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• 1. Negative state impairs proactive control but positive state improves proactive control. • 2. Control system responds adaptively to the emotional disruption of control. • 3. The findings extend the adaptive control hypothesis to emotional contexts. This study investigated bilingual language control in emotional contexts. We assessed the language switching and mixing performance of two groups of Chinese-English bilinguals in picture naming under neutral, negative, and positive emotional states. One group switched languages voluntarily while another matched group switched languages according to external cues. We found that negative state impaired proactive control, whereas positive state seemed to improve proactive control. Importantly, the detrimental effects of negative state could be proportional to the cognitive demands imposed by the naming context. However, negative states disrupted proactive control in voluntary but not cued naming, where the proactive control demands were comparable. This finding suggests that the control system selectively compensates for the emotional disruption of control in a cued-naming context requiring strict control but not in a voluntary-naming context preferring less strict control. Accordingly, we tentatively proposed a theoretical account of the adaptive control mechanism in emotional contexts. These findings would extend the Adaptive Control Hypothesis to more naturalistic settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The phonological lexicon of Mandarin Chinese is graded. • Constituent edit yields highest dissimilarity, followed by phoneme, and then tone. • Graded neighborhood density and frequency affect lexical retrieval across tasks. • Distant neighbors facilitate and near neighbors inhibit lexical retrieval. How phonological neighborhood affects lexical retrieval can shed important light on lexical organization and processing. Yet these effects are unclear, particularly in Mandarin Chinese. This is likely because the working definition of phonological neighbors (i.e., the one-phoneme edit rule) used in Indo-European languages inadequately characterizes the phonological similarity among Mandarin words, which have simpler syllable structures and lexical tones. The current study proposes a graded Mandarin phonological neighborhood and investigates the impacts of near-to-distant Mandarin phonological neighbors on lexical retrieval. In Study 1, we investigated how Mandarin phonological similarity is influenced by the editing of lexical tone, constituent (onset/rime, initial/final) and phoneme. Native Mandarin speakers rated the similarity between the edited monosyllabic words. We found that constituent-edit neighbors were rated as the most dissimilar, followed by phoneme-edit neighbors, while tone-edit neighbors were the most similar. In Study 2, we calculated the constituent-, phoneme- and tone-edit phonological neighborhood densities and frequencies for 4,706 monosyllabic Mandarin words. We then utilized extant datasets to examine how the density and frequency of neighbors at varied distances, as well as of homophonic neighbors, impact response latencies in word naming, visual lexical decision, and picture naming tasks. The results showed that graded phonological neighbors had differential impacts on lexical retrieval efficiency: distant (constituent-edit) neighbors facilitated word retrieval, while near (phoneme-, tone-edit and homophonic) neighbors had inhibitory effects. We discuss these findings within an interactive activation and competition framework and suggest future directions to study the representation and processing of the Mandarin phonological lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study evaluates two broad classes of language processing accounts that make predictions for sentences like "The admirer of the singer(s) apparently thinks...". Feature distortion accounts predict increased processing difficulty at the verb in sentences with a plural distractor noun (singers) while similarity-based interference accounts predict the opposite: increased difficulty in sentences with a singular distractor noun (singer). Neither of these effects was reliably observed in earlier research, and the Bayesian meta-analysis of 31 published studies reported here is almost perfectly inconclusive. An explanation may be that both effects occur simultaneously and therefore mask each other. To test this idea, we conducted three single-trial self-paced reading experiments ( N 1 = 4 , 296 , N 2 = 3 , 920 , N 3 = 3 , 559) which orthogonally manipulated agreement attraction and inhibitory interference. Surprisingly, all three experiments produced evidence for agreement attraction but none for inhibitory interference, which supports feature distortion but not similarity-based interference accounts. Experiment 4 ( N 4 = 3 , 535) tested the role of the expected task by preparing participants for a comprehension question (vs. acceptability judgment in Experiments 1–3). It showed neither agreement attraction nor inhibitory interference effects. Our findings demonstrate that agreement attraction effects can arise in grammatical sentences – contra earlier research – but also that these effects crucially depend on the task. This explains inconsistent results in prior research and supports feature distortion as the driving force behind attraction effects in grammatical sentences. • Three experiments show agreement attraction effects in grammatical sentences. • The same experiments produced no evidence for similarly-based interference. • Expt. 4 shows that agreement attraction effects crucially depend on the offline task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Lexical stress position is unpredictable in languages such as English or Italian. • A corpus analysis revealed the existence of sublexical cues to stress in Italian. • Results from a megastudy show Italian readers use those cues and lexical ones. • Our results can serve as benchmark for computational models of reading. • Our study provides a large database of stimuli and responses. When reading polysyllabic words, assignment of lexical stress is a challenge for readers, especially in languages, such as English or Italian, in which stress position is not strictly determined even though words as well as nonwords typically contain several sublexical cues to stress that readers might use. Here, we attempted to identify such cues using a corpus analysis and to examine their impact on human performance in a megastudy in which participants (N = 45) assigned stress to nonwords (N = 800), stimuli particularly revealing of stress cue use because they have no predefined stress pattern. Hierarchical regression results confirmed an impact of sublexical cues examined in former studies and revealed a role for cues not previously examined, including similarity to real words. These results are informative for computational models of reading as they indicate that readers assign stress to nonwords based on not only sublexical but also lexical information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• New ERP method to study children's language comprehension in naturalistic context. • Child and adult N400 responses reflect word predictability given the context. • Like adults, child N400s in a connected discourse are not modulated by frequency. • ERP responses to low frequency words show a prolonged anterior negativity. • Results show top-down cues play a substantial role in children's lexical processes. When listening to speech, adults rely on context to anticipate upcoming words. Evidence for this comes from studies demonstrating that the N400, an event-related potential (ERP) that indexes ease of lexical-semantic processing, is influenced by the predictability of a word in context. We know far less about the role of context in children's speech comprehension. The present study explored lexical processing in adults and 5–10-year-old children as they listened to a story. ERPs time-locked to the onset of every word were recorded. Each content word was coded for frequency, semantic association, and predictability. In both children and adults, N400s reflect word predictability, even when controlling for frequency and semantic association. These findings suggest that both adults and children use top-down constraints from context to anticipate upcoming words when listening to stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Individual differences in foveal and parafoveal word processing skill were assessed. • Individual differences were then used to predict eye-movement patterns in reading. • The Random Forests technique was used to identify the best predictors. • Foveal word processing efficiency predicts both foveal and parafoveal processing in reading. The study examined whether word-level eye-movement patterns in text reading can be predicted by individual differences in foveal and parafoveal word processing efficiency. Individual differences in lexical skills were gauged by presenting words and pseudowords with short exposure times in the fovea (30–60 ms) and at varying eccentricities in the parafovea. Lexical decision was used to index orthographic processing, word naming to index phonological processing and pseudoword naming to index grapheme-phoneme decoding. The Random Forests statistical technique was used to assess the relative importance of individual difference measures in predicting readers' eye-movement patterns. The results show that individual differences in foveal word processing efficiency are better predictors of both foveal and parafoveal word processing during reading than differences in parafoveal processing efficiency. Results indicate that individual variability in foveal word recognition skills are better determinants of reading fluency among adult readers than variability in parafoveal word recognition skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The results of two large-scale eye-tracking studies are reported. • A novel variable trailing mask paradigm was used to determine whether amount or location of rereading of NP/Z garden-path sentences was related to offline comprehension. • E1 presented comprehension questions after each sentence, and E2 presented the comprehension questions both before and after each sentence. • Results provide strong evidence (of multiple types) against selective reanalysis of NP/Z garden-paths. When people read temporarily ambiguous ("garden-path") sentences, the forward movement of their eyes is often interrupted by regressions. These regressions are usually followed by rereading some portion of the previously read text. Frazier and Rayner (1982) proposed the Selective Reanalysis Hypothesis (SRH), which proposed that readers regress to critical choice points in the syntactic phrase marker of garden-paths where misparses had occurred, and furthermore, then reanalyzed the syntactic structure to arrive at a correct parse in most cases. A considerable amount of more recent work, however, suggests that readers often do not derive a correct parse or interpretation from such sentences. If these more recent observations are accurate, perhaps rereading is not necessarily strategic, controlled, or predictable. The current study consists of two large-scale eye-tracking experiments designed specifically to examine where and how much people reread garden-path sentences, and whether rereading influences comprehension accuracy. A variable text-masking paradigm was employed to restrict access to portions of garden-paths and non-garden-paths during rereading. Scanpath analyses were used to determine whether some or all participants targeted syntactically critical parts of previously read text. Comprehension questions probed final interpretations. In short, readers often misinterpreted the garden-paths, and no rereading measures predicted better comprehension. Furthermore, scanpath analyses revealed considerable variation across and within readers; only small percentages of trials conformed to structurally-based predictions. Taken together, we fail to find support for structurally strategic rereading. We therefore propose that rereading of these sentences is more often "confirmatory" than "revisionary" in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cue-based retrieval theories of sentence processing posit that long-distance dependency formation is guided by a cue-based retrieval mechanism: dependents are retrieved via retrieval cues associated with a verb. When retrieval cues match multiple similar items in memory, this leads to cue-based retrieval interference. A landmark study by Van Dyke and McElree tested interference from sentence-external items: retrieval cues were manipulated to (mis-)match semantically similar items presented prior to a target dependency. The support for interference of this type is weak, and only comes from English object cleft constructions. Our study provides a cross-linguistic investigation of interference from sentence-external items: Three eyetracking studies in English, German and Russian tested interference in the online processing of filler-gap dependencies under varying task demands. A fourth study attempted to replicate the Van Dyke and McElree study using self-paced reading. Bayes factors analyses show cross-linguistic evidence against interference from sentence-external items. A broader implication from these data is that cue-based retrieval interference is driven by sentence-internal distracting items, suggesting that a cue-based search is restricted to the current linguistic context. • Cross-linguistic study on cue-based interference from sentence-external items. • Three larger-sample eye-tracking studies in English, German and Russian. • A fourth self-paced reading study attempts to replicate the original Van Dyke study. • Data show evidence against interference from sentence-external items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Readers target the eyes to locations in implausible sentences where inserting/deleting to would make the sentence plausible. • Readers misinterpret implausible sentences less when they spend longer fixated where inserting to would make them plausible. • Older adults have a stronger tendency to make noisy-channel inferences for implausible sentences than young adults. • Perceptual information extracted during reading influences whether or not readers make noisy-channel inferences. This novel experiment investigates the relationship between readers' eye movements and their use of "noisy channel" inferences when reading implausible sentences, and how this might be affected by cognitive aging. Young (18–26 years) and older (65–87 years) adult participants read sentences which were either plausible or implausible. Crucially, readers could assign a plausible interpretation to the implausible sentences by inferring that a preposition (i.e., to) had been unintentionally omitted or included. Our results reveal that readers' fixation locations within such sentences are associated with the likelihood of them inferring the presence or absence of this critical preposition to reach a plausible interpretation. Moreover, our older adults were more likely to make these noisy-channel inferences than the younger adults, potentially because their poorer visual processing and greater linguistic experience promote such inference-making. We propose that the present findings provide novel experimental evidence for a perceptual contribution to noisy-channel inference-making during reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prediction has been proposed as an overarching principle that explains human information processing in language and beyond. To what degree can processing difficulty in syntactically complex sentences – one of the major concerns of psycholinguistics – be explained by predictability, as estimated using computational language models, and operationalized as surprisal (negative log probability)? A precise, quantitative test of this question requires a much larger scale data collection effort than has been done in the past. We present the Syntactic Ambiguity Processing Benchmark, a dataset of self-paced reading times from 2000 participants, who read a diverse set of complex English sentences. This dataset makes it possible to measure processing difficulty associated with individual syntactic constructions, and even individual sentences, precisely enough to rigorously test the predictions of computational models of language comprehension. By estimating the function that relates surprisal to reading times from filler items included in the experiment, we find that the predictions of language models with two different architectures sharply diverge from the empirical reading time data, dramatically underpredicting processing difficulty, failing to predict relative difficulty among different syntactic ambiguous constructions, and only partially explaining item-wise variability. These findings suggest that next-word prediction is most likely insufficient on its own to explain human syntactic processing. • We collect a large reading time dataset for English syntactically complex sentences. • We evaluate to what extent surprisal – estimated using neural network language models – can explain processing difficulty. • Surprisal greatly underestimated processing difficulty for most constructions. • It failed to predict relative difficulty among different garden path constructions. • It also failed to predict across-item variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent influential experimental finding in pragmatics is that of scalar diversity : that different lexical items vary robustly in how likely they are to lead to scalar inference. For instance, hearers are much more likely to strengthen the meaning of some to some but not all than to infer good but not excellent from good. In this paper, we address the question of what underlies scalar diversity and identify two sources of uncertainty: uncertainty associated with the identity of relevant alternatives, and uncertainty associated with the step of excluding those alternatives. In our experiments, we make use of the Question Under Discussion to eliminate the former, and of the focus particle only to eliminate the latter kind of uncertainty. Our findings show that both manipulations make inference calculation more likely, but only when they are combined is scalar diversity reduced to a minimum. In order to quantitatively characterize the observed (reduction in) variation, this paper adopts the information theoretic measure of relative entropy. • We investigate two sources of uncertainty in variation in scalar implicature. • Discourse context reduces uncertainty about the identity of alternatives. • Semantic focus reduces uncertainty about whether to exclude alternatives. • Relative entropy quantifies changes in the variation of implicature calculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Soliciting metacognitive judgments reactively temper the entity being monitored, phenomenon known as the reactivity effect. • Neither immediate nor pre-study JOLs reactively enhance the relatedness effect in self-paced study conditions. • In experimenter-paced study conditions, only immediate JOLs, but not pre-study JOLs, enhance the relatedness effect. • The enhanced relatedness effect of immediate JOLs shows minimal transfer to no-JOL pairs when JOL and no-JOL pairs are interleaved. • Goal change plays a small or possibly even no role in the enhanced relatedness effect of immediate JOLs. Measurement of mental processes is the bedrock of cognitive psychology, but the interpretation of such measurements is profoundly undermined by evidence that many mental processes are changed by (are reactive to) the act of being observed and measured. The current article is concerned with one particular type of reactivity, namely changes in memory performance when individuals are asked to concurrently monitor their learning via judgments of learning (JOLs). One explanation for memory reactivity is that the requirement to engage in metamemory monitoring changes learners' goals, shifting them towards greater prioritization of mastering easy items and de-prioritization of memorizing difficult ones. This hypothesis is tested in 5 experiments (2 of which were pre-registered), which varied item difficulty by contrasting related (e.g., computer – keyboard) and unrelated (e.g., book – shoe) word pairs. While the experiments find robust evidence that recall is affected by the requirement to make immediate JOLs (reactivity), two key predictions of the goal-change account are not supported. The observed findings suggest that a change in the learner's goal is not the main mechanism underlying JOL reactivity. Alternative explanations for why memory is reactive to metamemory judgments are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Chinese four-character idioms are processed as Multi-Constituent Units (MCUs). • Frequently used four-character phrases can be processed parafoveally as MCUs. • Lexical identification is episodic in natural reading. • Parafoveal processing operates over words, MCUs, or sub-units of a single word. The perceptual span in Chinese reading extends one character to the left and three to the right of the point of fixation. Thus, four-character idioms and phrases often extend rightward beyond these limits during reading. We investigated whether such idioms, frequent phrases and equibiased strings are processed parafoveally as Multi-Constituent Units (MCUs). Using the boundary paradigm in Experiments 1 and 2, we separately manipulated preview (identities or pseudocharacters) of the first two and the last two characters of idioms and frequently used phrases. In Experiment 3, we examined processing of strings judged to be a single lexical unit, equi-biased ambiguous strings and matched unambiguous multi-word strings. Experiments 1 and 2 produced greater preview benefit for the final two characters when the first two characters were presented after identity rather than pseudocharacter previews. In Experiment 3, preview effects were largest for single units, reduced for equi-biased strings and smallest for multi-word strings. Together the results demonstrate that four-character idioms and frequently used phrases are processed as MCUs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Models of eye-movement control during reading, developed largely within psychology, usually focus on visual, attentional, lexical, and motor processes but neglect post-lexical language processing; by contrast, models of sentence comprehension processes, developed largely within psycholinguistics, generally focus only on post-lexical language processes. We present a model that combines these two research threads, by integrating eye-movement control and sentence processing. Developing such an integrated model is extremely challenging and computationally demanding, but such an integration is an important step toward complete mathematical models of natural language comprehension in reading. We combine the SWIFT model of eye-movement control (Seelig et al., 2023) with key components of the Lewis and Vasishth sentence processing model (Lewis and Vasishth, 2005). This integration becomes possible, for the first time, due in part to recent advances in successful parameter identification in dynamical models, which allows us to investigate profile log-likelihoods for individual model parameters. We present a fully implemented proof-of-concept model demonstrating how such an integrated model can be achieved; our approach includes Bayesian model inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling as a key computational tool. The integrated Sentence-Processing and Eye-Movement Activation-Coupled Model (SEAM) can successfully reproduce eye movement patterns that arise due to similarity-based interference in reading. To our knowledge, this is the first-ever integration of a complete process model of eye-movement control with linguistic dependency completion processes in sentence comprehension. In future work, this proof of concept model will need to be evaluated using a comprehensive set of benchmark data. • Computational model of the interaction of eye movements and sentence processing. • Integrating psychological and linguistic threads of reading research in one model. • Parameter inference of the integrated SEAM model in a principled Bayesian workflow. • Regressive eye movements can be triggered by similarity-based memory interference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Two well-powered experiments replicated the phonological parafoveal preview benefit during silent reading for real word and pseudoword previews. • The preview effect depended on sentence constraint, lexicality (between-experiments comparison), and participant spelling ability. • Parafoveal phonological activation during reading aids word recognition, but this benefit depends on the ease of precursory processing stages. For decades, researchers have debated whether readers benefit from translating visual word forms into phonological codes. A focus of this debate has been on the earliest moments of processing when a word is perceived in parafoveal vision (i.e., phonological preview benefit). A recent meta-analysis (Vasilev et al., 2019) concluded that the phonological preview benefit may be small and unreliable but they did not take into account potentially important stimulus-level or participant-level factors that varied across the included studies. Therefore, we conducted two well-powered experiments that systematically investigated the effects of sentence constraint, preview lexicality, and participant language skills on the phonological preview benefit effect. We found phonological preview benefits that were larger in high versus low constraint sentences, larger for words than pseudowords, and larger for better spellers. We conclude that phonological codes do facilitate early word recognition during reading, but that the phonological preview benefit magnitude depends on subject- and stimulus-level factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Reflexive attraction is mitigated when verbal agreement is available. • Reflexives' perceived grammaticality depends on verb- rather than subject-matching. • This suggests that verbal agreement alters the feature representation of the subject. • Memory representations are less stable than assumed by Cue-Based Retrieval. • Findings are interpreted in terms of representational interference. The formation of linguistic dependencies is subject to memory interference. In this study, we ask whether memory representations are fixed, or whether they can be distorted and updated after their initial encoding. Models of Cue-Based Retrieval assume that memory representations are fixed. However, representational interference and rational inference models assume that memory contents can be edited. To examine this, we test how reflexive attraction is affected by preceding verbal agreement in Hebrew. Cue-Based Retrieval suggests that agreement on the verb can exaggerate the reflexive's sensitivity to the distractor. In contrast, we propose that if memory representations can be edited, verbal agreement can alter the representation of the subject. This process would reduce vulnerability to distortions originating from the distractor. In two self-paced reading experiments and one forced-choice completion we find (i) decreased reflexive attraction when (grammatical or ungrammatical) agreement cues were available on the preceding verb; and (ii) a preference for reflexive forms matching the verb over forms matching the subject when the sentence included ungrammatical verbal agreement. These results suggest that comprehenders use featural information from the verb to recover properties of the subject. The findings are therefore consistent with a memory model where representations can be distorted and updated, as well as with rational inference about memory disruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Written languages vary in their structural properties, which leads to cross-linguistic variability in distributions of word lengths and frequency of occurrence. • This study is the first to test across 12 typologically diverse alphabetic languages whether word length and frequency of occurrence has a similar effect on eye-movements during reading. • Both effects were highly similar across 12 alphabetic languages, suggesting universality of reading behavior within the writing system. Reading research robustly finds that shorter and more frequent words are recognized faster and skipped more often than longer and less frequent words. An empirical question that has not been tested yet is whether languages within the same writing system would produce similarly strong length and frequency effects or whether typological differences between written languages would cause those effects to vary systematically in their magnitude. We analyzed text reading eye-movement data in 12 alphabetic languages from the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO). The languages varied substantially in their word length and frequency distributions as a function of their orthographic depth and morpho-syntactic type. Yet, the effects of word length and frequency on fixation durations and skipping rate were highly similar in size between the languages. This finding suggests a high degree of cross-linguistic universality in the readers' behavioral response to linguistic complexity (indexed by word length) and the amount of experience with the word (indexed by word frequency). These findings run counter to influential theories of single word recognition, which predict orthographic depth of a language to modulate the size of these benchmark effects. They also facilitate development of cross-linguistically generalizable computational models of eye-movement control in reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Comprehenders are sensitive to state changes of semantically related objects. • Interference effects arise due to semantic similarity between the objects. • Interference effects arise due to the dissimilarity of states of the same object. • Results are compatible with theories emphasizing dynamic views of cognition. The present research shows that language comprehenders are sensitive to multiple states of target and semantically related objects. In Experiments 1 to 2B, participants (total N = 273) read sentences that either implied a minimal change of an object's state (e.g., "Jane chose a mango") or a substantial change (e.g., "Jane stepped on a mango") and then verified whether a subsequently pictured object was mentioned in the sentence. Crucially, the picture either showed the original/modified state of an object that was mentioned in the sentence (e.g., "mango" in Experiment 1) or not (e.g., "banana" in Experiments 2A and 2B). The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that the objects in a modified state were verified faster when a sentence implied a substantial state-change rather than a minimal state-change. In contrast, the reverse was true for the objects in the original state. Importantly, verification latencies of pictures depicting original and modified states of an object in the substantial state-change condition were approximately similar, thus suggesting that language comprehenders maintain multiple representations of an object in different states. The results of Experiments 2A and 2B revealed that when participants had to indicate that a pictured object (e.g., banana) was not mentioned in the sentence, their verification latencies were slowed down when the sentence contained a semantically related item (e.g., mango) and described this item as being changed substantially by the action. However, these verification latencies varied continuously with the degree of change: the more dissimilar the states of a semantically related item, the less time participants needed to verify a pictured object. The results are discussed through the prism of theories emphasizing dynamic views of event cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Compound words are very common in Finnish and Chinese. • In Finnish two-component compounds vary in length; in Chinese their length is equal. • Finnish compounds are recognized via components when the length exceeds 10 letters. • Chinese compound words are recognized holistically despite their horizontal extent. Two eye-tracking experiments in alphabetic Finnish and two in logographic Chinese examined the recognition of two-constituent compound words in reading. In Finnish, two-constituent compound words vary greatly in length, whereas in Chinese they are identical in length. According to the visual acuity principle (Bertram & Hyönä, 2003), short Finnish compound words and all two-character Chinese compound words that fit in foveal vision are recognized holistically, whereas long Finnish compound words are recognized via components. Experiment 1 in Finnish provided evidence consistent with the account, whereas the results for long compound words presented in condensed font in Experiment 2 were inconsistent with it. In Chinese, the first-character frequency effect was non-significant even when the compound words were presented in large font. The Finnish results suggest that componential processing is necessary when the compound word entails more than 10 letters. The Chinese results are compatible with the Chinese Reading Model (Li & Pollatsek, 2020) that assumes whole-word representations to overrule the activation of components during compound word recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Proficient L2-English speakers were primed to produce near-ungrammatical double-objects. • Priming from grammatical alternating verbs and near-ungrammatical non-alternating verbs. • There was lexical boost from non-alternating same-verb double object primes. • No difference found in priming patterns between L1-Germanic and L1-Romance speakers. • Results are consistent with abstract and lexically-based L2-statistical learning but not L1-generalization. In two structural priming experiments, we investigated the representations of lexically-specific syntactic restrictions of English verbs for highly proficient and immersed second language (L2) speakers of English. We considered the interplay of two possible mechanisms: generalization from the first language (L1) and statistical learning within the L2 (both of abstract structure and of lexically-specific information). In both experiments, L2 speakers with either Germanic or Romance languages as L1 were primed to produce dispreferred double-object structures involving non-alternating dative verbs. Priming occurred from ungrammatical double-object primes involving different non-alternating verbs (Experiment 1) and from grammatical primes involving alternating verbs (Experiment 2), supporting abstract statistical learning within the L2. However, we found no differences between L1-Germanic speakers (who have the double-object structure in their L1) and L1-Romance speakers (who do not), inconsistent with the prediction for between-group differences of the L1-generalization account. Additionally, L2 speakers in Experiment 2 showed a lexical boost: There was stronger priming after (dispreferred) non-alternating same-verb double-object primes than after (grammatical) alternating different-verb primes. Such lexically-driven persistence was also shown by L1 English speakers (Ivanova, Pickering, McLean, Costa, & Branigan, 2012) and may underlie statistical learning of lexically-dependent structural regularities. We conclude that lexically-specific syntactic restrictions in highly proficient and immersed L2 speakers are shaped by statistical learning (both abstract and lexically-specific) within the L2, but not by generalization from the L1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • 4 speeded continuation tasks investigated agreement attraction in Romanian. • Bare nouns cannot typically be preverbal subjects in Romanian. • Bare noun intervenors cause less attraction than modified DP intervenors. • Cue-based retrieval is sensitive to the overtness of the determiner. This paper investigates whether agreement attraction is modulated by distributional properties determining subject-likelihood by examining the degree to which bare nouns and full determiner phrases (DPs) cause agreement attraction effects in Romanian. Romanian represents an ideal testing ground for this, given two distributional constraints making bare nouns less subject-like: Locative Determiner Omission , preventing locative prepositions from taking nouns with definite articles (unless modified by adjectives), and the Naked Noun Constraint , disallowing bare nouns as preverbal subjects. We predicted that bare nouns should be less likely to trigger agreement attraction than overt DPs. We conducted four speeded forced-choice sentence continuation tasks on Romanian native speakers to test this prediction. We observe that overt DPs cause significantly more attraction than bare nouns. We suggest that the results are consistent with a cue-based retrieval mechanism for forming agreement dependencies, where cues that determine subjecthood are used to reactivate elements in working memory upon processing a verb. These cues can be language specific, and in Romanian, this means that agreement attraction is sensitive to the morphophonological overtness of the determiner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Lexical representations are thought to be abstract. • We hypothesized that voice information can be encoded in words. • We tested whether voice information can affect referent selection. • Speed of spoken word recognition was affected by talker's voice. • Our results support an episodic and distributed view of the mental lexicon. The speech signal carries both linguistic and non-linguistic information (e.g., a talker's voice qualities; referred to as indexical information). There is evidence that indexical information can affect some aspects of spoken word recognition, but we still do not know whether and how it can affect access to a word's meaning. A few studies support a dual-route model, in which inferences about the talker can guide access to meaning via a route external to the mental lexicon. It remains unclear whether indexical information is also encoded within the mental lexicon. The present study tests for indexical effects on spoken word recognition and referent selection within the mental lexicon. In two experiments, we manipulated voice-to-referent co-occurrence, while preventing participants from using indexical information in an explicit way. Participants learned novel words (e.g., bifa) and their meanings (e.g., kite), with each talker's voice linked (via systematic co-occurrence) to a specific referent (e.g., bifa spoken by speaker 1 referred to a specific picture of a kite). In testing, voice-to-referent mapping either matched that of training (congruent), or not (incongruent). Participants' looks to the target's referent were used as an index of lexical activation. Listeners looked faster at a target's referent on congruent than incongruent trials. The same pattern of results was observed in a third experiment, when testing was 24 hrs later. These results show that indexical information can be encoded in lexical representations and affect spoken word recognition and referent selection. Our findings are consistent with episodic and distributed views of the mental lexicon that assume multi-dimensional lexical representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Speakers reliably repeat structures they heard used to describe particular pictures. • This reflects durable associations between event content and syntactic structure. • This process could reflect how we learn the meanings conveyed by syntactic structure. Syntactic structures can convey certain (subtle) emergent properties of events. For example, the double-object dative ("the doctor is giving a patient pills") can convey the successful transfer of possession, whereas its syntactic alternative, the prepositional dative ("the doctor is giving pills to a patient"), conveys just a transfer to a location. Four experiments explore how syntactic structures may become associated with particular semantic content – such as these emergent properties of events. Experiment 1 provides evidence that speakers form associations between syntactic structures and particular event depictions. Experiment 2 shows that these associations also hold for different depictions of the same events. Experiments 3 and 4 implicate representations of the semantic features of events in these associations. Taken together, these results reveal an effect we term syntactic entrainment that is well positioned to reflect the recalibration of the strength of the mappings or associations that allow syntactic structures to convey emergent properties of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Investigated inflectional morphology acquisition across Polish, Finnish and Estonian. • Preregistered analyses found effects of frequency and phonological analogy. • Observed both crosslinguistic similarities and language-specific effects. • Evidence for analogy-based connectionist and exemplar accounts. The aim of this large-scale, preregistered, cross-linguistic study was to mediate between theories of the acquisition of inflectional morphology, which lie along a continuum from rule-based to analogy-based. Across three morphologically rich languages (Polish, Finnish and Estonian), 120 children (mean age 48.32 months, SD = 7.0 months) completed an experimental, elicited-production study of noun case marking. Confirmatory analyses found effects of surface-form (whole-word, token) frequency for Polish and Estonian, and phonological neighbourhood density (PND) for all three languages (using either our preregistered class-based or an exploratory form-based measure). An exploratory all-languages analysis yielded both main effects, and a predicted interaction, such that the effect of PND was greater for forms with lower surface-form frequency, which are less available for direct retrieval from memory. Cross-linguistic differences were investigated with exploratory analyses of case variance, affix syncretism and stem changes. We conclude that these findings are difficult to reconcile with accounts that posit rules or linguistic abstractions and are most naturally explained by analogy-based connectionist or exemplar accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• In three experiments, we study the processing of cataphoric reflexives. • We find that readers initially process cataphoric reflexives anaphorically. • We interpret this as evidence of pressure to interpret reflexives incrementally. • Anaphoric and cataphoric reflexives show differential sensitivity to syntax. English reflexives like herself tend to associate with a structurally prominent local antecedent in online processing. However, past work has primarily investigated reflexives in canonical direct object positions. The present study investigates cataphoric reflexives in fronted wh -predicates (e.g., The mechanic that James hired predicted how annoyed with himself the insurance agent would be). Here, the reflexive is encountered in advance of its grammatical antecedent. We ask two questions. First, will readers engage an anaphoric (backwards-looking) or cataphoric (forwards-looking) search for an antecedent? Two, how similar is this process to the retrieval process for direct object reflexives? In two eye-tracking experiments, we found that readers initially interpret a cataphoric reflexive anaphorically, and tend to associate the reflexive with the more recently encountered antecedent. We propose that structural guidance for reflexive resolution occurs only when the necessary configurational syntactic information is available when the reflexive is encountered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Individuals with lower phonological skills show higher subphonemic sensitivity. • Higher subphonemic sensitivity indicates finer-grained phonological representations. • Overspecified phonological representations may indicate reading difficulties. Many studies have established a link between phonological abilities (indexed by phonological awareness and phonological memory tasks) and typical and atypical reading development. Individuals who perform poorly on phonological assessments have been mostly assumed to have underspecified (or "fuzzy") phonological representations, with typical phonemic categories, but with greater category overlap due to imprecise encoding. An alternative posits that poor readers have overspecified phonological representations, with speech sounds perceived allophonically (phonetically distinct variants of a single phonemic category). On both accounts, mismatch between phonological categories and orthography leads to reading difficulty. Here, we consider the implications of these accounts for online speech processing. We used eye tracking and an individual differences approach to assess sensitivity to subphonemic detail in a community sample of young adults with a wide range of reading-related skills. Subphonemic sensitivity inversely correlated with meta-phonological task performance, consistent with overspecification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Switch costs were asymmetrical in early-onset, highly proficient bilinguals. • Diglossic language switching has similar switch costs as bilingual switching. • Switch costs were asymmetric, favouring the sociolinguistically preferred variety. • In diglossic switching, cognate facilitation occurred between both varieties. • In bilingual switching, cognate facilitation even occurred for a variety not used. Diglossic speakers of two varieties of a language switch between their language varieties as bilinguals do between their languages, instead of having the otherwise typical probabilistic distributions of variants across varieties. To investigate the mechanisms involved in diglossic language control and lexical access, we conducted two switching experiments, in which participants who were highly proficient in the two varieties, or languages, named pictures in Swiss German or Standard German (Experiment 1), or in Swiss German or Tamil (Experiment 2), with pictures having cognate or non-cognate names in Swiss German and Standard German. The overall magnitude of switch costs in diglossic switching was comparable to switch costs in bilingual switching. Switch costs were asymmetric, favouring switching into the sociolinguistically preferred variety (Swiss German) in Experiment 1 and the slightly less dominant language (Tamil) in Experiment 2. Cognate gains were higher for Swiss German than Standard German and occurred even for Tamil responses. These results are compatible with a model that assumes that diglossic switching is influenced by similar mechanisms of language control as bilingual switching, that inhibitory processes are involved, that the amount of lexical inhibition depends on the relative strengths of lexical representations and on top-down control, and that diglossic cognates have integrated lexical representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We introduce Pro-KWo, a new distributional predictor of vocabulary development. • Pro-KWo quantifies how much a word co-occurs with words a child already knows. • Pro-KWo predicts vocabulary development better than other predictors. • Pro-KWo's predictions are robust across age and grammatical category. Why do children learn some words before others? A large body of behavioral research has identified properties of the language environment that facilitate word learning, emphasizing the importance of particularly informative language contexts that build on children's prior knowledge. However, these findings have not informed research that uses distributional properties of words to predict vocabulary composition. In the current work, we introduce a predictor of word learning that emphasizes the role of prior knowledge. We investigate item-based variability in vocabulary development using lexical properties of distributional statistics derived from a large corpus of child-directed speech. Unlike previous analyses, we predicted word trajectories cross-sectionally across child age, shedding light on trends in vocabulary development that may not have been evident at a single time point. We also show that regardless of a word's grammatical class, the best distributional predictor of whether a child knows a word is the number of other known words with which that word tends to co-occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• People supposedly predict more strongly when predictions are frequently confirmed. • Our large-sample ERP study fails to support rational adaptation of prediction. • Linguistic prediction may be less 'rational' or Bayes optimal than is often suggested. People sometimes predict upcoming words during language comprehension, but debate remains on when and to what extent such predictions indeed occur. The rational adaptation hypothesis holds that predictions develop with expected utility: people predict more strongly when predictions are frequently confirmed (low prediction error) rather than disconfirmed. However, supporting evidence is mixed thus far and has only involved measuring responses to supposedly predicted nouns, not to preceding articles that may also be predicted. The current, large-sample (N = 200) ERP study on written discourse comprehension in Dutch therefore employs the well-known 'pre-nominal prediction effect': enhanced N400-like ERPs for articles that are unexpected given a likely upcoming noun's gender (i.e., the neuter gender article 'het' when people expect the common gender noun phrase 'de krant', the newspaper) compared to expected articles. We investigated whether the pre-nominal prediction effect is larger when most of the presented stories contain predictable article-noun combinations (75% predictable, 25% unpredictable) compared to when most stories contain unpredictable combinations (25% predictable, 75% unpredictable). Our results show the pre-nominal prediction effect in both contexts, with little evidence to suggest that this effect depended on the percentage of predictable combinations. Moreover, the little evidence suggesting such a dependence was primarily observed for unexpected, neuter-gender articles ('het'), which is inconsistent with the rational adaptation hypothesis. In line with recent demonstrations (Nieuwland, 2021a,b), our results suggest that linguistic prediction is less 'rational' or Bayes optimal than is often suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Minimal pair lexical competitors influence the pronunciation of pseudowords. • Impact of minimal pair competitors is smaller in pseudowords than in real words. • Neural model of pronunciation planning derives competitor effects from inhibition. • The model makes other novel empirical predictions which remain to be tested. Previous work has demonstrated that words are hyperarticulated on dimensions of speech that differentiate them from a minimal pair competitor. This phenomenon has been termed contrastive hyperarticulation (CH). We present a dynamic neural field (DNF) model of voice onset time (VOT) planning that derives CH from an inhibitory influence of the minimal pair competitor during planning. We test some predictions of the model with a novel experiment investigating CH of voiceless stop consonant VOT in pseudowords. The results demonstrate a CH effect in pseudowords, consistent with a basis for the effect in the real-time planning and production of speech. The scope and magnitude of CH in pseudowords was reduced compared to CH in real words, consistent with a role for interactive activation between lexical and phonological levels of planning. We discuss the potential of our model to unify an apparently disparate set of phenomena, from CH to phonological neighborhood effects to phonetic trace effects in speech errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Presents meta-analyses of gender congruency effects in noun phrases. • Demonstrates effects in German/Slavic languages but not in Romance languages. • Tests prediction of late selection hypothesis as an explanation of this difference. • Shows that available data is not sufficient to confirm this hypothesis. It has been proposed that the order in which words are prepared for production depends on the speaker's language. When producing the translation equivalent of the small cat , speakers of German or Dutch select the gender-marked determiner at a relatively early stage of production. Speakers of French or Italian postpone the encoding of a determiner or adjective until the phonological form of the noun is available. Hence, even though the words are produced in the same order (e.g., die kleine Katze in German, le petit chat in French), they are not planned in the same order and might require different amounts of advanced planning prior to production onset. This distinction between early and late selection languages was proposed to account for the observation that speakers of Germanic and Slavic languages, but not of Romance languages, are slower to name pictures in the context of a distractor word of a different gender. Meta-analyses are conducted to provide the first direct test of this cross-linguistic difference and to test a prediction of the late selection hypothesis. They confirm the existence of the gender congruency effect in German/Slavic languages and its absence in Romance languages when target and distractor words are presented simultaneously. They do not allow confirming the hypothesis that in the latter languages, a similar effect emerges when the presentation of the distractor is delayed. Overall, these analyses confirm the cross-linguistic difference but show that the evidence available to date is not sufficient to confirm or reject the late selection hypothesis as an explanation of this difference. We highlight specific directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Perceiving speech during orthographic syllable recognition was investigated. • Previously reported interference effects involving consonants extended to vowels. • Reaction time modulations mirrored those when responses are uttered. • Effects reflected representational detail below the level of phonemes. • Processing was unaffected by phonetic variants of spoken syllable distractors. In the cue-distractor paradigm, individuals observe a spoken distractor syllable while responding to a visual cue referring to a syllable. When the task is to utter the cued syllable, distractors sharing fewer subphonemic properties with the cued syllable (below the level of phonemes) lead to slower reaction times (RTs), indicating representations involved in speech perception and production are closely linked. The present study investigated whether a subphonemic level of representation is involved when the task was to manually indicate (but not produce) an orthographically cued syllable. Results revealed RT modulations closely mirroring those reported previously for uttered responses. In an additional experiment, phonetic variants of phonologically identical distractors were presented, but RT modulations were unaffected by this manipulation. The present findings indicate that perceiving speech accesses a relatively detailed phonological level of representation which is closely aligned with representations pertinent in orthographic syllable recognition and in speech production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Do pragmatic principles apply to non-linguistic symbols? • Adults and 5-year-olds apply the maxim of quantity to drawings. • Drawing complexity affects children's success. • Drawings differ from words pragmatically. • Drawings can function as communicative symbols. A foundational principle of communication is that speakers should offer as much information as required during conversation. Thus, if a speaker offers a statement with limited information (e.g., "I like the candle" when asked about a gift containing a candle and a sweater), the listener often takes the speaker to imply that a more informative statement ("I like the candle and the sweater") does not hold. Classic theories of communication have proposed that the principle of informativeness extends to purposeful exchanges beyond linguistic interactions, but relevant evidence so far is limited. In a set of studies, we adopt a simple visual-world paradigm to investigate whether 4- and 5-year-old children and adults expect drawings, like utterances, to be informative in accordance with the creator's knowledge. We find that 5-year-olds and adults (but not 4-year-olds) apply the principle of informativeness to non-linguistic symbols; furthermore, the 5-year-olds' success in this task depends on features of the symbols. We discuss the implications of these findings for debates over the mechanisms underlying pragmatic inference, as well as for children's developing understanding of the symbolic function of drawings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We test the learnability of evidentials using Artificial Language Learning methods. • Cross-linguistically prevalent evidential distinctions are learned more easily. • Same patterns occur when non-linguistic symbols encode evidential meanings. • We propose that pragmatic pressures explain the learnability patterns observed. Cross-linguistically prevalent semantic distinctions are widely assumed to be easier to learn because they reflect natural concepts. Here we propose an alternative, pragmatic perspective that links both the cross-linguistic prevalence and the learnability of semantic distinctions to communicative pressures. We focus on evidentiality (the encoding of the speaker's information source). Across languages, grammatical evidential systems are more likely to encode indirect sources (especially, reported information) compared to direct sources (e.g., visual perception). On a conceptual account, this seems puzzling, since humans reason naturally about how seeing connects to knowing. On a pragmatic account, however, the predominant encoding of the speaker's reportative compared to visual information sources can be explained in terms of informativeness (visual access is ubiquitous and potentially more reliable, hence less marked). We tested the pragmatic account in four experiments. Adult English speakers exposed to novel miniature evidential morphological systems consistently showed higher learning rates for systems with a single indirect (reportative) compared to a single direct (visual) evidential morpheme (Experiment 1). This pattern persisted even when participants were given specific cues to the target meanings (Experiment 2) and partly extended to cases where evidential meanings were conveyed through visual, not linguistic, means (Experiment 3). It also persisted when the evidential morphemes had to be learned from different materials (Experiment 4). We conclude that the cross-linguistic bias to mark reportative/indirect over visual/direct sources of information has pragmatic roots that also shape the learnability of evidential semantic distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• It's not clear whether the lexical boost is limited to heads or not. • We conducted two large-scale syntactic priming experiments with Mandarin datives. • We found that only head repetition yielded a lexical boost in both experiments. • Our results support lemma-based residual activation account of language production. Accounts of language production make different predictions about the conditions under which structural priming should be enhanced by lexical repetition (the lexical boost). Repetition of the head verb strongly enhances structural priming of a sentence, but studies of English have found contradictory results regarding the effects of noun repetition. In two experiments, Mandarin participants read a prime sentence aloud and then produced a target picture description of a dative event. In Experiment 1, the verb was printed on the target picture, and we found that repetition of the verb enhanced priming (vs. no repetition) but repetition of the agent, theme, or recipient argument did not. In Experiment 2, both the agent noun and the verb were printed on the picture, and we found that verb repetition enhanced priming but agent repetition did not. These results indicate that the lexical boost is restricted to the head verb in Mandarin and therefore support lemma-based residual activation accounts of language production in which activation of a head leads to activation of its associated grammatical construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • We tested the predictions of a resource model of phonological working memory. • Recall precision decreased as set size increased, even from one to two. • Precision increased for attended items at the expense of unattended items. • Attention influenced precision during both encoding and maintenance phases. • Similarity to vision suggests domain-general principles of resource allocation. Abstract The nature of working memory resources—in particular, their quantization (discrete vs. continuous)—has been studied extensively in the visual domain, with evidence supporting models with flexibly and continuously divisible resources. It remains unclear, however, whether similar mechanisms mediate the division of resources in phonological working memory. In three experiments, we show that, despite representational differences between visual and auditory domains, the principles of resource division are indeed similar in these domains. Exp. 1 tests slot vs. resource models, Exp. 2 gauges the effect of attention on resource division, and Exp. 3 investigates the influence of attention on different stages of working memory. Collectively, the results provide support for a resource model of phonological working memory and, more generally, point to similar computational principles governing the allocation of working memory resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Near-threshold identity priming enhances recollection-driven cued recall. • Priming-related benefits on immediate test performance are eliminated on delayed cued recall performance. • Bypassing generation has consequences for delayed recollection. Abstract Within-trial priming paradigms have been widely used to measure lexical retrieval and familiarity-based processes in speeded pronunciation, perceptual identification, lexical decision, lexical retrieval, and episodic recognition tasks. Here, we introduce a novel within-trial priming paradigm to examine cued recall, which is considered a more recollection-based task. In each experiment, participants initially studied a list of paired-associates (e.g., BADGE-gold). During each recall test trial, 500 ms after the onset of the stimulus cue (BADGE-??????), a pattern-masked prime was briefly presented for either 48 ms or 125 ms, with the task to recall the word (e.g., gold) paired with the cue (BADGE). Across seven experiments, the primes were identical (gold), semantically related (silver), orthographically related (good), or unrelated (chair) to the to-be-recalled response item (gold). The results consistently indicated that the masked identity primes benefited immediate recall at both the 48 ms and 125 ms durations. There was no benefit from the orthographically related prime condition, suggesting that participants were not using partial letter information as an additional cue for memory retrieval. Semantically related primes only produced a benefit in immediate recall at the 125 ms prime duration. Delayed cued recall performance indicated that the facilitatory priming effects observed in immediate recall were eliminated. In addition, results from conditional analyses suggest that the benefits of retrieval in an immediate recall condition are reversed in the delayed recall condition. We consider multiple interpretations of these delayed recall results and argue that the results are in part due to priming influencing an activation-based mechanism in the immediate recall task, which decreases the retrieval demands for the response item to the paired associate cue, and hence, decreases the long-term benefits of retrieval practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • We test real-time fictional language processing in 'impossible' counterfactual worlds. • We examine understanding in adults with ASD, a disorder involving deficits in executive functions and imagination. • Results reveal a dominant real-world bias that can be neutralized by a sufficiently rich fantasy context. • Comprehending counterfactuals is intact in ASD, even when real-world constraints are violated. • We show a dissociation between counterfactual thinking and Theory of Mind. Abstract Understanding fictional events requires one to distinguish reality from fantasy, and thus engages high-level processes including executive functions and imagination, both of which are impaired in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We examined how adults with and without ASD make sense of reality-violating fantasy narratives by testing real-time understanding of counterfactuals. Participants were eye-tracked as they read narratives that depicted novel counterfactual scenarios that violate reality (e.g. "If margarine contained detergent, Mum could use margarine in her washing / baking ", Experiment 1), or counterfactual versions of known fictional worlds (e.g. "If Harry Potter had lost all his magic powers, he would use his broom to sweep / fly ", Experiment 2). Results revealed anomaly detection effects in the early moments of processing (immediately in Experiment 1, and from the post-critical region in Experiment 2), which were not modulated by group. We discuss these findings in relation to the constraints from real-world and fantasy contexts that compete to influence language comprehension, and identify a dissociation between ToM impairments and counterfactual processing abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • We compared Hebb repetition learning and more explicit learning. • Hebb repetition learning did not lead to engagement in lexical competition. • Explicit training with a consolidation period facilitated lexical integration. Abstract Previous research has suggested that integration of novel words into lexical competition benefits from a consolidation delay containing a period of sleep (Dumay & Gaskell, 2007). However, a recent study argued that learning novel words via a relatively implicit Hebb repetition task leads to later lexical integration independently of sleep (Szmalec, Page, & Duyck, 2012). It is not clear whether this different time course of lexical integration is a consequence of the learning method chosen, as opposed to other between study differences. Four experiments directly compared the learning of novel words using explicit and implicit methods, namely phoneme monitoring on isolated tokens vs. Hebb repetition of syllable sequences. The impact of the learning was tested at a range of later time-points using two tests of explicit knowledge (recognition and recall) and a test of lexical integration (pause detection on related existing words). Between experiments, we also manipulated exposure frequency, the impact of syllable grouping cues in Hebb repetition and the level of mismatch between novel and real words. The results suggested that learning novel words via Hebb sequence repetition does not confer a benefit on lexical integration prior to or after sleep. We observed an engagement in lexical competition only in the case where a good level of explicit training was followed by a consolidation delay. Recognition and recall performance was generally poorer for Hebb learning. We conclude that Hebb-style implicit learning of words does not allow consolidation processes to be bypassed in lexical integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • The formulation of relative clauses requires filler retention. • Speakers employ language-specific strategies to manage this memory burden. • In English, impeded retention increases the rate of shorter dependencies. • In Hebrew, it increases the rate of resumption in direct object position. Abstract This study investigates the language production mechanisms underlying the creation of filler-gap dependencies (e.g., relative clauses: This is the boy that the girl from Norway saw_ yesterday), which require speakers to establish an argument-predicate relationship between a phrase, the 'filler', (the boy) and a further embedded predicate (saw). We show that filler-gap dependency production involves the retention of a representation of the filler until the relevant embedded position. We then report three elicitation experiments examining how English and Hebrew speakers manage and moderate filler retention demands via production choices. In Experiments 1 (English) and 2 (Hebrew), speakers produced restrictive relative clauses and non-restrictive relative clauses with the latter predicted to impede filler retention. In Experiment 3 (Hebrew), speakers produced relative clauses with and without intervening material creating interference for filler retention. We found that English speakers use passivization to moderate filler-retention demands via the creation of shorter dependencies. In Hebrew, impeded filler retention resulted in increased rate of grammatical resumption. We conclude that the production of filler-gap dependencies invokes cognitive strategies that manage the memory burdens that they impose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Speech errors follow newly learned phonotactic constraints in the laboratory. • Learning new reversed constraints is more difficult than the original learning. • The phonotactic learning process is incremental. Abstract Speakers implicitly learn novel phonotactic patterns while producing strings of syllables. The learning is revealed in their speech errors. For example, if /f/ is artificially restricted to the syllable onset position and /s/ is restricted to the coda position, speakers' slips will respect these constraints, demonstrating learning. The mechanism behind this learning was investigated by reversal shift. In two experiments, speakers produced syllable sequences for 32 trials in which one consonant was constrained to be an onset and one, a coda. Then for the next 32 trials, the constraints were reversed; for example, /f/ is now a coda and /s/ an onset. Over a third block of 32 trials, the constraints were reversed again back to the original rule. The learning of the reversed rules was slow in comparison to rapid learning of the original rule, providing evidence that the underlying mechanism is incremental. To learn a reversed rule, first one must unlearn the original association before making progress on the new rule. This pattern of rapid initial learning and slow reversal learning was replicated in a nonspeech analogue of the syllable production task. Participants pushed sequences of buttons, in which finger presses corresponded to consonants and thumb presses to vowels. A control experiment found that non-reversal shifts between blocks are easily learned, showing that the difficulty is specifically with reversal shifts. A final experiment provided evidence that learning in these experiments is greater when productions are more errorful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Listeners can use disfluencies to guide predictive strategies. • Listeners adapt their predictive strategies through distributional learning. • Listeners adapt to typical disfluency distributions in native and non-native speech. • Listeners adapt to atypical disfluency distributions only in native speech. • Associative and inferential processes together explain disfluency-driven prediction. Abstract Disfluencies, like uh , have been shown to help listeners anticipate reference to low-frequency words. The associative account of this 'disfluency bias' proposes that listeners learn to associate disfluency with low-frequency referents based on prior exposure to non-arbitrary disfluency distributions (i.e., greater probability of low-frequency words after disfluencies). However, there is limited evidence for listeners actually tracking disfluency distributions online. The present experiments are the first to show that adult listeners, exposed to a typical or more atypical disfluency distribution (i.e., hearing a talker unexpectedly say uh before high-frequency words), flexibly adjust their predictive strategies to the disfluency distribution at hand (e.g., learn to predict high-frequency referents after disfluency). However, when listeners were presented with the same atypical disfluency distribution but produced by a non-native speaker, no adjustment was observed. This suggests pragmatic inferences can modulate distributional learning, revealing the flexibility of, and constraints on, distributional learning in incremental language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Semantic encoding strategies mitigated effects of value on recognition performance. • Semantic processing is likely a crucial mechanism explaining value effects on memory. • Value also enhanced memory for items paired with an immediate forget cue. • Relatively automatic processes likely contribute to memory for valuable information. Abstract Valuable items are often remembered better than less valuable items, but research on the mechanisms supporting this value effect is limited. In the current study, we sought to determine how items might be differentially encoded based on their value. In Experiment 1, participants studied words associated with point-values which were followed by a cue to either "Remember" the word for a later test or "Forget" the word. While to-be-forgotten words were recognized at a lower rate than to-be-remembered words, there was a significant effect of value for to-be-forgotten words when the "Forget" cue was presented immediately after the word, suggesting a relatively automatic enhancement of encoding by value. In Experiment 2, we examined to what extent participants engage in more effective encoding strategies for high-value items. Participants studied a list of words with different point-values, and were instructed either to construct a mental image of the item, use rote rehearsal to learn the items, or were not given any study strategy. There were significant effects of value for items that were studied under rote rehearsal or when no strategy instruction was given. However, effects of value were nearly eliminated when participants used a mental imagery strategy for all items as this strategy boosted memory for low-value items. In Experiment 3, we sought to replicate Experiment 2 with an encoding manipulations that required responses on each trial as a manipulation check. Participants were instructed to generate a sentence containing each item, count the consonants in each item, or were not given any encoding instructions. Consistent with Experiment 2, these manipulations eliminated the effects of value on recognition memory. Thus, it appears that participants engage in more effective encoding strategies for high-value words because the benefit of value was substantially reduced when participants were required to use the same encoding strategy for all items. Together, these results suggest that valuable items are encoded more effectively due to strategic, and to a lesser extent, automatic mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • English 14-month-olds map some non-native pitch contours to objects, but not others. • The acoustic distinctiveness of pitch contour labels does not drive word learning. • Infants only demonstrate learning if one of the labels has a rising pitch contour. • English-learners may initially over-interpret rising pitch in object-label mapping. Abstract Infants show interesting patterns of flexibility and constraint early in word learning. Here, we explore perceptual and experiential factors that drive associative learning of labels that differ in pitch contour. Contrary to the salience hypothesis proposed in Experiment 1, English-learning 14-month-olds failed to map acoustically distinctive level and dipping labels to novel referents, even though they discriminated the labels when no potential referents were present. Conversely, infants readily mapped the less distinctive rising and dipping labels. In Experiment 2, we found that the degree of pitch variation in labels also does not account for learning. Instead, English-learning infants only learned if one of the labels had a rising pitch contour. We argue that experience with hearing and/or producing native language prosody may lead infants to initially over-interpret the role rising pitch plays in differentiating words. Together, our findings suggest that multiple factors contribute to whether specific acoustic forms will function as candidate object labels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Fluid and crystalized intelligence both predict metaphor comprehension. • Crystalized intelligence impacts a broad range of metaphor types. • Fluid intelligence only impacts more complex metaphors. • The Semantic Similarities Test (SST) is a new measure of crystalized intelligence. Abstract The nature of the mental processes involved in metaphor comprehension has been the focus of debate, with controversy focusing on the relative role of general analogical reasoning versus language-specific conceptual combination. In the present set of studies, we take an individual-differences approach to examine the comprehension of a variety of metaphors, some taken from literary sources, using several types of comprehension tests. In a series of metaphor-comprehension studies with college students, we measured both fluid intelligence (using the nonverbal Raven's Progressive Matrices test) and crystalized verbal intelligence (using a new Semantic Similarities Test as well as the Vocabulary subscale of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale). Previous work has shown that measures of fluid intelligence are closely linked to individual differences in analogical reasoning, whereas measures of crystalized verbal intelligence are linked to language-specific abilities. We found that each measure had a dissociable predictive relationship to metaphor comprehension. The pattern of individual differences indicated that crystalized intelligence influences metaphor comprehension across a broad range of metaphor types, whereas individual differences in fluid intelligence mainly impact comprehension of more cognitively complex metaphors, such as those that arise in literary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Bilingual advantages in inhibitory control did not occur in four tasks. • Inhibitory control was not affected by specific aspects of bilingual experience. • Interference tasks did not cluster based on stimulus–response compatibility. • Spatial stroop and Simon tasks showed significant inter-task correlations. Abstract One purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that prevalent patterns of bilingual language control lead to greater enhancement of the ability to resolve Stimulus-Stimulus conflict compared to Stimulus-Response conflict. To that end 104 bilinguals and 62 monolinguals completed four commonly used nonverbal interference tasks with varied S-S and S-R incompatibilities. No bilingual advantages were observed in any of the tasks. A second purpose was to further investigate whether a general inhibitory-control ability exists by examining inter-task correlations in the current and previous studies. We conclude that there may be a shared mechanism for interference control across spatial Stroop tasks and Simon tasks, but that this mechanism is apparently not recruited during bilingual language control to the extent that such practice would enhance a general ability. Rather, inhibition in language processing may be encapsulated within a lexical-identification system as assumed by Dijkstra and van Heuven's bilingual-interactive-activation plus model and its update Multilink. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Some but not all varieties of scalar inferences are cognitively demanding. • The presence of a processing cost depends on the scalarity of the scalar word. • Results for 'some' and 'or' cannot be generalised to all scalar words. • Processing data are compatible with the automatic computation of scalar inferences. Abstract The scalar word 'some' may be interpreted with an upper bound, i.e., as excluding 'all'. Several studies have found that the computation of this scalar inference may be associated with a processing cost (e.g., Bott & Noveck, 2004; De Neys & Schaeken, 2007), which seems to argue in favour of theories according to which pragmatic inferencing is cognitively demanding (e.g., Sperber & Wilson, 1986). This argument holds on the premise that findings for 'some' can be generalised across the entire family of scalar words, which has been called into question by recent work highlighting the diversity within the class of scalar words (e.g., van Tiel, van Miltenburg, Zevakhina, & Geurts, 2016). In order to determine how generalisable the findings for 'some' are, we conducted three experiments in which we investigated the cognitive processing of seven scalar words that differ, inter alia, in their scalarity , i.e., whether they impose a lower ('some', 'or', 'might', 'most', 'try') or upper ('low', 'scarce') bound on their dimension. We find that the scalar inferences of the negatively scalar words 'low' and 'scarce' are not associated with a processing cost, unlike the scalar inferences of positively scalar words. We argue that the reported processing cost for scalar inferencing reflects increased cognitive demands associated with the processing of negative information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: • First cross-linguistic, real-time investigation of wh -questions during production. • The subject is linguistically encoded first, even when it is not linearly initial. • Assignment of grammatical role and linear order is tightly linked temporally. Abstract We use visual world eye-tracking to provide a first look into the real-time production of an under-researched but communicatively crucial construction – wh -questions. We investigate whether the transition from abstract message to highly-structured utterances (linguistic encoding) is driven by linear order (positional processing) or subjecthood assignment (functional processing). Experiment 1 decouples positional and functional processes by comparing production of English declaratives versus object wh -questions ('Which nurses did the maids tickle?'). Experiment 2 compares the production of declaratives versus object wh -questions in Mandarin Chinese to investigate potential information-focus effects on linguistic encoding and tests whether Experiment 1's findings could be due to focus. Experiment 1 found that even though the articulation of a sentence is necessarily linear, speakers do not necessarily encode sentences in accordance with the linear order in which the words are uttered. Experiment 2 suggests that information-focus does not guide speakers' eye-movements during linguistic encoding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Errorful generation improves subsequent item recognition. • Generating errors for unrelated word pairs does not improve associative knowledge. • Initial guesses are not predicted to speed up the learning of novel words. Abstract Potts and Shanks (2014) recently reported that making mistakes improved the encoding of novel information compared with simply studying. This benefit of generating errors is counterintuitive, since it resulted in less study time and more opportunity for proactive interference. Five experiments examined the effect of generating errors versus studying on item recognition, cued recall, associative recognition, two-alternative forced choice and multiple-choice performance. Following Potts and Shanks (2014), participants first attempted to learn the English definitions of either very rare English words or Euskara nouns. During encoding, participants either guessed the definition (and almost always made an error) before the correct definition was revealed, or simply studied the words for an equivalent period. Experiments 1–4 used rare English words. In these experiments, generating errors led to better subsequent recognition of both the cues and targets compared with studying (Experiments 1 and 3). Tests of cued recall and associative recognition, by contrast, revealed no significant benefit of generating errors over studying (Experiments 1–3). Generating errors during encoding also improved performance on a two-alternative forced choice test when the correct target was presented with a novel foil, but not when the familiarity of the target and the foil was matched (Experiment 4). In Experiment 5, a different set of materials – Euskara nouns – and a different (intermixed) encoding procedure was adopted. Here, guessing improved target recognition (performance was improved on a multiple-choice test with unfamiliar foils), but impaired cued recall performance. These results suggest that, when learning word pairs that do not have a pre-existing semantic association, generating errors strengthens the cues and targets in isolation, but does not strengthen the cue-target associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • We examine the impact of configural cues on perspective selection and its dynamics. • Other-centrism increased with other-aligned configural cues (consistent or inconsistent). • Response dynamics captured through mouse-tracking were predicted by strategy. • An egocentric (vs. other-centric) strategy involved shorter, more direct trajectories. • Still, configural cues contributed to the stabilization of the other-centric strategy. Abstract How do environmental cues and social perspectives influence perspective selection? Listeners responded to instructions (e.g., "Give me the folder on the right") from a simulated partner, selecting from two objects consistently aligned with themselves (ego-aligned; Experiment 1a) or the speaker (other-aligned; Experiment1b). In Experiment 2, listeners selected from triangular 3-object configurations whose orientation varied (ego-, other-, or neither-aligned). When the configural cue was other-aligned (consistently or inconsistently: Experiments 1b and 2), listeners were more likely to be other-centric. Other-centric responders stabilized their strategy more quickly when the cue was other-aligned, but their mouse trajectories did not exhibit facilitation (Experiment 1b vs. 1a). In Experiment 2, other-centric responders showed sensitivity to the configural cue, making longer and more complex trajectories on neither-aligned configurations. That cue also influenced how listeners interpreted the front - back terms. Our findings suggest that configural cues can promote an other-centric strategy and its stabilization, influence response dynamics selectively, and impact the interpretation of spatial language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]