A developmental study of the role of word order in comprehending Hebrew

Monolingual Hebrew-speaking subjects, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 11 years old, as well as adults, were asked to interpret utterances consisting of two nouns and a verb. Some utterances included only word order cues while others included direct object marker and subject-verb gender agreement cues. Even though Hebrew word order is relatively free, when subjects used word order as an interpretive cue they generally assigned sentence relations according to the dominant SVO order of modern Hebrew. This trend was less strong for the interpretations of NNV utterances than of NVN and VNN utterances. There was no evidence of a developmental sequence for word order strategies. In addition, there was no evidence that word order, for any age group, was necessarily a dominant cue for assigning sentence relations when other linguistic information was available.     

Limits on the Agent-First Strategy: Evidence from Children's Comprehension of a Transitive Construction in Korean

It has long been believed across languages that the Agent-First strategy, a comprehension heuristic that maps the first noun onto the agent role, is a general cognitive bias which applies automatically and faithfully to children's comprehension. The present study asks how this strategy interplays with such grammatical cues as the number of overt arguments and the presence of case-marking in Korean, an SOV language with case-marking by dedicated markers. To investigate whether and how these cues affect the operation of this strategy, we measure children's comprehension of a transitive construction (with scrambling and omission of sentential components) in a novel experimental setting where arguments and case markers were obscured to varying degrees through acoustic masking. We find that children do not demonstrate the agent-first interpretation strongly in the noun–verb pattern without case-marking, showing their uncertainty about the thematic role of the nominal when it is both the only argument in the sentence and lacks case-marking. They perform significantly better in the patterns with additional cues, the impact of which is asymmetric by age and by the nature of alignment between cues from word order and case-marking. These findings suggest that, for Korean-speaking children's comprehension of a transitive construction, the Agent-First strategy is activated properly only in conjunction with other types of interpretive cues.     

Untrained speakers' use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation and listeners' interpretations

We investigated how naively produced prosody affects listeners' end interpretations of ambiguous utterances. Non-professional speakers who were unaware of any ambiguity produced ambiguous sentences couched in short, unambiguous passages. In a forced-choice task, listeners could not tell which context the isolated ambiguous sentences came from (Exp. 1). However, listeners were able to correctly paraphrase the least ambiguous subset of these utterances, showing that prosody can be used to resolve ambiguity (Exp. 2). Nonetheless, in everyday language use, both prosody and context are available to interpret speech. When the least ambiguous sentences were cross-spliced into contexts biasing towards their original interpretations or into contexts biasing towards their alternative interpretations, answers to content questions about the ambiguous sentence, confidence ratings, and ratings of naturalness all indicated that prosody is ignored when context is available (Exp. 3). Although listeners can use prosody to interpret ambiguous sentences, they generally do not, and this makes sense in light of the frequent lack of reliable prosodic cues in everyday speech. Received: 3 April 1998 / Accepted: 21 October 1998     

Interpretation of bodily symptoms in hypochondriasis.

Although it has been suggested that hypochondriasis is caused by the misinterpretation of innocuous bodily sensations, support for this hypothesis rests largely upon uncontrolled self-report. We investigated the interpretation of ambiguous bodily sensations in three experiments using separate samples of non-clinical subjects differing in level of hypochondriacal concern. Results confirmed that subjects with high hypochondriacal concern endorse more thoughts about illness interpretations of bodily sensations, but reported thought content resembled 'catastrophic' rather than the 'non-emergency' thoughts suggested by Warwick and Salkovskis (Hypochondriasis. Behavior Research and Therapy, 28, 105-117, 1990). Presence of an interpretive bias was further supported in a study of recognition bias for disambiguated versions of ambiguously threatening sentences, although this applied as much to social as to illness threats. A final experiment failed to support the hypothesis of an automatic inference bias, but did show that subjects with high hypochondriacal concern were quicker to correctly identify previously exposed illness words. Thus, reported thoughts are consistent with catastrophic interpretations of common bodily sensations, but interpretive bias may not be limited to illness threat. However, high hypochondriacal subjects do show a more specific enhanced perceptual sensitivity to illness cues, which may play a role in maintaining their concern with bodily symptoms.     

Making faces: testing the relation between child behavior problems and mothers' interpretations of child emotion expressions

We examined the relations between preschool boys' behavior problems and mothers' interpretations of children's emotion expressions. A sample of 31 mothers of oppositional boys and 28 control mothers responded to standard stimuli depicting child emotional reactions to maternal control attempts; mothers were instructed to think of the stimuli as either (a) their own child or (b) an unfamiliar child. Mothers of oppositional boys were more likely to generate negative interpretations than were control mothers when thinking of their own children; however, this difference did not generalize to the explicitly unfamiliar child condition. Mothers of oppositional boys demonstrated negative and comparison mothers demonstrated positive interpretive tendencies toward their own children. Findings suggest that child emotion cues may trigger biased maternal cognitions even in the absence of child misbehavior.     

THE CONTRIBUTION OF KINESIC ILLUSTRATORS TOWARD THE COMPREHENSION OF VERBAL BEHAVIOR WITHIN UTTERANCES

The study assessed the extent to which a speaker's visible body movements can improve verbal comprehension for listeners. Subjects responded to multiple-choice items designed to test their comprehension of 12 videotaped spoken utterances which had been obtained by asking speakers to describe either objects in motion (e.g., a tennis ball, a car, spraying water) or abstract concepts. The 60 subjects each responded to stimuli in one of three presentation conditions (audiovisual, audiovisual without lip and facial cues, and audio-alone) over four signal-to-noise ratios. The results indicated that: (1) visual cues can at times significantly improve comprehension scores, even with lip and facial cues not present; (2) visual cues are increasingly useful as noise is introduced; (3) visual cues assist the comprehension of certain grammatical types of verbal segments regardless of semantic content expressed in those type segments.     

Prosodic disambiguation of syntactic structure: for the speaker or for the addressee?

Evidence has been mixed on whether speakers spontaneously and reliably produce prosodic cues that resolve syntactic ambiguities. And when speakers do produce such cues, it is unclear whether they do so "for" their addressees (the audience design hypothesis) or "for" themselves, as a by-product of planning and articulating utterances. Three experiments addressed these issues. In Experiments 1 and 3, speakers followed pictorial guides to spontaneously instruct addressees to move objects. Critical instructions (e.g., "Put the dog in the basket on the star") were syntactically ambiguous, and the referential situation supported either one or both interpretations. Speakers reliably produced disambiguating cues to syntactic ambiguity whether the situation was ambiguous or not. However, Experiment 2 suggested that most speakers were not yet aware of whether the situation was ambiguous by the time they began to speak, and so adapting to addressees' particular needs may not have been feasible in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 examined individual speakers' awareness of situational ambiguity and the extent to which they signaled structure, with or without addressees present. Speakers tended to produce prosodic cues to syntactic boundaries regardless of their addressees' needs in particular situations. Such cues did prove helpful to addressees, who correctly interpreted speakers' instructions virtually all the time. In fact, even when speakers produced syntactically ambiguous utterances in situations that supported both interpretations, eye-tracking data showed that 40% of the time addressees did not even consider the non-intended objects. We discuss the standards needed for a convincing test of the audience design hypothesis.     

Disambiguation by community membership

To interpret utterances in conversations, listeners must often make reference to the common ground they share with speakers. For example, when faced with an utterance such as "That game was a disaster," listeners must decide whether they share common assumptions about what outcome would be disastrous. In our experiments, we examine how common ground, as encoded in community membership, is used to constrain judgments about the interpretations of ambiguous utterances. In Experiment 1, subjects were sensitive to community membership when they were asked to evaluate the interpretations at a leisurely pace. Experiment 2 replicated this result with greater time pressure. Experiment 3 demonstrated that judgments based on assessments of community membership were equivalent to those based on certain knowledge, except when the judgements were challenged. The results suggest that models of memory retrieval during language comprehension should make mention of access to common ground.     

句法和语义在汉语简单句理解中的作用

两个实验探讨句法和语义在汉语简单句加工中的作用及其相互关系。实验一采用施事判断任务,发现句法作用与语义可逆性的作用都很显著;实验二采用快速句子判断任务,发现句法作用是主要的,语义可逆性无显著作用;两个实验都发现句法与语义可逆性之间的交互作用不显著。这些结果表明：（１）在汉语简单句理解的过程中句法因素的作用是主要的,语义因素的作用是次要的,只要当实验任务更多地强调语义分析时,语义因素才有显著的作用。     

Developmental changes in assigning agent relations in Hebrew: The interaction between word order and structural cues

Developmental changes in the interaction between word order and structural cues was investigated by having Hebrew-speaking children between 4 and 10 years of age interpret NVN utterances that balanced the complementary and contradictory effects of work order and two types of morphological cues, inflections that mark subject-verb gender agreement and an object particle. In Hebrew, gender inflections are highly complex and irregular while the object particle is highly regular and distinctive. Both word order and structural cues affected interpretations by subjects of all age groups, though the role of structural cues increased with age. For all groups, the objec particle was a dominant cue. The likelihood of assigning the agent relation to the first or second noun systematically varied with the relative weights of cues that supported and opposed each assignment. Comparisons were made between processing of Hebrew and processing of Serbo-Croatian and Turkish.     

Armstrong on Probabilistic Laws of Nature

D. M. Armstrong famously claims that deterministic laws of nature are contingent relations between universals and that his account can also be straightforwardly extended to irreducibly probabilistic laws of nature. For the most part, philosophers have neglected to scrutinize Armstrong’s account of probabilistic laws. This is surprising precisely because his own claims about probabilistic laws make it unclear just what he takes them to be. We offer three interpretations of what Armstrong-style probabilistic laws are, and argue that all three interpretations are incompatible either with some feature of Armstrong’s broader metaphysics or with essential features of his account of laws (or both).     

KNOWING WHEN TO “SECOND-GUESS”

Studies on social information gathering typically investigate how an interactant actively elicits needed information from another source. An alternative approach would focus on how a hearer gathers selected bits of information from the message(s) at hand. The process of second-guessing is proposed as one such interpretive approach to information gathering. Previous research confirmed that social actors do use this strategy and use it reasonably effectively. This article extends our knowledge of second-guessing by looking at the conditions or “cues” that provoke the process, and by showing that participants in an experimental study second-guess when confronted with those cues.     

Pragmatic skills predict online counterfactual comprehension: Evidence from the N400

Counterfactual thought allows people to consider alternative worlds they know to be false. Communicating these thoughts through language poses a social-communicative challenge because listeners typically expect a speaker to produce true utterances, but counterfactuals per definition convey information that is false. Listeners must therefore incorporate overt linguistic cues (subjunctive mood, such as in If I loved you then) in a rapid way to infer the intended counterfactual meaning. The present EEG study focused on the comprehension of such counterfactual antecedents and investigated if pragmatic ability—the ability to apply knowledge of the social-communicative use of language in daily life—predicts the online generation of counterfactual worlds. This yielded two novel findings: (1) Words that are consistent with factual knowledge incur a semantic processing cost, as reflected in larger N400 amplitude, in counterfactual antecedents compared to hypothetical antecedents (If sweets were/are made of sugar). We take this to suggest that counterfactuality is quickly incorporated during language comprehension and reduces online expectations based on factual knowledge. (2) Individual scores on the Autism Quotient Communication subscale modulated this effect, suggesting that individuals who are better at understanding the communicative intentions of other people are more likely to reduce knowledge-based expectations in counterfactuals. These results are the first demonstration of the real-time pragmatic processes involved in creating possible worlds.     

The processing of extraposed structures in English

In most languages, most of the syntactic dependency relations found in any given sentence are projective: the word-word dependencies in the sentence do not cross each other. Some syntactic dependency relations, however, are non-projective: some of their word-word dependencies cross each other. Non-projective dependencies are both rarer and more computationally complex than projective dependencies; hence, it is of natural interest to investigate whether there are any processing costs specific to non-projective dependencies, and whether factors known to influence processing of projective dependencies also affect non-projective dependency processing. We report three self-paced reading studies, together with corpus and sentence completion studies, investigating the comprehension difficulty associated with the non-projective dependencies created by the extraposition of relative clauses in English. We find that extraposition over either verbs or prepositional phrases creates comprehension difficulty, and that this difficulty is consistent with probabilistic syntactic expectations estimated from corpora. Furthermore, we find that manipulating the expectation that a given noun will have a postmodifying relative clause can modulate and even neutralize the difficulty associated with extraposition. Our experiments rule out accounts based purely on derivational complexity and/or dependency locality in terms of linear positioning. Our results demonstrate that comprehenders maintain probabilistic syntactic expectations that persist beyond projective-dependency structures, and suggest that it may be possible to explain observed patterns of comprehension difficulty associated with extraposition entirely through probabilistic expectations.     

Phonotactic cues for segmentation of fluent speech by infants

There is growing evidence that infants become sensitive to the probabilistic phonotactics of their ambient language sometime during the second half of their first year. The present study investigates whether 9-month-olds make use of phonotactic cues to segment words from fluent speech. Using the Headturn Preference Procedure, we found that infants listened to a CVC stimulus longer when the stimulus previously appeared in a sentential context with good phonotactic cues than when it appeared in one without such cues. The goodness of the phonotactic cues was estimated from the frequency with which the C.C clusters at the onset and offset of a CVC test stimulus (i.e. C.CVC.C) are found within and between words in child-directed speech, with high between-word probability associated with good cues to word boundaries. A similar segmentation result emerged when good phonotactic cues occurred only at the onset (i.e. C.CVC.C) or the offset (i.e. C.CVC.C) of the target words in the utterances. Together, the results suggest that 9-month-olds use probabilistic phonotactics to segment speech into words and that high-probability between-word clusters are interpreted as both word onsets and word offsets.     

Eye Gaze Provides a Window on Children's Understanding of Verbal Irony

We investigated how children solve the interpretive problem of verbal irony. Children 5 to 8 years of age and a group of adults were presented with ironic and literal remarks in the context of short puppet shows. The speaker puppet's personality was manipulated as a cue to intent; that is, speakers were described as funny or serious. We measured all participants' interpretations of the remarks and also children's eye gaze and response latencies as they made their interpretations. As expected, children were less accurate than adults in their judgments of speaker intent. Although children took longer to judge speaker intent for ironic remarks than literal remarks, eye gaze data showed no evidence that children had a literal-first bias in their processing of ironic language. Instead, children's eye gaze behavior suggested that they considered an ironic interpretation even in the earliest moments of processing. We argue that these results are most consistent with a parallel constraint satisfaction framework for irony comprehension.     

Aphasics' comprehension of contextually conveyed meaning

Eighteen aphasics and seven normal controls were examined as to their ability to comprehend utterances when correct interpretation required integration of extralinguistic cues in a natural setting. Videotaped situations were presented in which the correct interpretation of an utterance was not the literal interpretation but was the meaning conveyed by the request in a particular context. The aphasics' performance with indirect requests was superior to their performance on a standard battery of auditory comprehension tasks. Standard tests of auditory language comprehension, therefore, offer a measure of aphasic breakdown in linguistic processing but do not adequately reflect aphasics' receptive abilities in natural communicative settings. When the aphasic subjects did demonstrate difficulties with natural settings, their difficulty was, in part, a function of their level of performance on the standard battery. In addition, when the linguistic element of the communicative setting conveyed negative intent, aphasics were further reduced in their ability to interpret a message correctly. Otherwise, the aphasic subjects performance resembled that of the normal controls in that they demonstrated the capacity to utilize extralinguistic cues to discern correctly the conveyed intent in many requests.     

Processing of probabilistic information in weight perception and motor prediction

We studied the effects of probabilistic cues, i.e., of information of limited certainty, in the context of an action task (GL: grip-lift) and of a perceptual task (WP: weight perception). Normal subjects (n = 22) saw four different probabilistic visual cues, each of which announced the likely weight of an object. In the GL task, the object was grasped and lifted with a pinch grip, and the peak force rates indicated that the grip and load forces were scaled predictively according to the probabilistic information. The WP task provided the expected heaviness related to each probabilistic cue; the participants gradually adjusted the object’s weight until its heaviness matched the expected weight for a given cue. Subjects were randomly assigned to two groups: one started with the GL task and the other one with the WP task. The four different probabilistic cues influenced weight adjustments in the WP task and peak force rates in the GL task in a similar manner. The interpretation and utilization of the probabilistic information was critically influenced by the initial task. Participants who started with the WP task classified the four probabilistic cues into four distinct categories and applied these categories to the subsequent GL task. On the other side, participants who started with the GL task applied three distinct categories to the four cues and retained this classification in the following WP task. The initial strategy, once established, determined the way how the probabilistic information was interpreted and implemented.     

The effects of verbal feedback and listener type on the speech of preschool children

The present study simultaneously assessed the relative contributions of feedback indicative of comprehension and the apparent age of the listener, either an adult or a doll which resembled a toddler, in a 2 (listeners) × 2 (types of feedback, C = comprehension, NC = noncomprehension) design. Two groups of children, a 3-year-old (N = 13, 7 boys, 6 girls) and a 5-year-old group (N = 12, 6 boys, 6 girls) were asked to tell stories to both the adult and doll in both C and NC conditions. The doll was constructed with an internal speaker such that it could actually carry on a conversation with the children. The conversations were taped, transcribed, and scored for mean length of utterance (MLU), transitional utterance length to each C and NC signal, and the proportion of child questions, exact self-repetitions, repetition and reductions, and rephrases/elaborations. The data analysis revealed that all children appropriately modified the length of their utterances (MLU) in the doll condition but not in the adult condition, indicating that they were sensitive to both the feedback and the nature of their listeners. Older children were more likely than younger children, and girls more likely than boys to adjust the length of their utterances appropriately to each type of feedback, slightly increasing the length of the subsequent utterance to a C signal and decreasing the length to an NC signal. The younger children were also more likely to respond with a simple repetition to NC cues from the adult.