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The acquisition of new orthographic representations is a rapid and accurate process in proficient monolingual readers. The present study used biliterate and bialphabetic population to address the impact of phonological inconsistencies across the native (L1) and second (L2) alphabets. Naming latencies were collected from 50 Russian–English biliterates through a reading-aloud task with familiar and novel word forms repeated across 10 blocks. There were three Script conditions: (1) native Cyrillic, (2) non-native Roman, and (3) Ambiguous (with graphically identical, but phonologically inconsistent graphemes shared by both alphabets). Our analysis revealed the main effect of Script on both reading and orthographic learning: naming latencies during training were longer for the ambiguous stimuli, particularly for the novel ones. Nonetheless, novel word forms in the ambiguous condition approached the latencies for the familiar words along the exposures, although this effect was faster in the phonologically consistent trials. Post-training tests revealed similarly successful performance patterns for previously familiar and newly trained forms, indicating successful rapid acquisition of the latter. Furthermore, we found the highest free recall rates for the ambiguous stimuli. Overall, our results indicate that phonological inconsistency initially interferes with the efficiency of novel word encoding. Nevertheless, it does not prevent efficient attribution of orthographic representations; instead, the knowledge of two distinct alphabets supports a more efficient learning and a better memory for ambiguous stimuli via enhancing their encoding and retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Pronouns are referentially ambiguous (e.g. she could refer to any female), yet they are common in everyday conversations. Individuals with typical development (TD) employ several strategies to avoid pronoun interpretation errors, including the subject bias – an assumption that a pronoun typically refers to the subject (or, with the closely related order‐of‐mention bias, the first‐mentioned character) of the previous sentence. However, it is unknown if adults with intellectual disability (ID) share this strategy or the extent to which the subject bias is associated with non‐verbal abilities or receptive vocabulary. Methods: We tested 22 adults with mixed‐aetiology ID on their interpretation of ambiguous pronouns using the visual world eye‐tracking paradigm and by asking a follow‐up pronoun interpretation question. A group of TD adults was also tested to establish the strength of the subject bias with our materials and task. Results: Adults with ID did demonstrate the subject bias, but it was significantly less robust than that seen in TD. For participants with ID, the subject bias was influenced by non‐verbal IQ and receptive vocabulary at different stages of processing. Conclusions: Given the frequency of pronouns in conversation, strengthening the subject bias may help alleviate discourse and reading comprehension challenges for individuals with ID, particularly those with lower non‐verbal and/or vocabulary skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most words are ambiguous: Individual word forms (e.g., run) can map onto multiple different interpretations depending on their sentence context (e.g., the athlete/politician/river runs). Models of word-meaning access must therefore explain how listeners and readers can rapidly settle on a single, contextually appropriate meaning for each word that they encounter. I present a new account of word-meaning access that places semantic disambiguation at its core and integrates evidence from a wide variety of experimental approaches to explain this key aspect of language comprehension. The model has three key characteristics. (a) Lexical-semantic knowledge is viewed as a high-dimensional space; familiar word meanings correspond to stable states within this lexical-semantic space. (b) Multiple linguistic and paralinguistic cues can influence the settling process by which the system resolves on one of these familiar meanings. (c) Learning mechanisms play a vital role in facilitating rapid word-meaning access by shaping and maintaining high-quality lexical-semantic knowledge throughout the life span. In contrast to earlier models of word-meaning access, I highlight individual differences in lexical-semantic knowledge: Each person's lexicon is uniquely structured by specific, idiosyncratic linguistic experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that adults are skilled at learning new words and meanings. We examined whether learning new meanings for familiar words affects the processing of their existing meanings. Adults learnt fictitious meanings for previously unambiguous words over four consecutive days. We tested comprehension of existing meanings using a semantic relatedness decision task in which the probe word was related to the existing but not the new meaning. Following the training, responses were slower to the trained, but not to the untrained, words, indicating competition between newly-acquired and well-established meanings. This effect was smaller for meanings that were semantically related to existing meanings than for the unrelated counterparts, demonstrating that meaning relatedness modulates the degree of competition. Overall, the findings confirm that new meanings can be integrated into the mental lexicon after just a few days' exposure, and provide support for current models of ambiguity processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syntactic priming without lexical overlap is well-documented in language production. In contrast, reading-time comprehension studies, which typically use locally ambiguous sentences, generally find syntactic priming only with lexical overlap. This asymmetry has led some researchers to propose that distinct mechanisms underlie the comprehension and production of syntactic structure. Instead, we propose that methodological differences in how priming is assessed are largely responsible for the asymmetry: in comprehension, lexical biases in a locally ambiguous target sentence may overwhelm the influence of syntactic priming effects on a reader’s interpretation. We addressed these issues in a self-paced reading study by (1) using target sentences containing global attachment ambiguities, (2) examining a syntactic structure which does not involve an argument of the verb, and (3) factoring out the unavoidable lexical biases associated with the target sentences in a mixed-effects regression model. Under these conditions, syntactic priming affected how ambiguous sentences were parsed, and facilitated reading times when target sentences were parsed using the primed structure. This resolves discrepancies among previous findings, and suggests that the same mechanism underlies syntactic priming in comprehension and production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Listeners resolve ambiguity in speech by consulting context. Extensive research on this issue has largely relied on continua of sounds constructed to vary incrementally between two phonemic endpoints. In this study we presented listeners instead with phonetic ambiguity of a kind with which they have natural experience: varying degrees of word-final /t/-reduction. In two experiments, Dutch listeners decided whether or not the verb in a sentence such as Maar zij ren(t) soms ‘But she sometimes run(s)’ ended in /t/. In Dutch, presence versus absence of final /t/ distinguishes third- from first-person singular present-tense verbs. Acoustic evidence for /t/ varied from clear to absent, and immediately preceding phonetic context was consistent with more versus less likely deletion of /t/. In both experiments, listeners reported more /t/s in sentences in which /t/ would be syntactically correct. In Experiment 1, the disambiguating syntactic information preceded the target verb, as above, while in Experiment 2, it followed the verb. The syntactic bias was greater for fast than for slow responses in Experiment 1, but no such difference appeared in Experiment 2. We conclude that syntactic information does not directly influence pre-lexical processing, but is called upon in making phoneme decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Perception is a product of the interaction between bottom-up sensory processing and top-down higher order cognitive activity. For example, when the initial phoneme of a word is obliterated and replaced with noise, listeners hear it as intact provided there is semantic context. We modified this phonemic restoration paradigm by masking (not obliterating) the initial phoneme of a target word and presenting it within a carrier phrase which was informative (I), uninformative (U), or misinformative (M). Bias in favor of top-down context was measured as the extent to which M trials mislead listeners into reporting a target word other than that which was presented (relative to U trials that have irrelevant top-down semantic context). Forty-one participants (20 men) completed 600 test trials (300 delayed report of the phrase, 300 forced choice). Relative to the U condition, women were more affected by both the I and M cues than men, at certain levels of audibility during the forced choice condition. Moreover, the semantic strength of the I carrier phrases was correlated with the rate of correct reports of the target words in women but not in men. This suggests that women can be more affected by top-down semantic context than men. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present a novel method for establishing the preferred interpretation of ambiguities in spoken sentences. It makes use of the phoneme restoration effect (Warren, 1970): when noise replaces phoneme(s) in a word, listeners report that they perceive the word as intact and congruent with the context. If the word disambiguates a potentially ambiguous sentence, the word that is 'heard' reveals which interpretation listeners assigned. The advantage of this method is its naturalness: no deliberative judgements, no interrupting task, no attention drawn to the ambiguity, and no reliance on anomalous sentences. Our experiments examined the contribution of prosodic phrasing to syntactic ambiguity resolution, using three different tasks to probe what participants thought they had heard: Visual Word Choice, Sentence Repetition, and Speech Shadowing. All three tasks showed a powerful effect of prosody on the resolution of two syntactic ambiguities in Bulgarian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]