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Sheaves are mathematical objects that describe the globally compatible data associated with open sets of a topological space. Original examples of sheaves were continuous functions; later they also became powerful tools in algebraic geometry, as well as logic and set theory. More recently, sheaves have been applied to the theory of contextuality in quantum mechanics. Whenever the local data are not necessarily compatible, sheaves are replaced by the simpler setting of presheaves. In previous work, we used presheaves to model lexically ambiguous phrases in natural language and identified the order of their disambiguation. In the work presented here, we model syntactic ambiguities and study a phenomenon in human parsing called garden-pathing. It has been shown that the information-theoretic quantity known as 'surprisal' correlates with human reading times in natural language but fails to do so in garden-path sentences. We compute the degree of signalling in our presheaves using probabilities from the large language model BERT and evaluate predictions on two psycholinguistic datasets. Our degree of signalling outperforms surprisal in two ways: (i) it distinguishes between hard and easy garden-path sentences (with a p -value <10−5), whereas existing work could not, (ii) its garden-path effect is larger in one of the datasets (32 ms versus 8.75 ms per word), leading to better prediction accuracies. This article is part of the theme issue 'Quantum contextuality, causality and freedom of choice'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An experiment investigated the "good-enough" processing account regarding how people parse sentences with late-closure ambiguity, such as While Anna dressed the baby who was cute and cuddly spit up on the bed. One possible result of an initial misparse of the sentence (thinking that Anna dressed the baby) is that the correct parse then cannot be created. The alternative is that, although the misparse may linger in the comprehender's mind, the correct parse is eventually established and coexists with the misparse. This study approached this issue through an analogy to quantum physics. When photons are directed toward two small slits, it appears as if each photon passes through both slits ("bothness"). If particles not subject to quantum effects are directed at the slits, they pass through one or the other ("oneness"). Participants read sentences containing the late-closure ambiguity and afterward answered two questions about each sentence. These could query the potential misparse (Did Anna dress the baby?), correct-parse (Did Anna dress herself?), or the main clause (Did the baby spit up on the bed?), and the order of the question types was varied to test for quantum measurement context effects. The results supported "oneness," that is, the correct-parse and misparse of the subordinate clause do not coexist. Participants rarely said "yes" to both the misparse and correct-parse questions, and the "yes" response proportions for these two questions invariably added up to around 1.0. Furthermore, no quantum-like measurement-order effect between misparse and correct-parse questions was found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For any research program examining how ambiguous words are processed in broader linguistic contexts, a first step is to establish factors relating to the frequency balance or dominance of those words' multiple meanings, as well as the similarity of those meanings to one other. Homonyms—words with divergent meanings—are one ambiguous word type commonly utilized in psycholinguistic research. In contrast, although polysemes—words with multiple related senses—are far more common in English, they have been less frequently used as tools for understanding one-to-many word-to-meaning mappings. The current paper details two norming studies of a relatively large number of ambiguous English words. In the first, offline dominance norming is detailed for 547 homonyms and polysemes via a free association task suitable for words across the ambiguity continuum, with a goal of identifying words with more equibiased meanings. The second norming assesses offline meaning similarity for a partial subset of 318 ambiguous words (including homonyms, unambiguous words, and polysemes divided into regular and irregular types) using a novel, continuous rating method reliant on the linguistic phenomenon of zeugma. In addition, we conduct computational analyses on the human similarity norming data using the BERT pretrained neural language model (Devlin et al., 2018, BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. ArXiv Preprint. arXiv:1810.04805) to evaluate factors that may explain variance beyond that accounted for by dictionary-criteria ambiguity categories. Finally, we make available the summarized item dominance values and similarity ratings in resultant appendices (see supplementary material), as well as individual item and participant norming data, which can be accessed online (https://osf.io/g7fmv/). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translating experimental tasks that were designed to investigate differences between conditions at the group-level into valid and reliable instruments to measure individual differences in cognitive skills is challenging (Hedge et al., 2018; Rouder et al., 2019; Rouder & Haaf, 2019). For psycholinguists, the additional complexities associated with selecting or constructing language stimuli, and the need for appropriate well-matched baseline conditions make this endeavour particularly complex. In a typical experiment, a process-of-interest (e.g. ambiguity resolution) is targeted by contrasting performance in an experimental condition with performance in a wellmatched control condition. In many cases, careful between-condition matching precludes the same participant from encountering all stimulus items. Unfortunately, solutions that work for group-level research (e.g. constructing counterbalanced experiment versions) are inappropriate for individual-differences designs. As a case study, we report an ambiguity resolution experiment that illustrates the steps that researchers can take to address this issue and assess whether their measurement instrument is both valid and reliable. On the basis of our findings, we caution against the widespread approach of using datasets from group-level studies to also answer important questions about individual differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thematic-role assignment is influenced by several classes of cues during sentence comprehension, ranging from morphological exponents of syntactic relation such as case and agreement to probabilistic cues such as prosody. The effect of these cues cross-linguistically varies, presumably reflecting their language-specific robustness in signaling thematic roles. However, language-specific frequencies are not mapped onto the cue strength in a one-to-one fashion. The present article reports two eye-tracking studies on Hungarian examining the interaction of case and prosody during the processing of case-unambiguous (Experiment 1) and case-ambiguous (Experiment 2) clauses. Eye fixations reveal that case is a strong cue for thematic role assignment, but stress only enhances the effect of case in case-unambiguous clauses. This result differs from findings reported for Italian and German in which case initial stress reduces the expectation for subject-first clauses. Furthermore, the sentence comprehension facts are not explained by corpus frequencies in Hungarian. After considering an array of hypotheses about the roots of cross-linguistic variation, we conclude that the crucial difference lies in the high reliability/availability of case cues in Hungarian in contrast to the further languages examined within this experimental paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, mechanisms of processing ambiguous linguistic constructions have attracted great attention, since their understanding can tell us a lot about the fundamental processes of language comprehension — attaching concepts into single coherent representations. From the wide area of research on the topic of cognitive processing, this paper focuses on one type of ambiguity for which contradictory principles of processing have been established in different languages: the syntactic ambiguity of the relative clause, the most common and the most controversial sentence construction in research on language processing to date. The text offers an overview of empirical findings, hypotheses, and implications for wider models of cognitive processing, including their contradictions and methodological questions deserving further consideration. The concluding remarks sum up the findings, drawbacks and needed directions of future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout time, the study of typographical errors has been approached from a variety of fields, such as bibliography, textual criticism, publishing, metalexicography, psycholinguistics and natural language processing (NLP). However, typographical errors are inherent in written texts, and there is no multidisciplinary and allencompassing method for their treatment. For that reason, we present a theoretical review of typographical errors and their categorisation, especially from the perspective of psycholinguistics and NLP. On the one hand, some of the most thorough studies from the XX century onwards have been conducted in those two fields. On the other hand, there are remarkable similarities, regarding both the conclusions reached (e.g. the low frequency of errors in the first letter of words) and the limitations encountered (e.g. ambiguity in error categorisation). Thus, our starting point will be the theoretical distinction between motoric or execution errors (mistypings) and orthographic or cognitive errors (misspellings). Moreover, we will analyse the commonalities between the abovementioned disciplines when it comes to identifying the wrong operations (omission, insertion, substitution, and transposition) behind those phenomena. Finally, we will confirm that sometimes execution errors and competence errors cannot be distinguished in the practice of writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Glasgow Norms are a set of normative ratings for 5,553 English words on nine psycholinguistic dimensions: arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, age of acquisition, semantic size, and gender association. The Glasgow Norms are unique in several respects. First, the corpus itself is relatively large, while simultaneously providing norms across a substantial number of lexical dimensions. Second, for any given subset of words, the same participants provided ratings across all nine dimensions (33 participants/word, on average). Third, two novel dimensions—semantic size and gender association—are included. Finally, the corpus contains a set of 379 ambiguous words that are presented either alone (e.g., toast) or with information that selects an alternative sense (e.g., toast (bread), toast (speech)). The relationships between the dimensions of the Glasgow Norms were initially investigated by assessing their correlations. In addition, a principal component analysis revealed four main factors, accounting for 82% of the variance (Visualization, Emotion, Salience, and Exposure). The validity of the Glasgow Norms was established via comparisons of our ratings to 18 different sets of current psycholinguistic norms. The dimension of size was tested with megastudy data, confirming findings from past studies that have explicitly examined this variable. Alternative senses of ambiguous words (i.e., disambiguated forms), when discordant on a given dimension, seemingly led to appropriately distinct ratings. Informal comparisons between the ratings of ambiguous words and of their alternative senses showed different patterns that likely depended on several factors (the number of senses, their relative strengths, and the rating scales themselves). Overall, the Glasgow Norms provide a valuable resource—in particular, for researchers investigating the role of word recognition in language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined how the degree of semantic similarity between an ambiguous word’s meanings (homonyms vs. irregular polysemes) and meaning frequency (biased vs. balanced meanings) interact during lexical access and disambiguation. In Experiment 1, which was a continuous priming experiment, and with an ITI of 50 ms, we observed exhaustive access of meanings for all ambiguous words. With an ITI of 200 ms, we found a dominance effect for biased homonyms. There was no priming for biased irregular polysemes. For balanced homonyms and polysemes, we observed strong and roughly equivalent priming for target words associated with either meaning. In Experiment 2, using sentence reading, all ambiguous words elicited longer reading times in the absence of biasing context, while only biased and balanced homonyms also led to longer reading times in subsequent subordinate-biased context. Taken together, our data support a shared features model of irregular polyseme representation and retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children have considerable difficulty producing informative and unambiguous referring expressions, a fact that still lacks a full explanation. Potential insight can come from psycholinguistic models of ambiguity avoidance in adults, which suggest that, before describing any scene, speakers pro-actively monitor for some — but not all — types of potential ambiguity, and then subsequently monitor whether their just-produced expression provides an ambiguous description. Our experiments used eye tracking to assess the developing roles of these skills in children’s referential communication. Experiment 1 shows that adults’ eye movements can index the processes of both pro-active and self-monitoring. Experiments 2 and 3 show that children (n = 110) typically do not pro-actively monitor for potential ambiguity, although they do show evidence of pro-active monitoring on the occasions when they produce informative expressions. However, we do find evidence that children consistently monitor their own descriptions for ambiguity, even though they rarely correct their utterances. We propose that the process of self-monitoring might act as a learning signal, that guides children as they acquire the ability to monitor pro-actively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Listeners must adapt to differences in speech rate across talkers and situations. Speech rate adaptation effects are strong for adjacent syllables (i.e., proximal syllables). For studies that have assessed adaptation effects on speech rate information more than one syllable removed from a point of ambiguity in speech (i.e., distal syllables), the difference in strength between different types of ambiguity is stark. Studies of word segmentation have shown large shifts in perception as a result of distal rate manipulations, while studies of segmental perception have shown only weak, or even nonexistent, effects. However, no study has standardized methods and materials to study context effects for both types of ambiguity simultaneously. Here, a set of sentences was created that differed as minimally as possible except for whether the sentences were ambiguous to the voicing of a consonant or ambiguous to the location of a word boundary. The sentences were then rate-modified to slow down the distal context speech rate to various extents, dependent on three different definitions of distal context that were adapted from previous experiments, along with a manipulation of proximal context to assess whether proximal effects were comparable across ambiguity types. The results indicate that the definition of distal influenced the extent of distal rate effects strongly for both segments and segmentation. They also establish the presence of distal rate effects on word-final segments for the first time. These results were replicated, with some caveats regarding the perception of individual segments, in an Internet-based sample recruited from Mechanical Turk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To successfully comprehend a sentence that contains a homonym, readers must select the ambiguous word's context-appropriate meaning. The outcome of this process is influenced both by top-down contextual support and bottom-up, word-specific characteristics. We examined how these factors jointly affect the neural signatures of lexical ambiguity resolution. We measured the similarity between multi-voxel patterns evoked by the same homonym in two distinct linguistic contexts: once after subjects read sentences that biased interpretation toward each homonym's most frequent, dominant meaning, and again after interpretation was biased toward a weaker, subordinate meaning. We predicted that, following a subordinate-biasing context, the dominant yet inappropriate meaning would nevertheless compete for activation, manifesting in increased similarity between the neural patterns evoked by the two word meanings. In left anterior temporal lobe (ATL), degree of within-word pattern similarity was positively predicted by the association strength of each homonym's dominant meaning. Further, within-word pattern similarity in left ATL was negatively predicted by item-specific responses in a region of left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) sensitive to semantic conflict. These findings have implications for psycholinguistic models of lexical ambiguity resolution, and for the role of left VLPFC function during this process. Moreover, these findings demonstrate the utility of item-level, similarity-based analyses of fMRI data for our understanding of competition between co-activated word meanings during language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People with aphasia (PWA) often fail to understand syntactically complex sentences. This phenomenon has been described as asyntactic comprehension and has been explored in various studies cross-linguistically in the past decades. However, until now there has been no consensus among researchers as to the nature of sentence comprehension failures in aphasia. Impaired representations accounts ascribe comprehension deficits to loss of syntactic knowledge, whereas processing/resource reduction accounts assume that PWA are unable to use syntactic knowledge in comprehension due to resource limitation resulting from the brain damage. The aim of this paper is to use independently motivated psycholinguistic models of sentence processing to test a variant of the processing/resource reduction accounts that we dub the Complexity Threshold Hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, PWA are capable of building well-formed syntactic representations, but, because their resources for language processing are limited, their syntactic parser fails when processing complexity exceeds a certain threshold. The source of complexity investigated in the experiments reported in this paper is syntactic prediction. We conducted two experiments involving comprehension of sentences with different types of syntactic dependencies, namely dependencies that do not require syntactic prediction (i.e. unpredictable dependencies in sentences that require Quantifier Raising) and dependencies whose resolution requires syntactic predictions at an early stage of processing based on syntactic cues (i.e. predictable dependencies in movement-derived sentences). In line with the predictions of the Complexity Threshold Hypothesis, the results show that the agrammatic patients that participated in this study had no difficulties comprehending sentences with the former type of dependencies, whereas their comprehension of sentences with the latter type of dependencies was impaired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantifier words like each , every , all and three are among the most abstract words in language. Unlike nouns, verbs and adjectives, the meanings of quantifiers are not related to a referent out in the world. Rather, quantifiers specify what relationships hold between the sets of entities, events and properties denoted by other words. When two quantifiers are in the same clause, they create a systematic ambiguity. “ Every kid climbed a tree ” could mean that there was only one tree, climbed by all, or many different trees, one per climbing kid. In the present study, participants chose a picture to indicate their preferred reading of different ambiguous sentences – those containing every , as well as the other three quantifiers. In Experiment 1, we found large systematic differences in preference, depending on the quantifier word. In Experiment 2, we then manipulated the choice of a particular reading of one sentence, and tested how this affected participants’ reading preference on a subsequent target sentence. We found a priming effect for all quantifiers, but only when the prime and target sentences contained the same quantifier. For example, all-a sentences prime other all-a sentences, while each-a primes each-a , but sentences with each do not prime sentences with all or vice versa. In Experiment 3, we ask whether the lack of priming across quantifiers could be due to the two sentences sharing one fewer word. We find that changing the verb between the prime and target sentence does not reduce the priming effect. In Experiment 4, we discover one case where there is priming across quantifiers – when one number (e.g. three ) is in the prime, and a different one (e.g. four ) is in the target. We discuss how these findings relate to linguistic theories of quantifier meaning and what they tell us about the division of labor between conceptual content and combinatorial semantics, as well as the mental representations of quantification and of the abstract logical structure of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present two eye-tracking experiments on the interpretation of sentences like 'The tall girl is (not) the only one that ...,' which are ambiguous between the anaphoric (the only girl that ...) and the exophoric interpretation (the only individual that ...). These interpretations differ in informativeness: in a positive context, the exophoric (strong) reading entails the anaphoric (weak), while in a negative context the entailment pattern is reversed and the anaphoric reading is the strongest one. We tested whether adults rely on considerations about informativeness in solving the ambiguity. The results show that participants interpreted one exophorically in both positive and negative contexts. Given these findings, we cast doubts on the idea that Informativeness plays a role in ambiguity resolution and proposes a Principle of Maximal Exploitation: When a context is provided, adults extend their domain of evaluation to include the whole scenario, independently from truth-conditional considerations about informativity and strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of psycholinguistic research has revealed that during sentence interpretation adults coordinate multiple sources of information. Particularly, they draw both on linguistic properties of the message and on information from the context to constrain their interpretations. Relatively little however is known about how this integrative processor develops through language acquisition and about how children process language. In this study, two on-line picture verification tasks were used to examine how 1st, 2nd and 4th/5th grade monolingual Greek children resolve pronoun ambiguities during sentence interpretation and how their performance compares to that of adults on the same tasks. Specifically, we manipulated the type of subject pronoun, i.e. null or overt, and examined how this affected participants’ preferences for competing antecedents, i.e. in the subject or object position. The results revealed both similarities and differences in how adults and the various child groups comprehended ambiguous pronominal forms. Particularly, although adults and children alike showed sensitivity to the distribution of overt and null subject pronouns, this did not always lead to convergent interpretation preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psycholinguistic research demonstrates that representational distance between meanings influences recognition of ambiguous words. Our goal was to investigate whether the neural correlates of ambiguity are also modulated by representational distance as a function of syntactic similarity (i.e., grammatical class) and meaning dominance. In an event-related fMRI experiment, participants completed a visual lexical decision task that included balanced and unbalanced noun–noun and noun–verb homonyms, unambiguous words, and nonwords. Syntactic similarity effects were observed in left inferior frontal regions, with greater activation for noun–verb than noun–noun homonyms. Meaning dominance effects were observed in left middle and superior temporal regions, with greater activation for balanced than unbalanced homonyms. These findings indicate that the behavioral cost associated with processing ambiguous word meanings, modulated by syntactic similarity and meaning dominance, is reflected in the neural systems underlying ambiguity processing, as frontal and temporal regions are recruited by increased competition as a function of representational distance. [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]

Many words have more than one meaning, and these meanings vary in their degree of relatedness. In the present experiment, we examined whether this degree of relatedness is influenced by whether or not the two meanings share a translation in a bilingual's other language. Native English speakers with Spanish as a second language (i.e., English-Spanish bilinguals) and native Spanish speakers with English as a second language (i.e., Spanish-English bilinguals) were presented with pairs of phrases instantiating different senses of ambiguous English words (e.g., dinner date- expiration date) and were asked to decide whether the two senses were related in meaning. Critically, for some pairs of phrases, a single Spanish translation encompassed both meanings of the ambiguous word ( joint-translation condition; e.g., mercado in Spanish refers to both a flea market and the housing market), but for others, each sense corresponded to a different Spanish translation ( split-translation condition; e.g., cita in Spanish refers to a dinner date, but fecha refers to an expiration date). The proportions of 'yes' (related) responses revealed that, relative to monolingual English speakers, Spanish-English bilinguals consider joint-translation senses to be less related than split-translation senses. These findings exemplify semantic cross-language influences from a first to a second language and reveal the semantic structure of the bilingual lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When asked to indicate which items from a set of candidates belong to a particular natural language category inter-individual differences occur: Individuals disagree which items should be considered category members. The premise of this paper is that these inter-individual differences in semantic categorization reflect both ambiguity and vagueness. Categorization differences are said to be due to ambiguity when individuals employ different criteria for categorization. For instance, individuals may disagree whether hiking or darts is the better example of sports because they emphasize respectively whether an activity is strenuous and whether rules apply. Categorization differences are said to be due to vagueness when individuals employ different cut-offs for separating members from non-members. For instance, the decision to include hiking in the sports category or not, may hinge on how strenuous different individuals require sports to be. This claim is supported by the application of a mixture model to categorization data for eight natural language categories. The mixture model can identify latent groups of categorizers who regard different items likely category members (i.e., ambiguity) with categorizers within each of the groups differing in their propensity to provide membership responses (i.e., vagueness). The identified subgroups are shown to emphasize different sets of category attributes when making their categorization decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current models of idiom representation and processing differ with respect to the role of literal processing during the interpretation of idiomatic expressions. Word-like models (Bobrow & Bell, 1973; Swinney & Cutler, 1979) propose that idiomatic meaning can be accessed directly, whereas structural models (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988; Cutting & Bock, 1997; Sprenger, Levelt, & Kempen, 2006) propose that literal processing is crucial in the access of idiomatic meaning. We used a self-paced reading task to examine how contextual expectations influence real-time processing of phrasal verbs that are ambiguous between a literal and idiomatic sense (e.g., look up, turn in) and how comprehenders recover from expectations that are revealed to be incorrect. Our results suggest that when comprehenders expect a literal interpretation in a situation where the sentence turns out to be idiomatic, real-time processing is disrupted more than if comprehenders are expecting an idiomatic interpretation and the sentence turns out to be literal. We interpret our results in favor of models of idiom processing that propose obligatory literal processing (e.g., Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988; Cutting & Bock, 1997; Sprenger et al„ 2006). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the influence of word class and translation ambiguity on cross-linguistic representation and processing. Bilingual speakers of English and Spanish performed translation production and translation recognition tasks on nouns and verbs in both languages. Words either had a single translation or more than one translation. Translation probability, as determined by normative data, was the strongest predictor of translation production and translation recognition, after controlling for psycholinguistic variables. Word class did not explain additional variability in translation performance, raising the possibility that previous findings of differences between nouns and verbs might be attributed to the greater translation ambiguity of verbs relative to nouns. Proficiency in the second language was associated with quicker and more successful production of translations for ambiguous words, and with more accurate recognition of translations for ambiguous words. Working memory capacity was related to the speed of recognizing low probability translations for ambiguous words. These results underscore the importance of considering translation ambiguity in research on bilingual lexical and conceptual knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is at stake, philosophically, in the disagreement between Ockham and Buridan is whether there is simple (or material) supposition in the mental language or not. The key difference is that Ockham's theory allows for the possibility of use/mention ambi-guities within mental language, while Buridan's approach, whatever it is exactly, does not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The article presents a study on the measurement and performance of linguistic formality in second language discourse use in official functions, debates and ceremonies. It discusses the empirical possibilities of measuring formality and establishes connection between it and the psycholinguistic in a speech. It notes that formality is the avoidance of ambiguity by understating the context-dependence and indistinct expressions.

Abstract: This study investigates the degree to which referential context information influences structural ambiguity resolution preferences in non-native sentence comprehension, using both an off-line questionnaire and an on-line self-paced reading task. The critical target sentences contained prepositional phrases (PPs) modifying either the verb phrase (VP) or the preceding noun phrase (NP), as in Bill glanced at the customer with strong suspicion (with ripped jeans). These were embedded within short context paragraphs providing either one or two potential referents for the postverbal NP. The results showed that native Chinese-speaking learners of English and native English speakers were affected differently by referential information in the on-line task. The learners’ reading times of the critical PP were influenced significantly by the referential context, with VP-modifying items being read faster than NP-modifying ones in a VP-supporting context, and the reverse pattern seen in NP-supporting contexts. The native speakers’ ambiguity resolution preferences, on the other hand, were modulated by the referential context in the off-line task only. Our results indicate that non-native comprehenders are highly sensitive to extra-sentential discourse-level information during processing even at intermediate levels of proficiency, a finding that provides a challenge for ‘processing capacity limitation’ accounts for non-targetlike L2 performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

While allowing for polysemy, scholars seem mostly averse to ambiguity, as in the π...στις Xριστo... debate; but, it would seem,without engaging with ancient semantic theory. There the model of 'naming' and so of evoking an otherwise unspecified mental impression, predominates. Meaning is taken to lie in the mind, not in the word or words that are hoped to evoke it, as is also shown in ancient discussions of metaphor, allegory, and paraphrase. Connotations of individual words are rarely distinguished, rarely if ever purged. We are not justified in expecting verbal precision where our ancient authors will neither have attempted it nor will their hearers have expected it; nor, indeed, domodern psycholinguists appear to find space for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical ambiguity resolution was examined in children aged 7 to 10 years and adults. In Experiment 1, participants heard sentences supporting one (or neither) meaning of a balanced ambiguous word in a cross-modal naming paradigm. Naming latencies for context-congruent versus context-incongruent targets and judgements of the relatedness of targets to the sentence served as indices of appropriate context use. While younger children were faster to respond to related targets regardless of the sentence context, older children and adults showed priming only for context-appropriate targets. In Experiment 2, only a single-word context preceded the homophone, and in contrast to Experiment 1, all groups showed contextual sensitivity. Individual working-memory span and inhibition ability were also measured in Experiment 2, and more mature executive function abilities were associated with greater contextual sensitivity. These findings support a developmental model whereby sentential context use for lexical ambiguity resolution increases with age, cognitive processing capacity, and reading skill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Using a self-paced moving window reading paradigm, we examine the degree to which structural commitments made while 60 Spanish–English L2 speakers read syntactically ambiguous sentences in their second language (L2) are constrained by the verb’s lexical entry about its preferred structural environment (i.e., subcategorization bias). The ambiguity under investigation arises because a noun phrase immediately following a verb can be parsed as either the direct object of the verb ‘The CIA director confirmed the rumor when he testified before Congress’, or as the subject of an embedded complement ‘The CIA director confirmed the rumor could mean a security leak’. In an experiment with 59 monolingual English participants, we replicate the findings reported in the previous literature demonstrating that native speakers are guided by subcategorization bias information during sentence interpretation. In a bilingual experiment, we then show that L2 subcategorization biases influence L2 sentence interpretation. The results indicate that L2 speakers keep track of the relative frequencies of verb-subcategorization alternatives and use this information when building structure in the L2. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The concept of politics as a moment of a questioning of the existing order of reactivation of the social sphere has certain advantages for the study of contemporary political processes. Two representative theoreticians of this way of thinking are Ernesto Laclau and Jacques Rancière but they begin their thoughts from different starting points. The former prefers to start from an ontological view of politics and the latter rejects it. Both authors have strengths and weaknesses. Laclau can explain all kinds of political practice but he introduces a certain ambiguity in his explanations, while Ranciere applies a stricter definition of "political" but excludes some practices that could be considered under this term. [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]

Abstract: The current article considers a marker, anka, in Akan (Niger-Congo, Kwa branch), which has a variety of uses. Adopting a relevance-theoretic approach, I argue that anka is a marker with a modal meaning. In spite of the variety of uses of this word, I propose a univocal lexical semantics for it, which will be shown to account for its context-dependent function in all the categories. Taking into consideration the interplay between the encoded meaning of anka and pragmatically derived information in actual speech situations, monosemy is seen as a more economical and psychologically plausible way of accounting for the communicative function of this Akan marker. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this study, we investigated the impact of age and task context on Stroop task performance, using error scores, response latencies, and process dissociation estimates (e.g., Lindsay & Jacoby, 1994). Across three experiments, the findings showed that although older adults were able to evaluate Stroop task demands and modify their representations of task context in response to this knowledge, they were less able to maintain and update these representations on a trial-by-trial basis in tasks with high stimulus uncertainty or ambiguity. Moreover, although there was no age-related decline in the ability to modulate print color information, older adults were consistently less able to control the activation of conflicting word information. Together, these findings suggest that whereas age differences in the Stroop task may be magnified under conditions that promote transient failures to maintain task context, the primary source of these differences seems to be a more enduring decline in the efficiency of processes that are responsible for suppressing the activation of irrelevant lexical information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study investigated the processing of direct Italian “who”-questions, containing a temporary ambiguity of the syntactic role (subject/object) of the initial pronoun. To this aim we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by the disambiguating verbal agreement word and by the following ones. Results showed two positive deflections, corresponding to a P300 and to a P600, only at the target verb of the object-first extraction, the condition which has been demonstrated to be less preferred by speakers. The functional meaning of this positive complex, similar to patterns already reported for German subject/object ambiguous relative clauses, was discussed with reference both to results obtained in other languages using similar sentences and to psycholinguistic parsing models. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Psycholinguistic investigations of reanalysis phenomena have typically focused on revisions of phrase structure. Here, we identify a further subcomponent of syntactic reanalysis, namely the revision of case marking. This aspect of reanalysis was isolated by examining German subject-object ambiguities that require a revision towards a dative-initial order. Since dative-initial orders are potentially unmarked, no phrase structure corrections are required, but the original, preference-based nominative assignment must be revised. Experiment 1, an ERP study, revealed an N400 component for reanalysis of case marking, which contrasted with a P600 component for phrase structure revisions. The 're-analysis N400' was replicated in Experiment 2, which also showed that direct lexical support for a dative-initial order leads to a reduction of the effect. Finally, in Experiment 3, direct time course measures provided by the speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) procedure supported the case reanalysis account by showing that conditions hypothesized to involve case reanalysis (dative-initial structures) require longer computation times than their nominative-initial counterparts. Lexeme-specific support for the dative-initial reading, however, does not lead to a faster computation of the target structure, but rather increases the likelihood that the correct interpretation will be computed. We interpret these findings as evidence for the general availability of an unmarked dative-nominative word order in German, the accessibility of which may be increased by lexical information. Moreover, the data show that syntactic reanalysis is not a homogeneous process, but may rather be subdivided along several dimensions that interact in determining overall garden path strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central question for psycholinguistics concerns the role of grammatical constraints in online sentence processing. Many current theories maintain that the language processing mechanism constructs a parse or parses that are grammatically consistent with the whole of the perceived input each time it processes a word. Several bottom-up, dynamical models make a contrasting prediction: partial parses which are syntactically compatible with only a proper subpart of the input are sometimes constructed, at least temporarily. Three self-paced reading experiments probed for interference from such locally coherent structures. The first tested for a distracting effect of irrelevant Subject–Predicate interpretations of Noun Phrase–Verb Phrase sequences (e.g., The coach smiled at the player tossed a frisbee) on reading times. The second addressed the question of whether the interference effects can be treated as lexical interference, instead of involving the formation of locally coherent syntactic structures. The third replicated the reading time effects of the first two experiments with grammaticality judgments. We evaluate the dynamical account, comparing it to other approaches that also predict effects of local coherence, and arguing against accounts which rule out the formation of merely locally coherent structures. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Linguistic and psycholinguistic research has documented that there exists a close relationship between a verb's meaning and the syntactic structures in which it occurs, and that learners and comprehenders take advantage of this relationship both in acquisition and in processing. We address implications of these facts for issues in structural ambiguity resolution, arguing that comprehenders are sensitive to meaning-structure correlations based not on the verb itself but on its specific senses, and that they exploit this information on-line. We demonstrate that individual verbs show significant differences in their subcategorisation profiles across three corpora, and that cross-corpora bias estimates are much more stable when sense is taken into account. Finally, we show that consistency between sense-contingent subcategorisation biases and experimenters' classifications largely predicts results of recent experiments. Thus comprehenders learn and exploit meaning-form correlations at the level of individual verb senses, rather than the verb in the aggregate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the psychological factors that influence human language processors' preference for reanalysis during language comprehension using three experiments on complement-clause ambiguities. Revision-as-last-resort and revision-irrelevant hypotheses; Avoidance of reanalysis; Trimmed residual reading times with untrimmed raw reading times.

Examines some relationships between generality and ambiguity for a set of words. Generality's reference to the inclusiveness of a class which the word names; Description of the ambiguity of a word as a condition where a word evokes more than one meaning response in a perceiver; Suggestion that no functional difference between the concepts of generality and ambiguity was perceived by the participating subjects.

• 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]