精细阐述在先行信息通达中的作用

先前研究发现,在篇章阅读理解中,先行信息与当前信息的合适与否是影响其通达的重要因素。本研究进一步引入精细阐述因素,通过窗口阅读及命名探测技术,以含错误信息的文章为阅读材料,探讨在篇章阅读理解中,精细阐述、信息的合适与否两者相比,何者对先行信息的通达速度影响更大。结果发现,如果错误信息受到精细阐述,在遇到相关的回指词时该信息会比合适、但未受精细阐述的先行信息更快得以通达,表明精细阐述在先行信息通达过程中具有相当重要的作用。     

Neurofunctional (re)organization underlying narrative discourse processing in aging: evidence from fNIRS

Relatively few studies have analyzed the mechanisms underlying the cognitive changes that affect language in the elderly, and fewer have done so for narrative discourse. The goal of this study was to explore the neurofunctional changes associated with aging for different components of narrative discourse. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and behavioral data on 10 younger adults and 10 healthy elderly participants were collected. Ten younger adults in a non-proficient second language condition were included to explore the possibility that the age-related neurofunctional reorganization partly expresses demanding resource allocation. Results show within- and across-hemispheric differences in the neurofunctional pattern of activation in the older participants with reference to the younger ones, partially shared with the low-proficiency young adults, providing support for the recognized mechanisms underlying neural reserve and compensation. fNIRS was shown to be appropriate for studying the age-related neurofunctional reorganization of complex cognitive abilities.     

Towards a common processing architecture underlying Simon and SNARC effects

It has been shown repeatedly that relatively small numbers are responded to faster with the left hand and relatively large numbers are responded to faster with the right hand. This so-called SNARC effect (Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, 1993) is thought to arise through activation of irrelevant spatial codes associated with the magnitude of the number. This conflict between irrelevant magnitude information and the response is conceptually similar to the well-known Simon effect. Recently, both Mapelli, Rusconi, and Umiltà (2003) and Keus and Schwarz (in press) directly compared both effects in a single task within the framework of the additive factor method (Sternberg, 1969). While Mapelli et al. found additive effects of SNARC and Simon levels, suggesting different processing stages, Keus and Schwarz found that the SNARC effect depended on the compatibility level of the Simon task leading them to propose a common origin at the response selection stage. In the present study we demonstrate in 2 experiments that the relationship between Simon and SNARC depends on the relevance of the magnitude code, thereby violating one of the core assumptions of the AFM. Instead we propose a temporal overlap model to interpret the relationship between these effects which allows to commensurate apparently divergent outcomes.     

Patterns of language and discourse comprehension skills in school‐aged children with autism spectrum disorders

Åsberg, J. (2010). Patterns of language and discourse comprehension skills in school‐aged children with autism spectrum disorders. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 51, 534–539. The present study examined patterns of language and discourse comprehension skills in Swedish school‐aged children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) (n = 16) as compared to a slightly younger group of typically developing children (n = 16) matched for non‐verbal cognitive ability. Results suggested significantly lower abilities in narrative discourse comprehension for the ASD group, but not in oral receptive vocabulary or reception of grammar. This difficulty with discourse‐level comprehension appeared to be of a general nature, as no evidence was found for the hypothesis that participants with ASD would find comprehension of inferential discourse information disproportionally more difficult than stated information, or for the hypothesis that discourse processing in ASD would be characterized by an elevated processing of explicitly stated narrative details. The study has clinical and educational implications, as the findings suggest that children with ASD would benefit from being offered specific support for discourse‐level comprehension.     

Syntactic priming in Chinese sentence comprehension: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

Using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study examined the nature of syntactic priming effects in Chinese. Participants were required to read prime-target sentence pairs each embedding an ambiguous relative clause (RC) containing either the same verb or a synonymous verb. In Chinese, the word de serves as a relative clause marker. During reading a potential Chinese RC structure (either the prime or the target sentence), Chinese readers initially expect to read an Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) structure but the encounter of a relative clause marker de would make readers abandon the initial strategy and reanalyze the structure as a relative clause. A reduced P600 effect was elicited by the critical word de in the target sentence containing the same initial verb as in the prime sentence. No significant reduction of the P600 was observed in the target sentences in the synonymous condition. The results demonstrated that verb repetition but not similarity in meaning produced a syntactic priming effect in Chinese. The constraint-based lexicalist hypothesis and the argument structure theory were adopted to explain the syntactic priming effect obtained in the current study.     

The development of Japanese passive syntax as indexed by structural priming in comprehension

A number of previous studies reported a phenomenon of syntactic priming with young children as evidence for cognitive representations required for processing syntactic structures. However, it remains unclear how syntactic priming reflects children's grammatical competence. The current study investigated structural priming of the Japanese passive structure with 5- and 6-year-old children in a visual-world setting. Our results showed a priming effect as anticipatory eye movements to an upcoming referent in these children but the effect was significantly stronger in magnitude in 6-year-olds than in 5-year-olds. Consistently, the responses to comprehension questions revealed that 6-year-olds produced a greater number of correct answers and more answers using the passive structure than 5-year-olds. We also tested adult participants who showed even stronger priming than the children. The results together revealed that language users with the greater linguistic competence with the passives exhibited stronger priming, demonstrating a tight relationship between the effect of priming and the development of grammatical competence. Furthermore, we found that the magnitude of the priming effect decreased over time. We interpret these results in the light of an error-based learning account. Our results also provided evidence for prehead as well as head-independent priming.     

论元结构的焦点和重音关系对话语理解的影响

本研究采用韵律合适度判断和理解任务,通过两个实验探讨论元结构的焦点和重音之间的关系对话语理解的影响。实验通过操纵答句中的论元是否出现在问句中,变化问句的信息状态;通过操纵答句不同句子成份重读,变化答句的重读位置。实验结果发现:新论元负载焦点必须重读;重读论元将焦点投射到句子的高一级单元上,但动词必须重读;旧论元不负载焦点不必重读,但负载焦点的动词必须重读。     

Argument Status and PP-Attachment

Prepositional phrase attachment was investigated in temporarily ambiguous sentences. Both attachment site (noun phrase or verb phrase) and argument status (argument or adjunct) were manipulated to test the hypothesis that arguments are processed differently than adjuncts. Contrary to this hypothesis, some previous research suggested that arguments and adjuncts are initially processed in the same manner, following a general bias to attach prepositional phrases to the verb phrase whenever possible [Clifton, Speer, & Abney (1991) Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 251–271]. The current study supports the hypothesis for differential processing, even during the initial stages of syntactic analysis. In an eye movement experiment, readers spent less first-pass time on argument prepositional phrases (PPs) than adjunct PPs. The results support a view in which a noun’s or verb’s argument structure can facilitate the analysis of its arguments.This research was supported by NSF grants SBR-9729056 and SBR-9720473 to the first author. We gratefully thank Gerry Altmann, Rick Lewis, Brian McElree, Don Mitchell, Neal Pearlmutter, Shari Speer, and Suzanne Stevenson for useful discussions and helpful comments. We would also like to acknowledge the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, where the eye movement data were collected and an initial draft of the paper was written.     

The influence of the immediate visual context on incremental thematic role-assignment: evidence from eye-movements in depicted events

Studies monitoring eye-movements in scenes containing entities have provided robust evidence for incremental reference resolution processes. This paper addresses the less studied question of whether depicted event scenes can affect processes of incremental thematic role-assignment. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants inspected agent-action-patient events while listening to German verb-second sentences with initial structural and role ambiguity. The experiments investigated the time course with which listeners could resolve this ambiguity by relating the verb to the depicted events. Such verb-mediated visual event information allowed early disambiguation on-line, as evidenced by anticipatory eye-movements to the appropriate agent/patient role filler. We replicated this finding while investigating the effects of intonation. Experiment 3 demonstrated that when the verb was sentence-final and thus did not establish early reference to the depicted events, linguistic cues alone enabled disambiguation before people encountered the verb. Our results reveal the on-line influence of depicted events on incremental thematic role-assignment and disambiguation of local structural and role ambiguity. In consequence, our findings require a notion of reference that includes actions and events in addition to entities (e.g. Semantics and Cognition, 1983), and argue for a theory of on-line sentence comprehension that exploits a rich inventory of semantic categories.