Experience-based theories of language processing suggest that listeners use the properties of their previous linguistic input to constrain comprehension in real time (e.g. MacDonald & Christiansen, 2002; Smith & Levy, 2013; Stanovich & West, 1989; Mishra, Pandey, Singh, & Huettig, 2012).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study investigates the integration of word-initial fundamental frequency (F0) and voice-onset-time (VOT) in stop voicing categorization for adult listeners with normal hearing (NH) and unilateral cochlear implant (CI) recipients utilizing a bimodal hearing configuration [CI + contralateral hearing aid (HA)]. Categorization was assessed for ten adults with NH and ten adult bimodal listeners, using synthesized consonant stimuli interpolating between /ba/ and /pa/ exemplars with five-step VOT and F0 conditions. All participants demonstrated the expected categorization pattern by reporting /ba/ for shorter VOTs and /pa/ for longer VOTs, with NH listeners showing more use of VOT as a voicing cue than CI listeners in general.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOver the past decade, screen-captured instructional videos have become popular tools for learning. Viewers wanting to learn efficiently can play these videos at faster-than-normal speeds, a feature offered by hosting services such as YouTube. Although previous research suggests that moderate speeding may not lessen learning, little research has tested this form of media for speeding-induced learning impairments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough it is clear that unaccented referring expressions are associated with given information in a discourse (Dahan et al., 2002), it is less clear what aspects of givenness are relevant. We examine whether listeners' expectation of givenness depends on repetition of a referring expression or on contextual evocation of a referent.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRhythmic structure in speech is characterized by sequences of stressed and unstressed syllables. A large body of literature suggests that speakers of English attempt to achieve rhythmic harmony by evenly distributing stressed syllables throughout prosodic phrases. The question remains as to how speakers plan metrical structure during speech production and whether it is planned independently of phonemes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt has been claimed that English has a metrical structure, or rhythm, in which stressed and unstressed syllables alternate. In previous research regular, alternating patterns have been shown to facilitate online language comprehension. Expanding these findings to downstream processing would lead to the prediction that metrical regularity enhances memory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhen communicating with other people, adults reduce or lengthen words based on their predictability, frequency, and discourse status. But younger listeners have less experience than older listeners in processing speech variation across time. In 2 experiments, we tested whether English-speaking parents reduce word durations differently across utterances in child-directed speech (CDS) versus adult-directed speech (ADS).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRepetition reduces word duration. Explanations of this process have appealed to audience design, internal production mechanisms, and combinations thereof (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProsody is an important feature of language that conveys a wide range of information. However, prosody is widely considered to be a difficult domain of study within the language sciences. One consequence of this is that existing grammatical theories of prosody fail to explain prosodic choices that seem to arise from nonlinguistic cognitive demands, such as communicative context, top-down expectations, and recent articulatory and acoustic experience.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSyntactic priming in language production is the increased likelihood of using a recently encountered syntactic structure. In this paper, we examine two theories of why speakers can be primed: error-driven learning accounts (Bock, Dell, Chang, & Onishi, 2007; Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006) and activation-based accounts (Pickering & Branigan, 1999; Reitter, Keller, & Moore, 2011). Both theories predict that speakers should be primed by the syntactic choices of others, but only activation-based accounts predict that speakers should be able to prime themselves.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLanguage has a rhythmic structure, but little is known about the mechanisms that underlie how it is planned. Traditional models of language production assume that metrical and segmental planning occur independently and in parallel (Roelofs & Meyer Learning Memory and Cognition, 24(4), 922-939, 1998). We test this claim in two experiments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere remains little consensus about whether there exist meaningful individual differences in syntactic processing and, if so, what explains them. We argue that this partially reflects the fact that few psycholinguistic studies of individual differences include multiple constructs, multiple measures per construct, or tests for reliable measures. Here, we replicated three major syntactic phenomena in the psycholinguistic literature: use of verb distributional statistics, difficulty of object-versus subject-extracted relative clauses, and resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLanguage comprehension requires successfully navigating linguistic variability. One hypothesis for how listeners manage variability is that they rapidly update their expectations of likely linguistic events in new contexts. This process, called adaptation, allows listeners to better predict the upcoming linguistic input.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent work in the literature on prosody presents a puzzle: Some aspects of prosody can be primed in production (e.g., speech rate), but others cannot (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt is generally assumed that prosodic cues that provide linguistic information, like discourse status, are driven primarily by the information structure of the conversation. This article investigates whether speakers have the capacity to adjust subtle acoustic-phonetic properties of the prosodic signal when they find themselves in contexts in which accurate communication is important. Thus, we examine whether the communicative context, in addition to discourse structure, modulates prosodic choices when speakers produce acoustic prominence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigate whether expectations based on syntactic position influence the processing of intonational boundaries. In a boundary detection task, we manipulated a) the strength of cues to the presence of a boundary and b) whether or not a location in the sentence was a plausible location for an intonational boundary to occur given the syntactic structure. Listeners consistently reported hearing more boundaries at syntactically licensed locations than at syntactically unlicensed locations, even when the acoustic evidence for an intonational boundary was controlled.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRepeated words are often reduced in prosodic prominence, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. The present study contrasted two theories: does prosodic reduction reflect the choice of a particular linguistic form, or does ease of retrieval within the language production system lead to facilitated, less prominent productions? One test of facilitation-based theories is suggested by findings on human memory: Whether a second presentation of an item benefits later memory is predicted by the item's availability at the time of the second presentation. If prosodic reduction partially reflects facilitated retrieval, it should predict later memory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLang Cogn Neurosci
January 2015
Words vary in acoustic prominence; for example repeated words tend to be reduced, while focused elements tend to be acoustically prominent. We discuss two approaches to this phenomenon. On the message-based view, acoustic choices signal the speaker's meaning or pragmatics, or are guided by syntactic structure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAcoustic reduction for repeated words could be the result of articulation and motor practice (Lam & Watson, 2014), facilitated production (Kahn & Arnold, 2015; Gahl et al., 2012), or audience design and shared common ground (Galati & Brennan, 2010). We sought to narrow down what kind of facilitation leads to repetition reduction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychon Bull Rev
December 2015
Some accounts of acoustic reduction propose that variation in word duration is a reflection of the speaker's internal production processes, but it is unclear why lengthening within a word benefits planning. The present study examines whether variability in word length is partly attributable to phonological encoding. In an event-description task, speakers produced words with longer durations when the word shared part of its phonology with a previously articulated word than when it did not.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGesture facilitates language production, but there is debate surrounding its exact role. It has been argued that gestures lighten the load on verbal working memory (VWM; Goldin-Meadow, Nusbaum, Kelly, & Wagner, 2001), but gestures have also been argued to aid in lexical retrieval (Krauss, 1998). In the current study, 50 speakers completed an individual differences battery that included measures of VWM and lexical retrieval.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn
May 2014
Compared to words that are new to a discourse, repeated words are produced with reduced acoustic prominence. Although these effects are often attributed to priming in the production system, the locus of the effect within the production system remains unresolved because, in natural speech, repetition often involves repetition of referents and lexical items simultaneously. Therefore, repetition reduction could be due to repeated mention of a referent or to repetition of a word or referring expression.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn
March 2014
In 3 experiments, we investigated whether intonational phrase structure can be primed. In all experiments, participants listened to sentences in which the presence and location of intonational phrase boundaries were manipulated such that the recording included either no intonational phrase boundaries, a boundary in a structurally dispreferred location, a boundary in a preferred location, or boundaries in both locations. In Experiment 1, participants repeated the sentences to test whether they would reproduce the prosodic structure they had just heard.
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