judgments to learn category-specific weights on dimensions yielded substantially better predictions than all unweighted approaches across all types of similarity functions and representations, although dimension weights did not generalize well across semantic categories, suggesting strong category context effects in similarity judgment. We discuss implications of these results for cognitive modeling and natural language processing, as well as for theories of the representations and metrics involved in similarity.     

Measuring text similarity based on structure and word embedding

The problem of finding the similarity between natural language sentences is crucial for many applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP). An accurate calculation of similarity between sentences is highly needed. Many approaches depend on word-to-word similarity to measure sentence similarity. This paper proposes a new approach to improve the accuracy of the sentence similarity calculation. The proposed approach combines different similarity measures in the calculation of sentence similarity. In addition to traditional word-to-word similarity measure, the proposed approach exploits sentence semantic structure. Discourse representation structure (DRS) which is a semantic representation for natural sentences is generated and used to calculated structure similarity. Furthermore, word order similarity is measured to consider the order of words in sentences. Experiments show that exploiting structural information achieves good results. Moreover, the proposed method outperforms the current approaches on a standard benchmark dataset achieving 0.8813 Pearson correlation with human similarity.     

Conceptual similarity effects on working memory in sentence contexts: Testing a theory of anaphora

The degree of semantic similarity between an anaphoric noun phrase (e.g., the bird) and its antecedent (e.g., a robin) is known to affect the anaphor resolution process, but the mechanisms that underlie this effect are not known. One proposal (Almor, 1999) is that semantic similarity triggers interference effects in working memory and makes two crucial assumptions: First, semantic similarity impairs working memory just as phonological similarity does (e.g., Baddeley, 1992), and, second, this impairment interferes with processes of sentence comprehension. We tested these assumptions in two experiments that compared recall accuracy between phonologically similar, semantically similar, and control words in sentence contexts. Our results do not provide support for Almor's claims: Phonological overlap decreased recall accuracy in sentence contexts, but semantic similarity did not. These results shed doubt on the idea that semantic interference in working memory is an underlying mechanism in anaphor resolution.     

Grammatical structure and recall: A function of the space in immediate memory or of recall delay?

Savin and Perchonock suggest that when a sentence and additional unrelated words are presented for immediate recall, the number of words recalled in addition to that sentence represents the space left over in a limited memory store after the sentence and its transformational tag have been stored. They report error data and word-recall data in support of a transformational model of sentence processing. In two replications of that study, error data failed to support the transformational model. Furthermore, the word-recall data could be attributed to differential word-recall delays-the more complex the sentence, the longer the delay between word presentation and word recall. These findings, as well as others in the literature. fail to support a transformational interpretation of sentence processing.     

工作记忆、语境限制强度和句子长度对二语词汇学习的影响

本研究选取初二、高二、大三三个年龄段的被试,考察在句子阅读过程中,工作记忆容量、语境限制强度和句子长度对第二语言词汇学习的影响。研究结果发现,在句子阅读条件下,工作记忆容量是影响第二语言词汇学习的重要因素,高工作记忆容量促进了第二语言词汇的学习;在中等和长句子的条件下,语境的限制性越强,词汇学习的成绩越好;相比初二年龄组被试,高二和大三年龄组被试,在低语境限制性的情况下,阅读的句子越长,第二语言词汇学习效果越差。研究结果说明,个体工作记忆的容量,以及阅读材料等变量,都是影响自然阅读条件下二语词汇学习的重要因素。     

中文阅读的副中央凹-中央凹效应：词n的语义透明度对词n-1的影响

研究探讨中文阅读中的副中央凹-中央凹效应。副中央凹-中央凹效应是指副中央凹处词的特性对中央凹处词汇加工的影响。实验以27名大学生为被试,采用句子阅读材料,考察词n的语义透明度特性对词n-1（高频、低频）加工的影响。结果表明,词n的语义透明度的高低对词n-1（高频、低频）的加工没有影响,没有出现副中央凹-中央凹效应。实验结果支持E-Z读者模型的假设。     

A distinction between the effects of sentential speaking rate and semantic congruity on word identification

It is well known that numerous aspects of sentential context can influence the manner in which a word within the sentence is identified. We investigated two such contextual effects, that of the speaking rate of the sentence in which the target word occurs and that of the semantic congruence between the sentence and the target word. We observed that although the two effects are similar on the surface, in that each is realized as a change in the identification of acoustically ambiguous (but not unambiguous) items along a speech series, they are strikingly different in their susceptibility to changes in task demands. Specifically, changes in the task that readily eliminate the semantic congruity effect do not serve to eliminate the rate effect, suggesting that the two effects arise at different stages of analysis. The implications of this finding for models of speech processing are discussed.     

A discourse on semantic priming

The processing of a word is sometimes affected if earlier words are semantically related to it (semantic “priming”). Priming phenomena have generally been interpreted as reflecting the organization of the mental lexicon. Past studies have shown that priming effects have a very fast rise time and a relatively rapid decay time. This paper investigates the rate of decay of semantic facilitation in both sentences and lists. It was hypothesized that sentence processing involves the construction of a discourse model in which the main topics stay active. If true, then words referring to related objects or events will be processed rapidly even if they occur later in the input, i.e., there will be no decay of facilitation. Three experiments with college students examined the relative time to process a critical word when it was preceded by either a pair of semantically related words or more neutral words. The materials occurred in either sentences or lists, the latter being word-level anagrams of the sentences. Subjects carried out the phonememonitoring task, responding to a word-initial target phoneme that occurred immediately after the critical word. In Experiments I (N = 58) and II (N = 40) 12 words separated the related/neutral words and the critical items. Facilitation in processing the critical word was present in sentences but not in lists. Experiment III (N = 128) showed that the amount of facilitation in sentences was the same when 12 words separated the related/neutral and critical words as when 1.5 words separated them. Thus, there was no evidence obtained here for decay of facilitation in sentences. The results are taken to be consistent with a discourse-model interpretation of semantic facilitation in sentences.