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Cognitive control facilitates the resolution of representational conflict during language comprehension when incompatible interpretations vie for selection due to linguistic ambiguity. However, it remains unknown if control is required only when conflict arises between multiple, strongly supported interpretations, or even when there is substantial evidence for one interpretation and competition from weak alternatives. We investigated referential ambiguities such as "She will eat the red ... ", in which listeners temporarily consider multiple red objects as potential referents, including those that are partially consistent with the input (e.g. heart satisfies "red" but not "eat"). We introduce a remote visual-world paradigm to track listeners' interpretive commitments via webcam, combined with a cross-task adaptation manipulation of cognitive-control engagement. We replicated subtle competition effects in referential ambiguity but found that upregulated cognitive control did not modulate competition. This suggests that a competing representation must reach a certain activation threshold before conflict arises, requiring cognitive control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambiguity is ubiquitous in language; lexical ambiguity refers to instances where a single word has multiple meanings. The current investigation examined homonyms, words that have the same orthography and pronunciation in English but multiple meanings (e.g., BANK, meaning "financial institution" or "river's edge"). The processing of homonyms requires the engagement of executive control processes, for example, to select the appropriate meaning of the homonym while reducing interference from other meanings. Executive function processes are known to change over the lifespan and may be impacted by experiential factors such as bilingualism. The present study uses event-related brain potentials as an index of lexical access to examine whether bilingualism influences homonym processing in older adults. The results indicate that patterns of lexical access differ as a function of bilingual status in older adults and compared to young adults, suggesting that language experience may moderate language processing in both young and older adults, at least in situations where language processing is demanding on executive function, such as in the processing of homonyms. Importantly, we show that older bilinguals show a somewhat similar pattern of ambiguity processing as their younger counterparts, while age differences were observed in monolinguals when comparing across studies. This suggests that bilingual language experience may have a mitigating impact on age-related changes in ambiguity processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A long-standing question in sentence processing research concerns the online parsing process in clause-boundary garden-path sentences, such as After Mary dressed John bathed. In this sentence, "John" must be parsed as the matrix subject DP but can be locally analysed as the object of the embedded verb. There is considerable evidence that the parser misanalyses these garden-path sentences. However, the controversy lies in whether the parser revises them during the online parsing process. The present study investigated this revision process through two self-paced reading experiments utilising grammatical constraints on reflexives and subject or object relative clauses embedded within the locally ambiguous DP. The results provided evidence of revision when a subject relative clause was embedded but not when an object relative clause was embedded. These findings suggest that the parser assigns grammatical structures that correspond to input strings during the revision of clause-boundary ambiguities but that object relative clauses affect the online revision process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates whether the perceptual salience of grammatical morphemes influences the online processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences during adult first-language (L1) comprehension. In a bidirectional self-paced reading task, adult L1 English participants (N = 44) read sentences with time adjuncts that were in a structural position in which they could attach either to the most recent verb phrase (VP) or to a VP in a higher clause. Consistent with previous findings, the reading times on these sentences indicated processing difficulty when this adjunct allowed only for high attachment. Crucially, this effect was modulated by the perceptual salience of the grammatical morphemes used to indicate time reference in these clauses. Specifically, the processing cost for high attachment was larger when time in the lower clause was indicated by the auxiliary verb will compared to when it was indicated by the relatively less salient past - ed morpheme. These findings were taken to indicate that the influence of perceptual salience extends beyond the acquisition of and sensitivity to grammatical morphemes during L1 and L2 development. Rather, the perceptual salience of these forms also appears to affect online structural processing during adult L1 sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we demonstrate the effects of Information Theory measures on the processing of polysemous nouns and reveal that the sensitivity to multiple related senses can be learned from the linguistic context. We collected large-scale data and applied a correlation design to show that an increase in sense uncertainty (or sense diversity) is followed by a faster visual lexical decision. The facilitatory effect of sense uncertainty was revealed by the predictive power of entropy, followed by the additional analysis, which revealed that both the number of senses and the balance of sense probabilities affected processing. For the first time, the balance of sense probabilities was described via redundancy to demonstrate the effect of the numerical description of the balance of sense probabilities. Finally, we crossed distribution semantics and discrimination learning to show that polysemy effects can arise as a consequence of the principles of error-driven learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambiguity pervades language. The sentence "My office is really hot" could be interpreted as a complaint about the temperature or as an indirect request to turn on the air conditioning. How do comprehenders determine a speaker's intended interpretation? One possibility is that speakers and comprehenders exploit prosody to overcome the pragmatic ambiguity inherent in indirect requests. In a pre-registered behavioral experiment, we find that human listeners can successfully determine whether a given utterance was intended as a request at a rate above chance (55%), above and beyond the prior probability of a given sentence being interpreted as a request. Moreover, we find that a classifier equipped with seven acoustic features can detect the original intent of an utterance with 65% accuracy. Finally, consistent with past work, the duration, pitch, and pitch slope of an utterance emerge both as significant correlates of a speaker's original intent and as predictors of comprehenders' pragmatic interpretation. These results suggest that human and machine comprehenders alike can use prosody to enrich the meaning of ambiguous utterances, such as indirect requests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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A growing body of research suggests that language users integrate diverse sources of information in processing and adapt to the variability of language at multiple levels. In two visual-world paradigm studies, we explored whether listeners use prosody to predict a resolution to structures with a PP that is structurally ambiguous between a modifier and an instrument interpretation. The first study revealed that listeners predict a referent that is most compatible with the location of a prosodic boundary, casting anticipatory looks to the appropriate object even before the onset of a disambiguating word. The second study indicated that listeners failed to anticipate instrument resolutions when the prosody of non-experimental filler items was unconventional, even though experimental items remained identical to the first study. The results suggest that listeners adjust their predictive processing to the utility of prosodic information according to whether a speaker reliably conforms to the conventional use of prosody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Previous studies have reported that temporarily ambiguous sentences sometimes cause reading disruption (garden-path effects). These studies have interpreted their finding as indicating that the human sentence processing device (the processor) initially assigns incorrect structures and subsequently attempts revision. That is a logical interpretation. However, no previous studies have demonstrated evidence of a causal relationship between garden-path effects and initial misanalysis. Besides, there is currently limited evidence regarding whether the processor conducts revision. The present study reports two self-paced reading experiments that investigated these fundamental issues about garden-path effects. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the processor initially misanalyses temporarily ambiguous sentences and consequently encounters garden-path effects and persists with initial misinterpretations. Experiment 2 similarly observed garden-path effects. Additionally, there was evidence that the processor constructs globally correct structures during revision. These findings provide evidence that garden-path effects result from initial misanalysis, and the processor conducts revision upon disambiguation. [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]

Implicit expectations play a central role in sentence processing. These expectations are often assumed to be static or change only at relatively slow time scales. Some theoretical proposals, however, hold that comprehenders continuously adapt their expectations based on recent input. Existing evidence has relied heavily on self-paced reading, which requires familiarisation with a novel task. We instead employ eye-tracking reading to investigate the role of expectation adaptation during speeds and task demands more closely resembling natural reading. In two experiments, subjects read sentences that contained higher than expected proportions of a previously highly unexpected structure (reduced relative clauses). We test how this change in the statistics of structures within the experiment affects reading: if subjects adapt their expectations, reading times for the unexpected structure should decrease over the course of the experiment. This prediction is confirmed in both experiments. Significant effects of the changing statistics are observed for regression-related measures but not first-pass reading measures. We discuss possible accounts of this pattern in the eye-movement record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored differences between the two hemispheres in processing written words among deaf readers. The main hypothesis was that impoverished phonological abilities of deaf readers may lead to atypical patterns of hemispheric involvement. To test this, deaf participants completed a metalinguistic awareness test to evaluate their orthographic and phonological awareness. Additionally, they were asked to read biased or neutral target sentences ending with an ambiguous homograph, with each sentence followed by the request to make a rapid lexical decision on a target word presented either to the left (LH) or right hemisphere (RH). Targets were either related to the more frequent, dominant, meaning of the homograph, to the less frequent, subordinate, meaning of the homograph or were not related at all. An Inverse Efficiency Score based on both response latency and accuracy was calculated and revealed that deaf readers' RH perform better than their LH. In contrast to hearing readers who in previous studies manifested left hemisphere dominance when completed the same research design. The apparent divergence of deaf readers' hemisphere lateralization from that of hearing counterparts seems to validate previous findings suggesting greater reliance on RH involvement among deaf individuals during visual word recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses a response mouse-tracking paradigm to examine the role of sub-phonemic information in online lexical ambiguity resolution of continuous speech. We examine listeners' sensitivity to the sub-phonemic information that is specific to the ambiguous internal open juncture/s/-stop sequences in American English (e.g., "place kin" vs. "play skin"), that is, voice onset time (VOT) indicating different degrees of aspiration (e.g., long VOT for "kin" vs. short VOT for "skin") in connected speech contexts. A cross-splicing method was used to create two-word sequences (e.g., "place kin" or "play skin") with matching VOTs (long for "kin"; short for "skin") or mismatching VOTs (short for "kin"; long for "skin"). Participants (n = 20) heard the two-word sequences, while looking at computer displays with the second word in the left/right corner ("KIN" and "SKIN"). Then, listeners' click responses and mouse movement trajectories were recorded. Click responses show significant effects of VOT manipulation, while mouse trajectories do not. Our results show that stop-release information, whether temporal or spectral, can (mis)guide listeners' interpretation of the possible location of a word boundary between /s/ and a following stop, even when other aspects in the acoustic signal (e.g., duration of /s/) point to the alternative segmentation. Taken together, our results suggest that segmentation and lexical access are highly attuned to bottom-up phonetic information; our results have implications for a model of spoken language recognition with position-specific representations available at the prelexical level and also allude to the possibility that detailed phonetic information may be stored in the listeners' lexicons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pitch accent serves multiple duties (encoding lexical accent, syntactic structure, and focus) in spoken Japanese. This study investigates how listeners interpret a role-ambiguous pitch prominence surfacing as F0 rise, which could be a cue to the resolution of a syntactic ambiguity between two possible branching structures, or a signal of contrastive focus on the constituent accompanied by the rise. Two visual world paradigm experiments tested the same Japanese linguistic stimuli with and without pitch emphasis on the second word of structures of the following form: modifier + N1 + N2. In Experiment 1, the visual context suppressed the availability of the contrastive interpretation; in Experiment 2, the visual context made the contrastive interpretation available. We found that the same pitch event can be interpreted as both syntax-encoding and contrastencoding information within the course of processing the same sentence, as long as contextual information is made visually available. When contrastive focus is pragmatically felicitous, it is computed immediately, as soon as the incoming input is accompanied by a notable pitch prominence (Experiment 2). The same prosodic cue can then be re-interpreted as a signal to syntax after the branching ambiguity is recognized due to subsequent input (Experiments 1 and 2). This is most consistent with the view that an initially assigned prosodic boundary is exploited for re-interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primary Objective. The objective of this study was to investigate the factors that might have a negative influence on auditory processing and higher-level language processing in the US veterans of the recent foreign wars (Iraq and Afghanistan). Research Design. Exploratory, cross-sectional, correlational, prospective, cohort-design. Methods and Procedures. The experimental group consisted of 12 US veterans of war (10 males and 2 females) with blast exposure. The control group consisted of six US veterans (5 males and 1 female) without the history of blast exposure. Both groups were matched in mean age. Both groups were tested on Boston Assessment of Traumatic Brain Injury, Consonant Trigrams Test, Symbol Digit Modality Test, Trail Making Test, SCAN-3, CELF-5-Metalinguistics, CASL, and an unpublished test on the processing of sentence prosody. Main Outcomes and Results. Significant group differences in attention, and time-compressed sentence processing were found. For those veterans (in the experimental group) who were not wearing their helmets at the time of blast, additional significant differences were noted with inferencing and auditory figure-ground tasks. Conclusions: Findings support the importance of including speech/language pathologists in all stages of recovery for veterans post-blast exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Words of one language often have multiple translations into another language. Does mapping of an L2 word onto multiple L1 words impact how these L1 words are represented in the bilingual lexicon? Russian-English bilinguals decided on the lexical status (Exp1) or the conceptual relatedness (Exp2) of pairs of Russian words that had the same or different translations in English. We obtained evidence for a facilitative effect of L2-to-L1 translation ambiguity. In Exp1, bilinguals were faster to respond to a Russian target if a prime had the same vs. different English translation as the target. Further, the magnitude of the N400 ERP component was reduced and the P200 was enhanced in the translation ambiguous compared to non-ambiguous condition. In Exp2, translation alternatives were rated as being more conceptually similar than words with different translations. Thus, the presence of a shared L2 translation leads to some convergence of corresponding L1 lexico-conceptual representations. [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]

Background & Aims: Impaired message-structure mapping results in deficits in both sentence production and comprehension in aphasia. Structural priming has been shown to facilitate syntactic production for persons with aphasia (PWA). However, it remains unknown if structural priming is also effective in sentence comprehension. We examined if PWA show preserved and lasting structural priming effects during interpretation of syntactically ambiguous sentences and if the priming effects occur independently of or in conjunction with lexical (verb) information. Methods & Procedures: Eighteen PWA and 20 healthy older adults (HOA) completed a written sentence-picture matching task involving the interpretation of prepositional phrases (PP; the chef is poking the solider with an umbrella) that were ambiguous between high (verb modifier) and low attachment (object noun modifier). Only one interpretation was possible for prime sentences, while both interpretations were possible for target sentences. In Experiment 1, the target was presented immediately after the prime (0-lag). In Experiment 2, two filler items intervened between the prime and the target (2-lag). Within each experiment, the verb was repeated for half of the prime-target pairs, while different verbs were used for the other half. Participants' off-line picture matching choices and response times were measured. Results: After reading a prime sentence with a particular interpretation, HOA and PWA tended to interpret an ambiguous PP in a target sentence in the same way and with faster response times. Importantly, both groups continued to show this priming effect over a lag (Experiment 2), although the effect was not as reliable in response times. However, neither group showed lexical (verb-specific) boost on priming, deviating from robust lexical boost seen in the young adults of prior studies. Conclusions: PWA demonstrate abstract (lexically-independent) structural priming in the absence of a lexically-specific boost. Abstract priming is preserved in aphasia, effectively facilitating not only immediate but also longer-lasting structure-message mapping during sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many experiments have studied attraction errors in number agreement (e.g. ‘The key to the cabinets were rusty’). It has been noted that singular heads with plural dependents (attractors) trigger larger attraction effects than plural heads with singular attractors, and that in languages with morphological case, morphologically ambiguous attractors trigger larger effects (accusative plural forms coinciding with nominative plural were compared to unambiguous case forms). In Russian, the nominative plural forms of some nouns coincide not only with their accusative plural forms but also with the genitive singular. In one production and two comprehension experiments, such genitive singular forms were found to trigger larger attraction effects than morphologically unambiguous genitive plural forms. Accusative plural forms coinciding with the nominative plural were shown to be the most effective attractors. These results have implications for different models of attraction and for other discussions in morphology concerning ambiguity processing, different approaches to syncretism and the problem of lexical insertion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An MEG study investigated the role of context in semantic interpretation by examining the comprehension of ambiguous words in contexts leading to different interpretations. We compared high-ambiguity words in minimally different contexts (to bowl, the bowl) to low-ambiguity counterparts (the tray, to flog). Whole brain beamforming revealed the engagement of left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and posterior middle temporal gyrus (LPMTG). Points of interest analyses showed that both these sites showed a stronger response to verb-contexts by 200 ms post-stimulus and displayed overlapping ambiguity effects that were sustained from 300 ms onwards. The effect of context was stronger for high-ambiguity words than for low-ambiguity words at several different time points, including within the first 100 ms post-stimulus. Unlike LIFG, LPMTG also showed stronger responses to verb than noun contexts in low-ambiguity trials. We argue that different functional roles previously attributed to LIFG and LPMTG are in fact played out at different periods during processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four eye-tracking experiments examined how violations of the Gricean maxim of quantity affect reading. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that first-pass reading times for size-modified definite nouns ( the small towel ) were longer when the modifier was redundant, as the context contained one rather than two possible referents, whereas first-pass times for bare nouns ( the towel ) were unaffected by whether the context contained multiple referents that resulted in ambiguity. Experiment 3 showed that unlike redundant size modifiers, redundant color modifiers did not increase first-pass times. Experiment 4 confirmed this finding, demonstrating that the effect of redundancy was dependent on the meaning of the modifier. We propose that initial referential processing is led by the lexico-semantic representation of the referring expression rather than Gricean expectations about optimal informativeness: Redundancy of a size-modifier immediately disrupts comprehension because the processor fails to activate the referential contrast implied by the meaning of the modifier, whereas referential ambiguity has no immediate effect, as it allows the activation of at least one semantically-compatible referent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human language is massively ambiguous, yet we are generally able to identify the intended meanings of the sentences we hear and read quickly and accurately. How we manage and resolve ambiguity incrementally during real-time language comprehension given our cognitive resources and constraints is a major question in human cognition. Previous research investigating resource constraints on lexical ambiguity resolution has yielded conflicting results. Here we present results from two experiments in which we recorded eye movements to test for evidence of resource constraints during lexical ambiguity resolution. We embedded moderately biased homographs in sentences with neutral prior context and either long or short regions of text before disambiguation to the dominant or subordinate interpretation. The length of intervening material had no effect on ease of disambiguation. Instead, we found only a main effect of meaning at disambiguation, such that disambiguating to the subordinate meaning of the homograph was more difficult—results consistent with the reordered access model and contemporary probabilistic models, but inconsistent with the capacity-constrained model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the ability of persons with aphasia (PWA) to resolve different types of ambiguous words (homophones, metaphors, and metonyms) in discourse contexts. Method: Six PWA and 10 controls listened to short discourses that biased either the dominant (more frequent) or subordinate (less frequent) version of an ambiguous word as well as nonsense (filler) discourses. Participants then indicated whether or not the final sentence, which contained the ambiguity, made sense in the discourse. Data for both accuracy and reaction time were collected. Results: There was no significant Group × Word Type × Frequency interaction in the reaction time data. In the accuracy analysis, there was a significant Group × Frequency × Word Type interaction, which appeared to be driven by the PWA’s relative accuracy with subordinate homophones and relative inaccuracy with subordinate metaphors. Conclusions: These results suggest that PWA were able to use discourse contexts to resolve subordinate versions of literal ambiguous words but have difficulty resolving metaphoric ambiguous words. Further investigations should be done to clarify how much context PWA require to successfully resolve lexical ambiguities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the language-specific prosodic architecture, a phrase-medial pitch expansion in Japanese may signal either a narrow contrast or the beginning of a new syntactic phrase. To examine how visual and discourse context affects the tug of war between these two interpretations, three eye-tracking experiments tested the interpretation of a pitch expansion in referential contexts that varied in the plausibility of contrastive interpretation. The results showed that the degree of structural interpretation was inversely related to the plausibility of contrastive interpretation. Although there was no direct evidence of contrastive processing of the pitch prominence, participants responded to the trials with the pitch expansion much slower than to those without the expansion only when the contrastive interpretation of the pitch prominence was contextually infelicitous. These results suggest that the phrase-medial pitch expansion may have been simultaneously processed for contrast and structural disambiguation. However, the task that demanded resolutions of standing referential ambiguities seemed to make the structural disambiguation the best use of the prosodic cue. [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]

In this study, we examined two issues regarding the role of context in ambiguity resolution: whether access to the contextually appropriate meaning is exhaustive or selective, and whether the contextually inappropriate meaning is inhibited. Participants read texts in which a biased ambiguous word was encountered twice while their eye movements were measured. The context preceding the first encounter varied in the extent to which the subordinate meaning was supported; the context preceding the second encounter always supported the dominant meaning. The findings suggest that lexical access is exhaustive but can be influenced by context, and that the subsequent accessibility of the contextually inappropriate meaning is unaffected by previous selection processes. The results were interpreted in terms of the assumptions of the reordered-access model and activation mechanisms that operate during reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined how noun and verb processing in bilingual visual word recognition are affected by within and between-language overlap. We investigated how word class ambiguous noun and verb cognates are processed by bilinguals, to see if co-activation of overlapping word forms between languages benefits from additional overlap within a language, and whether this effect is sensitive to the grammatical category of a word. Although effects of form overlap are ubiquitous in studies on nouns, little is known about such effects in verbs. In two experiments, Dutch–English bilinguals performed lexical decision tasks in L2 in which cognate status and word class ambiguity were manipulated in nouns and verbs. Responses to verb targets in both experiments showed facilitatory effects of both types of overlap. In contrast, noun targets in both experiments showed only a cognate effect, but no ambiguity effect. We argue that the difference between verbs and nouns arises because verb representations are more complex than those of nouns. As a consequence, verb processing benefits more from within-language form overlap than noun processing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In computer-mediated communication, emojis can be used for various purposes. As small graphical images, many emojis depict abstract or concrete objects ideogrammatically. We report on a self-paced reading experiment of sentences containing emojis. We tested to what extent emojis encode lexical meanings when used in a sentence context. First, we confirm earlier findings that sentence comprehension does not suffer when emojis replace words. Second, we show that in addition to the graphically encoded concept, emojis in some cases enable the retrieval of an entire lexical entry, including the phonological value of the associated word. This means that even emojis showing a homophonous noun to the target word, such as "palm (tree)" for "palm (of hand)" can be interpreted correctly in context. Based on measured differences in the reading times between words, emojis depicting the intended target referent, and emojis depicting a homophonous noun, we propose a context dependent account of emoji interpretation. • Sentence comprehension does not suffer when emojis replace words. • Emojis within sentences are processed like pictures. • In special circumstances, emojis can activate an entire lexical entry, including phonological information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In three priming experiments, we investigated whether the meanings of ambiguous morphemes were activated during word recognition. Using a meaning generation task, Experiment 1 demonstrated that the dominant meaning of individually presented ambiguous morphemes was reported more often than did other less frequent meanings. Also, participants tended to produce responses that were consistent with the morphemic meaning of the subliminally presented prime words. Experiment 2 employed a masked priming lexical decision task (prime display duration=40ms) and showed that the recognition of targets which took the dominant meaning of ambiguous morphemes was facilitated by all morpheme-sharing primes, regardless of their intended interpretation. In contrast, morphological priming for subordinate targets was observed only in the subordinate priming condition. Using an unmasked priming task (prime display duration=100ms). Experiment 3 revealed that lexical decision responses were facilitated only when the morphemic interpretations in primes and targets were matched. These data indicate that the different meanings of an ambiguous morpheme are activated early during word recognition and that it takes time to select the appropriate morphemic interpretation. The results are discussed with reference to a modified lemma model of word recognition. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Language comprehension is assumed to proceed incrementally, and comprehenders commit to initial interpretations even in the absence of unambiguous information. Initial ambiguous object arguments are therefore preferably interpreted as subjects, an interpretation that needs to be revised towards an object initial interpretation once the disambiguating information is encountered. Most accounts of suchgrammatical function reanalysesassume that they involve phrase structure revisions, and do not differ from other syntactic reanalyses. A number of studies using measurements of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) provide evidence for this view by showing that both reanalysis types engender similar neurophysiological responses (e.g., P600 effects). Others have claimed that grammatical function reanalyses rather involve revisions of the mapping of thematic roles to argument noun phrases (NPs). In line with this, it has been shown that grammatical function reanalysis during spoken language comprehension engenders a N400 effect, an effect which has been shown to correlate with general problems in the mapping of thematic roles to argument NPs in a number of languages. This study investigated the ERP correlate to grammatical function reanalysis in Swedish. Postverbal NPs that disambiguated the interpretation of object-topicalised sentences towards an object-initial reading engendered a N400 effect with a local, right-parietal distribution. This “reanalysis N400” effect provides further support for the view that grammatical function reanalysis is functionally distinct from syntactic reanalyses and rather involves a revision of the mapping of thematic roles to the sentence arguments. Postverbal subject pronouns in object-topicalised sentences were also found to engender an enhanced P300 wave in comparison to object pronouns, an effect which seems to depend on the overall infrequency of object-topicalised constructions. This finding provides support for the view that the “reanalysis N400” in some cases can be attenuated by a task-related P300 component. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: Comprehension of semantically ambiguous words (e.g., “bark”) is strongly influenced by the relative frequencies of their meanings, such that listeners are biased towards retrieving the most frequent meaning. These biases are often assumed to reflect a highly stable property of an individual’s long-term lexical–semantic representations. We present three experiments that support an alternative view and suggest that these biases reflect a highly flexible aspect of lexical representations. We show that a single encounter with an ambiguous word in context is sufficient to bias a listener’s interpretation of that word after an average delay of more than 20min. This word-meaning priming effect is not affected by changes to the speakers’ identity between initial exposure and later testing, and is longer-lasting than purely semantic priming without the presence of the ambiguous word. These results provide evidence for a top-down influence of sentential context in retuning abstract lexical/semantic representations, and illustrate how semantic retuning can improve the comprehension of ambiguous words in speech. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Words like church are polysemous, having two related senses (a building and an organization). Three experiments investigated how polysemous senses are represented and processed during sentence comprehension. On one view, readers retrieve an underspecified, core meaning, which is later specified more fully with contextual information. On another view, readers retrieve one or more specific senses. In a reading task, context that was neutral or biased towards a particular sense preceded a polysemous word. Disambiguating material consistent with only one sense followed, in a second sentence (Experiment 1) or the same sentence (Experiments 2 and 3). Reading the disambiguating material was faster when it was consistent with that context, and dominant senses were committed to more strongly than subordinate senses. Critically, following neutral context, the continuation was read more quickly when it selected the dominant sense, and the degree of sense dominance partially explained the reading time advantage. Similarity of the senses also affected reading times. Across experiments, we found that sense selection may not be completed immediately following a polysemous word but is completed at a sentence boundary. Overall, the results suggest that readers select an individual sense when reading a polysemous word, rather than a core meaning. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Three experiments were conducted to investigate how syntactic-category and semantic information is processed in visual word recognition. The stimuli were two-character Chinese words in which semantic and syntactic-category ambiguities were factorially manipulated. A lexical decision task was employed in Experiment 1, whereas a semantic relatedness judgment task and a syntactic-category judgment task were adopted in Experiments 2 and 3, respectively. A semantic ambiguity disadvantage was observed in all three experiments, whereas a syntactic-category ambiguity disadvantage was only found in Experiment 3. In addition, no significant semantic ambiguity×syntactic-category ambiguity interaction was obtained across the three experiments. These results are consistent with the view that in isolated visual word recognition, the semantic information is crucial, but the syntactic-category information is not, at least in Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 examined temporarily ambiguous coordination structures such as put the butter in the bowl and the pan on the towel. Minimal Attachment predicts that the ambiguous noun phrase the pan will be interpreted as a noun-phrase coordination structure because it is syntactically simpler than clausal coordination. Constraint-based theories assume that interpretations are the result of a constraint-satisfaction process, which predicts that frequency or context can bias the parser to initially pursue a more complex interpretation. The results showed an initial preference for noun-phrase coordination, despite the fact that sentential coordination is more frequent in imperative structures. These data suggest that the parser uses a syntactic simplicity heuristic for building initial structural analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A pair of speaking and listening studies investigated the prosody of sentences with temporary Object/Clause and Late/Early Closure ambiguities. Speakers reliably produced prosodic cues that allowed listeners to disambiguate Late/Early Closure sentences, but only infrequently produced prosody that disambiguated Object/Clause sentences, as shown by the results of listening studies. The two continuations for Object/Clause sentences were not pronounced with identical prosody, but the differences in their productions were not helpful to listeners. Speakers’ different performance on the two sentence types is traced to their different syntactic structures. These results illustrate the importance of the syntax—prosody mapping in production and test the prosodic predictions of syntax—prosody models like that of Watson and Gibson (2004). [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]

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In this critique of current reading research and practice, the author contends that the extreme ambiguity of English spelling-sound correspondence has confined reading science to an insular, Anglocentric research agenda addressing theoretical and applied issues with limited relevance for a universal science of reading. The unique problems posed by this "outlier" orthography, the author argues, have focused disproportionate attention on oral reading accuracy at the expense of silent reading, meaning access, and fluency, and have significantly distorted theorizing with regard to many issues-including phonological awareness, early reading instruction, the architecture of stage models of reading development, the definition and remediation of reading disability, and the role of lexical-semantic and supralexical information in word recognition. The dominant theoretical paradigm in contemporary (word) reading research-the Coltheart/Baron dual-route model (see, e.g., J. Baron, 1977; M. Coltheart, 1978) and, in large measure, its connectionist rivals-arose largely in response to English spelling-sound obtuseness. The model accounts for a range of English-language findings, but it is ill-equipped to serve the interests of a universal science of reading chiefly because it overlooks a fundamental unfamiliar-to-familiar/novice-to-expert dualism applicable to all words and readers in all orthographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examined the role of intermediate, sublexical representations in spoken word perception. In particular, they tested whether flaps, which are neutralized allophones of intervocalic /t/s and /d/s, map onto their underlying phonemic counterparts. In 2 shadowing tasks, the authors found that flaps primed their carefully articulated counterparts, and vice versa. Because none of the flapped stimuli were lexically ambiguous (e.g., between rater and raider), these results provide evidence that such priming is sublexically mediated. Therefore, the current study provides further insights into when underlying form-based representations are activated during spoken word processing. In particular, the authors argue that phonological ambiguity, inherent in their flapped stimuli, is one of the conditions leading to the activation of underlying representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Recent experience with homonyms primes their interpretation tens of minutes later. • Priming occurs from sentences in which prior context guides disambiguation. • Priming can occur for sentences in which ambiguous words require reinterpretation. • "Good enough" listening tasks reduce priming if sentences require reinterpretation. • Findings reveal learning mechanisms by which lexical-semantic knowledge is updated. A single encounter with an ambiguous word (e.g. bark, ball) in the context of a less-frequent meaning (e.g. "Sally worried about how crowded the ball would be.") can shift the later interpretation of the word toward the same subordinate meaning. This lexical-semantic retuning functions to improve future comprehension of ambiguous words. The present paper investigates the relationship between this form of learning and the specific processes that occur during sentence comprehension. One possibility is that lexical-semantic retuning occurs immediately upon hearing the ambiguous word, during initial meaning activation and selection, so priming should be strongest when the disambiguating context is provided before the ambiguous word (prior disambiguation). Alternatively, priming may relate to the degree of reinterpretation needed, which would predict maximal learning when the word is initially misunderstood because the critical context is given after the word (subsequent disambiguation, e.g. "Sally worried that the ball would be too crowded."). In four experiments, adults listened to prior and subsequent disambiguation sentences, and were later tested on their interpretations of primed and unprimed ambiguous words. The results showed that lexical-semantic retuning can occur for both sentence types. Importantly, however, the emergence of priming for subsequent disambiguation sentences was sensitive to the prime conditions: when the task could potentially be performed without needing to re-analyse the ambiguity, then no significant priming was observed. This is consistent with the 'good enough' view of language processing which states that representations can remain as (im)precise as mandated by the situation, and that lexical-semantic retuning operates on the output of good-enough interpretation. More generally, our findings suggest that lexical-semantic retuning is driven by participants' final interpretation of the word meanings during the prime encounter, regardless of initial meaning activation or misinterpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Lingering misinterpretation and good enough processing have been widely examined. • Previous studies restricted to syntactic ambiguity (As Sue dressed the baby played). • We examined lingering misinterpretation of filler-gap dependencies. • We compared native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers in five experiments. • Results show good enough processing is a general property of L1 and L2 comprehension. Research on temporarily ambiguous "garden-path" sentences (e.g., After Mary dressed the baby laughed) has shown that initially assigned misinterpretations linger after reanalysis of the temporarily ambiguous phrase in both native (L1) and non-native (L2) readers. L2 speakers have particular difficulty with reanalysis, but the source of this L1/L2 difference is debated. Furthermore, how lingering misinterpretation may influence other aspects of language processing has not been systematically examined. We report three offline and two online experiments investigating reanalysis and misinterpretation of filler-gap dependences (e.g., Elisa noticed the truck which the policeman watched the car from). Our results showed that L1 and L2 speakers are prone to lingering misinterpretation during dependency resolution. L1/L2 differences were observed such that L2 speakers had increased difficulty reanalysing some filler-gap dependencies, however this was dependent on how the dependency was disambiguated. These results are compatible with the "good-enough" approach to language processing, and suggest that L1/L2 differences are more likely when reanalysis is particularly difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]