Low-frequency neural activity tracks syntactic information through semantic mediation.

How our brain integrates single words into larger linguistic units is a central focus in neurolinguistic studies. Previous studies mainly explored this topic at the semantic or syntactic level, with few looking at how cortical activities track word sequences with different levels of semantic correlations. In addition, prior research did not tease apart the semantic factors from the syntactic ones in the word sequences.

Violation of Leggett-Garg Inequality in Perceiving Cup-like Objects and Cognitive Contextuality.

This paper is devoted to an experimental investigation of cognitive contextuality inspired by quantum contextuality research. This contextuality is related to, but not identical to context-sensitivity which is well-studied in cognitive psychology and decision making. This paper is a part of quantum-like modeling, i.

The Online Processing of Hypothetical Events.

A conditional statement is formed by combining the two propositions and together with the conditional connective When embedded under the conditional connective, the two propositions and describe hypothetical events that are not actualized. It remains unclear when such hypothetical thinking is activated in the real-time comprehension of conditional statements. To tackle this problem, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment using the visual world paradigm.

Understanding Others' Minds: Social Inference in Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The study used an eye-tracking task to investigate whether preschool children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are able to make inferences about others' behavior in terms of their mental states in a social setting. Fifty typically developing (TD) 4- and 5-year-olds and 22 5-year-olds with ASD participated in the study, where their eye-movements were recorded as automatic responses to given situations. The results show that unlike their TD peers, children with ASD failed to exhibit eye gaze patterns that reflect their ability to infer about others' behavior by spontaneously encoding socially relevant information and attributing mental states to others.

Predictive Language Processing in Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Eye-Tracking Study.

Sentence comprehension relies on the abilities to rapidly integrate different types of linguistic and non-linguistic information. The present study investigated whether Mandarin-speaking preschool children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are able to use verb information predictively to anticipate the upcoming linguistic input during real-time sentence comprehension. 26 five-year-olds with ASD, 25 typically developing (TD) five-year-olds and 24 TD four-year-olds were tested using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm.

Using Eye Movements Recorded in the Visual World Paradigm to Explore the Online Processing of Spoken Language.

In a typical eye tracking study using the visual world paradigm, participants' eye movements to objects or pictures in the visual workspace are recorded via an eye tracker as the participant produces or comprehends a spoken language describing the concurrent visual world. This paradigm has high versatility, as it can be used in a wide range of populations, including those who cannot read and/or who cannot overtly give their behavioral responses, such as preliterate children, elderly adults, and patients. More importantly, the paradigm is extremely sensitive to fine grained manipulations of the speech signal, and it can be used to study the online processing of most topics in language comprehension at multiple levels, such as the fine grained acoustic phonetic features, the properties of words, and the linguistic structures.

Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism.

Sentence comprehension relies on the ability to rapidly integrate different types of linguistic and non-linguistic information. However, there is currently a paucity of research exploring how preschool children with autism understand sentences using different types of cues. The mechanisms underlying sentence comprehension remains largely unclear.

Scalar and Ignorance Inferences Are Both Computed Immediately upon Encountering the Sentential Connective: The Online Processing of Sentences with Disjunction Using the Visual World Paradigm.

Accounts based on the pragmatic maxim of quantity make different predictions about the computation of scalar versus ignorance inferences. These different predictions are evaluated in two eye-tracking experiments using a visual world paradigm to assess the on-line computation of inferences. The test sentences contained disjunction phrases, which engender both kinds of inferences.

Children's on-line processing of epistemic modals.

In this paper we investigated the real-time processing of epistemic modals in five-year-olds. In a simple reasoning scenario, we monitored children's eye-movements while processing a sentence with modal expressions of different force (might/must). Children were also asked to judge the truth-value of the target sentences at the end of the reasoning task.

Grammatical aspect and event recognition in children's online sentence comprehension.

This study investigated whether or not the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes can be used immediately by young children to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. We focused on the contrast between two grammatical aspectual morphemes in Mandarin Chinese, the perfective morpheme -le and the (imperfective) durative morpheme -zhe. The perfective morpheme -le is often used to indicate that an event has been completed, whereas the durative morpheme -zhe indicates that an event is still in progress or continuing.

Children's use of phonological information in ambiguity resolution: a view from Mandarin Chinese.

How do children develop the mapping between prosody and other levels of linguistic knowledge? This question has received considerable attention in child language research. In the present study two experiments were conducted to investigate four- to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's sensitivity to prosody in ambiguity resolution. Experiment 1 used eye-tracking to assess children's use of stress in resolving structural ambiguities.