Modulation of reflexive orienting to gaze direction by facial expressions

Facial expression and gaze perception are thought to share brain mechanisms but behavioural interactions, especially from gaze-cueing paradigms, are inconsistent. We conducted a series of gaze-cueing studies using dynamic facial cues to examine orienting across different emotional expression and task conditions, including face inversion. Across experiments, at a short stimulus–onset asynchrony (SOA) we observed both an expression effect (i.e., faster responses when the face was emotional versus neutral) and a cue validity effect (i.e., faster responses when the target was gazed-at), but no interaction between validity and emotion. Results from face inversion suggest that the emotion effect may have been due to both facial expression and stimulus motion. At longer SOAs, validity and emotion interacted such that cueing by emotional faces, fearful faces in particular, was enhanced relative to neutral faces. These results converge with a growing body of evidence that suggests that gaze and expression are initially processed independently and interact at later stages to direct attentional orienting.     

Bootstrapping word order in prelexical infants: a Japanese-Italian cross-linguistic study

Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language acquisition [Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]. Two theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Constructivist/lexicalist theories [Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74(3), 209-253.] argue that word order is learned separately for each lexical item or construction. Generativist theories [Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.], on the other hand, claim that word order is an abstract and general property, determined from the input independently of individual words. Here, we show that eight-month-old Japanese and Italian infants have opposite order preferences in an artificial grammar experiment, mirroring the opposite word orders of their respective native languages. This suggests that infants possess some representation of word order prelexically, arguing for the generativist view. We propose a frequency-based bootstrapping mechanism to account for our results, arguing that infants might build this representation by tracking the order of functors and content words, identified through their different frequency distributions. We investigate frequency and word order patterns in infant-directed Japanese and Italian corpora to support this claim.     

A perceptual interference account of acquisition difficulties for non-native phonemes

This article presents an account of how early language experience can impede the acquisition of non-native phonemes during adulthood. The hypothesis is that early language experience alters relatively low-level perceptual processing, and that these changes interfere with the formation and adaptability of higher-level linguistic representations. Supporting data are presented from an experiment that tested the perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese, German, and American adults. The underlying perceptual spaces for these phonemes were mapped using multidimensional scaling and compared to native-language categorization judgments. The results demonstrate that Japanese adults are most sensitive to an acoustic cue, F2, that is irrelevant to the English /r/-/l/ categorization. German adults, in contrast, have relatively high sensitivity to more critical acoustic cues. The results show how language-specific perceptual processing can alter the relative salience of within- and between-category acoustic variation, and thereby interfere with second language acquisition.     

Young children's use of prosody in sentence parsing

Korean children's ability to use prosodic phrasing in sentence comprehension was studied using two types of ambiguity. First, we examined a word-segmentation ambiguity in which placement of the phrasal boundary leads to different interpretations of a sentence. Next, we examined a syntactic ambiguity in which the same words were differently grouped into syntactic phrases by prosodic demarcation. Children aged 3 or 4 years showed that they could use prosodic information to segment utterances and to derive the meaning of ambiguous sentences when the sentences only contained a word-segmentation ambiguity. However, even 5- to 6-year-old children were not able to reliably resolve the second type of ambiguity, an ambiguity of phrasal grouping, by using prosodic information. The results demonstrate that children's difficulties in dealing with structural ambiguity are not due to their inability to use prosodic information.     

Development of single/geminate obstruent discrimination by Japanese infants: early integration of durational and nondurational cues

The Japanese language has single/geminate obstruents characterized by durational difference in closure/frication as part of the phonemic repertoire used to distinguish word meanings. We first evaluated infants' abilities to discriminate naturally uttered single/geminate obstruents (/pata/ and /patta/) using the visual habituation-dishabituation method. The results revealed that 9.5-month-old Japanese infants were able to make this discrimination, t(21) = 2.119, p = .046, paired t test, whereas 4-month-olds were not, t(25) = 0.395, p = .696, paired t test. To examine how acoustic correlates (covarying cues) are associated with the contrast discrimination, we tested Japanese infants at 9.5 and 11.5 months of age with 3 combinations of natural and manipulated stimuli. The 11.5-month-olds were able to discriminate the naturally uttered pair (/pata/ vs. /patta/), t(20) = 4.680, p < .000, paired t test. Neither group discriminated the natural /patta/ from the manipulated /pata/ created from natural /patta/ tokens: For 9.5-month-olds, t(23) = 0.754, p = .458; for 11.5-month-olds, t(27) = 0.789, p = .437, paired t tests. Only the 11.5-month-olds discriminated the natural /pata/ and the manipulated /patta/ created from /pata/ tokens: For 9.5-month-olds, t(24) = 0.114, p = .910; for 11.5-month-olds, t(23) = 2.244, p = .035, paired t tests. These results suggest that Japanese infants acquire a sensitivity to contrasts of single/geminate obstruents by 9.5 months of age and that certain cues that covary with closure length either facilitate or interfere with contrast discrimination under particular conditions.     

Immediate use of prosody and context in predicting a syntactic structure

Numerous studies have reported an effect of prosodic information on parsing but whether prosody can impact even the initial parsing decision is still not evident. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the influence of contrastive intonation and visual context on processing temporarily ambiguous relative clause sentences in Japanese. Our results showed that listeners used the prosodic cue to make a structural prediction before hearing disambiguating information. Importantly, the effect was limited to cases where the visual scene provided an appropriate context for the prosodic cue, thus eliminating the explanation that listeners have simply associated marked prosodic information with a less frequent structure. Furthermore, the influence of the prosodic information was also evident following disambiguating information, in a way that reflected the initial analysis. The current study demonstrates that prosody, when provided with an appropriate context, influences the initial syntactic analysis and also the subsequent cost at disambiguating information. The results also provide first evidence for pre-head structural prediction driven by prosodic and contextual information with a head-final construction.     

Excommunication and the philosophy of Spinoza

This paper is an attempt to probe the connection between Spinoza's philosophy and his excommunication from the Synagogue in 1656. It seeks, first, to show the decisive influence of the 1656 excommunication on Spinoza's life and thought, and to demonstrate that this event is the single most important key to understanding his entire philosophy. With this key, the paper seeks, secondly, to illustrate the development and transformation of Spinoza's thought through specific reference to his three major works, Korte Verhandeling, De Emendatione, and Ethica. Underlying these two points is a third, namely, that the inherently dynamic and positive elements of ‘experience’, which have not been fully appreciated thus far, should be given greater attention in the evaluation of Spinoza's philosophy.     

Effect of Repeated Evaluation and Repeated Exposure on Acceptability Ratings of Sentences

This study investigated the effect of repeated evaluation and repeated exposure on grammatical acceptability ratings for both acceptable and unacceptable sentence types. In Experiment 1, subjects in the Experimental group rated multiple examples of two ungrammatical sentence types (ungrammatical binding and double object with dative-only verb), and two difficult to process sentence types [center-embedded (2) and garden path ambiguous relative], along with matched grammatical/non-difficult sentences, before rating a final set of experimental sentences. Subjects in the control group rated unrelated sentences during the exposure period before rating the experimental sentences. Subjects in the Experimental group rated both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences as more acceptable after repeated evaluation than subjects in the Control group. In Experiment 2, subjects answered a comprehension question after reading each sentence during the exposure period. Subjects in the experimental group rated garden path and center-embedded (1) sentences as higher in acceptability after comprehension exposure than subjects in the control group. The results are consistent with increased fluency of comprehension being misattributed as a change in acceptability.