The Embodied Penman: Effector‐Specific Motor–Language Integration During Handwriting

Several studies have illuminated how processing manual action verbs (MaVs) affects the programming or execution of concurrent hand movements. Here, to circumvent key confounds in extant designs, we conducted the first assessment of motor–language integration during handwriting—a task in which linguistic and motoric processes are co‐substantiated. Participants copied MaVs, non‐manual action verbs, and non‐action verbs as we collected measures of motor programming and motor execution. Programming latencies were similar across conditions, but execution was faster for MaVs than for the other categories, regardless of whether word meanings were accessed implicitly or explicitly. In line with the Hand‐Action‐Network Dynamic Language Embodiment (HANDLE) model, such findings suggest that effector‐congruent verbs can prime manual movements even during highly automatized tasks in which motoric and verbal processes are naturally intertwined. Our paradigm opens new avenues for fine‐grained explorations of embodied language processes.     

Transitivity,Space, and Hand: The Spatial Grounding of Syntax

Previous research has linked the concept of number and other ordinal series to space via a spatially oriented mental number line. In addition, it has been shown that in visual scene recognition and production, speakers of a language with a left‐to‐right orthography respond faster to and tend to draw images in which the agent of an action is located to the left of the patient. In this study, we aim to bridge these two lines of research by employing a novel method that measures the spatial bias produced by transitive sentences that use a wide variety of abstract and concrete verbs. Across four experiments, participants read sentences and then responded to probe words appearing on either the left or right sides of the screen. Probe words consisted of agents, patients, other words in the sentence, or newly encountered words. We found consistent lateral biases to responding to agents and patients, which appears to be independent of order of mention in the sentence but which does reflect a correspondence between position in the sentence and role in the causal sequence of the action. Our results also show that this spatial bias is driven by the use of the hands in two different ways: The left hand shows a greater sensitivity to the spatial effect than the right hand, and vocal responses produce no spatial effect.     

汉字义符在汉语动作动词意义认知中的作用

通过4个实验,探讨汉字义符在汉语动作动词意义认知中的作用。实验1探讨汉字义符对认知动作动词的动作器官意义的影响。结果表明,当义符与动作器官一致时,会促进对动作动词的动作器官意义的认知;当义符与动作器官不一致时,会抑制对动作动词的动作器官意义的认知。实验2探讨汉字义符对认知动作动词的动作工具意义的影响。结果表明,当义符与动作工具一致时,会促进对动作动词的动作工具意义的认知;当义符与动作工具不一致或无关时,会抑制对动作动词的动作工具意义的认知。实验3探讨汉字义符的作用是否随词频而变化。结果表明,当义符与动作器官一致时,对高频词和低频词动作器官意义的认知不存在显著差异;不一致时,对高频词动作器官意义的认知比对低频词快。实验4探讨汉字义符与动作器官是否一致对具体性不同的动作动词的动作器官意义认知的影响。结果表明,当义符与动作器官一致时,对具体性高的词和具体性低的词的动作器官意义的认知不存在显著差异;不一致时,对具体性高的词的动作器官意义的认知比对具体性低的词快。整个研究表明,汉语动词的结构特点影响对动作动词的动作器官或动作工具意义的认知。     

身体部位与早期习得的汉语动词的联结及其对动词习得年龄的影响

在英语等语言中, 动词习得被认为比名词习得更困难, 而汉语儿童在3岁以前却习得了大量动词, 仅表现出微弱的“名词优势”。Ma, Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, McDonough和Tardif (2009)发现, 早期习得的汉语动词比英语动词具有更高的可表象性, 且可表象性可部分解释两种语言中动词习得年龄的变异。但是, 目前尚未有研究揭示汉语动词为何具有较高的可表象性。本研究假设, 早期动词与身体部位具有强烈的联结关系, 从而导致汉语动词具有较高的可表象性。研究1通过成人词汇联想任务, 考察了汉语儿童早期习得的169个行为动词与身体区域的联结关系。研究2请成人评定了这些动词的可表象性, 进一步考察动词-身体部位联结、可表象性和习得年龄之间的关系。研究结果验证了我们的假设。研究发现：1)汉语儿童早期习得的大部分动词都与特定身体区域有联结关系; 2)汉语儿童先习得关于手部区域(包括手和手臂)的动词, 其次是关于口部、腿部以及其他身体区域的动词; 3)动词联结的身体区域数可解释可表象性12%的变异; 4)动词-身体部位联结关系以可表象性为部分中介作用, 影响早期动词的习得年龄。研究结果表明, 汉语儿童早期习得动词与身体区域有较一致的联结关系, 且联结强度通过提高动词的可表象性而影响习得年龄。该结果对解释为何汉语儿童早期习得大量动词具有一定的启示作用。     

Differences in Noun and Verb Processing in Lexical Decision Cannot be Attributed to Word Form and Morphological Complexity Alone

It has been suggested that the effect of word category in noun and verb processing reflects typical word class properties, which can be characterized in terms of semantic as well as syntactic and morphological features. The present study is aimed at differentiating and discussing the relative contribution of these aspects with a main focus on syntactic and morphological processing. Experiment 1 established a processing advantage for nouns in German visual lexical decision, using nouns denoting biological and man-made objects as compared to transitive and intransitive verbs. Experiment 2 showed that the noun advantage persisted even when the morphological differences between word categories were reduced by using identical suffixes in nouns and verbs. Overall results suggest that the processing differences cannot be reduced to variables such as frequency, word form, or morphological complexity. Reaction time differences between transitive and intransitive verbs strengthen the role of syntactic information. In line with previous accounts the observed effects are discussed in terms of a category-specific combination of linguistic parameters.     

THE EFFECTS OF RESPONSE CARDS ON STUDENT AND TEACHER BEHAVIOR DURING VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION

The use of response cards during whole‐class English vocabulary instruction was evaluated. Five low‐participating students were observed during hand‐raising conditions and response‐card conditions to observe the effects of response cards on student responding and test scores and teacher questions and feedback. Responding and test scores were higher for all targeted students in the response‐card condition. The teacher asked a similar number of questions in both conditions; however, she provided more feedback in the response‐card condition.     

名词与动词加工的ERP差异

采用词汇判断任务和记录ERP的方法,探讨了名词与动词之间的差异以及词汇的具体性对这种词性效应的影响。研究结果表明,在200~300ms、300~400ms（即N400）时窗,词性与具体性的交互作用在两侧电极上达到显著水平,在两半球上具体名词所诱发的ERP比具体动词更负。并且,在N400上词性与电极位置有显著的交互作用,名词与动词的差异主要存在于左、右半球的额叶和颞叶。本研究结果部分支持了语言表征的神经生物学理论     

The thematic hierarchy in sentence comprehension: A study on the interaction between verb class and word order in Spanish

Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the syntactic functions of the phrases that realize them. At the sentence level, linking allows us to understand “who did what to whom” in an event. In Spanish, linking has been shown to interact with word order, verb class, and case marking. The current study aims to provide the first piece of experimental evidence about the interplay between word order and verb type in Spanish. We achieve this by adopting role and reference grammar and the extended argument dependency model. Two different types of clauses were examined in a self-paced reading task: clauses with object–experiencer psychological verbs and activity verbs. These types of verbs differ in the way that their syntactic and semantic structures are linked, and thus they provide interesting evidence on how information that belongs to the syntax–semantics interface might influence the predictive and integrative processes of sentence comprehension with alternative word orders. Results indicate that in Spanish, comprehension and processing speed is enhanced when the order of the constituents in the sentence mirrors their ranking on a semantic hierarchy that encodes a verb's lexical semantics. Moreover, results show that during online comprehension, predictive mechanisms based on argument hierarchization are used rapidly to inform the processing system. Our findings corroborate already existing cross-linguistic evidence on the issue and are briefly discussed in the light of other sentence-processing models.     

Learning Verbs Without Arguments: The Problem of Raising Verbs

This paper addresses the problem of learning the class of raising verbs (e.g. seem). These verbs are potentially problematic for learners in that unlike typical main verbs, these verbs do not stand in a semantic relation with any Noun Phrase (NP) arguments. Moreover, a second class of verbs, known as control verbs, shares certain distributional properties with raising verbs, but the two verb classes differ in important structural properties. The central problem addressed here is that of how a learner would distinguish raising verbs from control verbs, given their partial overlap in distribution. A series of experiments with English-speaking adults using a fill-in-the-blank questionnaire revealed two main types of cues that led participants to distinguish the two verb classes: inanimate NPs and semantically empty subjects (its raining) yielded the highest proportion of raising verb responses from adults, while animate NPs paired with eventive predicates yielded a high rate of control verb responses. On the basis of these results, suggestions are made as to how one should study the learning of these verbs in children.This research was supported by an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. I owe many, many thanks to Lila and Henry Gleitman, John Trueswell and the whole cast of participants in the Cheese seminar at IRCS during 2000–2002. In addition I would like to thank Ash Asudeh, Robin Clark, Jeffrey Lidz, Elliott Moreton, Julien Musolino, Anna Papafragou, Carson Schutze and an anonymous reviewer for comments and suggestions. I also thank audiences at University of North Carolina, University of Delaware, UCLA, Penn Linguistics Colloquium 26, Chicago Linguistic Society 38 and the CUNY Graduate Center for stimulating discussions. All errors and shortcomings are my own.