Publications by authors named "Jesse Snedeker"

It is well-established that people make predictions during language comprehension--the nature and specificity of these predictions, however, remain unclear. For example, do comprehenders routinely make predictions about which words (and phonological forms) might come next in a conversation, or do they simply make broad predictions about the gist of the unfolding context? Prior EEG studies using tightly controlled experimental designs have shown that form-based prediction can occur during comprehension, as N400s to unexpected words are reduced when they resemble the form of a predicted word (e.g.

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There is a growing interest in the use of webcams to conduct eye-tracking experiments over the internet. We assessed the performance of two webcam-based eye-tracking techniques for behavioral research: manual annotation of webcam videos () and the automated WebGazer eye-tracking algorithm. We compared these methods to a traditional infrared eye-tracker and assessed their performance in both lab and web-based settings.

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Natural languages contain systematic relationships between verb meaning and verb argument structure. Artificial language learning studies typically remove those relationships and instead pair verb meanings randomly with structures. Adult participants in such studies can detect statistical regularities associated with words in these languages and their use of novel words will adhere to those statistical regularities.

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The words that children learn change over time in predictable ways. The first words that infants acquire are generally ones that are both frequent and highly imageable. Older infants also learn words that are more abstract and some that are less common.

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When listening to speech, adults rely on context to anticipate upcoming words. Evidence for this comes from studies demonstrating that the N400, an event-related potential (ERP) that indexes ease of lexical-semantic processing, is influenced by the predictability of a word in context. We know far less about the role of context in children's speech comprehension.

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We assess the feasibility of conducting web-based eye-tracking experiments with children using two methods of webcam-based eye-tracking: automatic gaze estimation with the WebGazer.js algorithm and hand annotation of gaze direction from recorded webcam videos. Experiment 1 directly compares the two methods in a visual-world language task with five to six year-old children.

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Prior studies have found that children are more likely to learn words that are frequent in the input and highly imageable. Many theories of word learning, however, predict that these variables should interact, particularly early in development: frequency of a form is of little use if you cannot infer its meaning, and a concrete word cannot be acquired if you never hear it. The present study explores this interaction, how it changes over time and its relationship to syntactic category effects in children acquiring American English.

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Human languages can express an infinite number of thoughts despite having a finite set of words and rules. This is due, in part, to recursive structures, which allow us to embed one instance of a rule inside another. We investigated the origins of recursion by studying the development of Nicaraguan Sign Language (LSN), which emerged in the last 40 years and is not derived from any existing language.

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Classical quantifiers (like "all," "some," and "none") express relationships between two sets, allowing us to make generalizations (like "no elephants fly"). Devices like these appear to be universal in human languages. Is the ubiquity of quantification due to a universal property of the human mind or is it attributable to more gradual convergence through cultural evolution? We investigated whether classical quantifiers are present in a new language emerging in isolation from other languages, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL).

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Adults incrementally integrate multiple sources of information to predict the upcoming linguistic structure. Although we have substantial evidence that children can use lexicosemantic information triggered by the verb, we have limited information as to whether children can use morphosyntax to generate predictions during the course of processing. Previous studies show that four-year-old Turkish-speaking children can use case-marking cues predictively; however German-speaking children have been reported to fail until late in development.

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Previous studies have found correlations between parent input and child language outcomes, providing prima facie evidence for a causal relation. However, this could also reflect the effects of shared genes. The present study removed this genetic confound by measuring English vocabulary growth in 29 preschool-aged children (21 girls) aged 31-73 months and 17 infants (all girls) aged 15-32 months adopted from China and Eastern Europe and comparing it to speech produced by their adoptive mothers.

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Both 5-year-old children and adults infer the structure of a sentence as they are hearing it. Prior work, however, has found that children do not always make use of the same information that adults do to guide these inferences. Specifically, when hearing ambiguous sentences like "You can tickle the frog with the feather," children seem to ignore the aspects of the referential context that adults rely on to resolve the ambiguity-e.

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Bilingual speakers often switch between languages in conversation without any advance notice. Psycholinguistic research has found that these language shifts (or code-switches) can be costly for comprehenders in certain situations. The present study explores the nature of these costs by comparing code-switches to other types of unexpected linguistic material.

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Many syntactic theories posit a fundamental structural difference between intransitive verbs with agentive subjects (unergative verbs) and those with theme subjects (unaccusative verbs). This claim garners support from studies finding differences in the online comprehension of these verbs. The present experiments seek to replicate one such finding using the visual world paradigm (Koring, Mak, & Reuland, 2012).

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In 1990, Bock and Loebell found that passives (e.g., The 747 was radioed by the airport's control tower) can be primed by intransitive locatives (e.

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Studies of artificial language learning provide insight into how learning biases and iterated learning may shape natural languages. Prior work has looked at how learners deal with unpredictable variation and how a language changes across multiple generations of learners. The present study combines these features, exploring how word order variation is preserved or regularized over generations.

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In many offline studies, children show selectively better comprehension of sentences with the focus particle only when it modifies the object argument (Jane only ate an apple) than they do when it modifies the subject argument (Only Jane ate an apple). Here we explore the nature of this asymmetry by examining performance in a different kind of task: the moment-to-moment comprehension of unambiguous sentences. If past errors reflect a fundamental difference in representation or complexity of computation, we would expect the same asymmetry in this task.

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During language comprehension we must rapidly determine the thematic roles of arguments (who did what to whom) in order to semantically integrate the players into a single event and predict upcoming structure. While some languages signal these relations mostly with reliable word order, others rely more on case markers. The present study explores whether Turkish-speaking children use case marking predictively during online language comprehension.

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What are the semantic representations that underlie language production? We use structural priming to distinguish between two competing theories. Thematic roles define semantic structure in terms of atomic units that specify event participants and are ordered with respect to each other through a hierarchy of roles. Event structures instead instantiate semantic structure as embedded sub-predicates that impose an order on verbal arguments based on their relative positioning in these embeddings.

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Background: People with schizophrenia process language in unusual ways, but the causes of these abnormalities are unclear. In particular, it has proven difficult to empirically disentangle explanations based on impairments in the top-down processing of higher level information from those based on the bottom-up processing of lower level information.

Methods: To distinguish these accounts, we used visual-world eye tracking, a paradigm that measures spoken language processing during real-world interactions.

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Verbs that are similar in meaning tend to occur in the same syntactic structures. For example, give and hand, which denote transfer of possession, both appear in the prepositional-object construction: "The child gave/handed the ball to the dog." We can call the child a "giver" in one case and a "hander" in the other, or we can refer to her more generally as the agent, or doer of the action.

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Experimental pragmatics has gained many insights from understanding how people use weak scalar terms (like some) to infer that a stronger alternative (like all) is false. Early studies found that comprehenders initially interpret some without an upper bound, but later results suggest that this inference is sometimes immediate (e.g.

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Clearly, structural priming is a valuable tool for probing linguistic representation. But we don't think that the existing results provide strong support for Branigan & Pickering's (B&P's) model, largely because the priming effects are more confusing and diverse than their theory would suggest. Fortunately, there are a number of other experimental tools available, and linguists are increasingly making use of them.

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Past work has shown systematic differences between Easterners' and Westerners' intuitions about the reference of proper names. Understanding when these differences emerge in development will help us understand their origins. In the present study, we investigate the referential intuitions of English- and Chinese-speaking children and adults in the U.

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A well-known typological observation is the dominance of subject-initial word orders, SOV and SVO, across the world's languages. Recent findings from gestural language creation paradigms offer possible explanations for the prevalence of SOV. When asked to gesture transitive events with an animate agent and inanimate patient, gesturers tend to produce SOV order, regardless of their native language biases.

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