Lexico-syntactic constraints influence verbal working memory in sentence-like lists.

We test predictions from the language emergent perspective on verbal working memory that lexico-syntactic constraints should support both item and order memory. In natural language, long-term knowledge of lexico-syntactic patterns involving part of speech, verb biases, and noun animacy support language comprehension and production. In three experiments, participants were presented with randomly generated dative-like sentences or lists in which part of speech, verb biases, and animacy of a single word were manipulated.

Noun Sequence Statistics Affect Serial Recall and Order Recognition Memory.

Most theories of verbal working memory recognize that language comprehension and production processes play a role in word memory for familiar sequences, but not for novel lists of nouns. Some language emergent theories propose that language processes can support verbal working memory even for novel sequences. Through corpus analyses, we identify sequences of two nouns that resemble patterns in natural language, even though the sequences are novel.

Utterance planning under message uncertainty: evidence from a novel picture-naming paradigm.

Language researchers view utterance planning as implicit decision-making: producers must choose the words, sentence structures, and various other linguistic features to communicate their message. To date, much of the research on utterance planning has focused on situations in which the speaker knows the full message to convey. Less is known about circumstances in which speakers begin utterance planning before they are certain about their message.

Repetition parallels in language and motor action: Evidence from tongue twisters and finger fumblers.

We investigated similarities in language and motor action plans by comparing errors in parallel speech and manual tasks. For the language domain, we adopted the "tongue twister" paradigm, while for the action domain, we developed an analogous key-pressing task, "finger fumblers." Our results show that both language and action plans benefit from reusing segments of prior plans: when onsets were repeated between adjacent units in a sequence, the error rates decreased.

A chimpanzee by any other name: The contributions of utterance context and information density on word choice.

An important feature of language production is the flexibility of lexical selection; producers could refer to an animal as chimpanzee, chimp, ape, she, and so on. Thus, a key question for psycholinguistic research is how and why producers make the lexical selections that they do. Information theoretic approaches have argued that producers regulate the uncertainty of the utterance for comprehenders, for example using longer words like chimpanzee if their messages are likely to be misunderstood, and shorter ones like chimp when the message is easy to understand.

Good-Enough Production: Selecting Easier Words Instead of More Accurate Ones.

Dominant theories of language production suggest that word choice-lexical selection-is driven by alignment with the intended message: To talk about a young feline, we choose the most aligned word, . Another factor that could shape lexical selection is word accessibility, or how easy it is to produce a given word (e.g.

Hysteresis in motor and language production.

in motor planning and in language planning refer to the influence of prior production history on current production behaviour. Computational efficiency accounts of action hysteresis and theoretical accounts of syntactic priming both argue that reusing an existing plan is less costly than generating a novel plan. Despite these similarities across motor and language frameworks, research on planning in these domains has largely been conducted independently.

Expert musical improvisations contain sequencing biases seen in language production.

Language production involves action sequencing to produce fluent speech in real time, placing a computational burden on working memory that leads to sequencing biases in production. Here we examine whether these biases extend beyond language to constrain one of the most complex human behaviors: music improvisation. Using a large corpus of improvised solos from eminent jazz musicians, we test for a production bias observed in language termed -a tendency for more accessible sequences to occur at the beginning of a phrase, allowing incremental planning later in the same phrase.

Exploring the Relationship Between Fiction Reading and Emotion Recognition.

Fiction reading experience affects emotion recognition abilities, yet the causal link remains underspecified. Current theory suggests fiction reading promotes the simulation of fictional minds, which supports emotion recognition skills. We examine the extent to which contextualized statistical experience with emotion category labels in language is associated with emotion recognition.

Is Language Production Planning Emergent From Action Planning? A Preliminary Investigation.

The nature of syntactic planning for language production may reflect language-specific processes, but an alternative is that syntactic planning is an example of more domain-general action planning processes. If so, language and non-linguistic action planning should have identifiable commonalities, consistent with an underlying shared system. Action and language research have had little contact, however, and such comparisons are therefore lacking.

Verbal Working Memory as Emergent from Language Comprehension and Production.

This article reviews current models of verbal working memory and considers the role of language comprehension and long-term memory in the ability to maintain and order verbal information for short periods of time. While all models of verbal working memory posit some interaction with long-term memory, few have considered the character of these long-term representations or how they might affect performance on verbal working memory tasks. Similarly, few models have considered how comprehension processes and production processes might affect performance in verbal working memory tasks.

Production Practice During Language Learning Improves Comprehension.

Language learners often spend more time comprehending than producing a new language. However, memory research suggests reasons to suspect that production practice might provide a stronger learning experience than comprehension practice. We tested the benefits of production during language learning and the degree to which this learning transfers to comprehension skill.

Structural priming, action planning, and grammar.

Structural priming is poorly understood and cannot inform accounts of grammar for two reasons. First, those who view performance as grammar + processing will always be able to attribute psycholinguistic data to processing rather than grammar. Second, structural priming may be simply an example of hysteresis effects in general action planning.

Influences of speech familiarity on immediate perception and final comprehension.

Unfamiliar speech-spoken in a familiar language but with an accent different from the listener's-is known to increase comprehension difficulty. However, there is evidence of listeners' rapid adaptation to unfamiliar accents (although perhaps not to the level of familiar accents). This paradox might emerge from prior focus on isolated word perception and/or use of single comprehension measures.

Memory limitations and chunking are variable and cannot explain language structure.

Both the Now-or-Never bottleneck and the chunking mechanisms hypothesized to cope with it are more variable than Christiansen & Chater (C&C) suggest. These constructs are, therefore, too weak to support C&C's claims for the nature of language. Key aspects of the hierarchical nature of language instead arise from the nature of sequencing of subgoals during utterance planning in language production.

Impact of dialect use on a basic component of learning to read.

Can some black-white differences in reading achievement be traced to differences in language background? Many African American children speak a dialect that differs from the mainstream dialect emphasized in school. We examined how use of alternative dialects affects decoding, an important component of early reading and marker of reading development. Behavioral data show that use of the alternative pronunciations of words in different dialects affects reading aloud in developing readers, with larger effects for children who use more African American English (AAE).

Text exposure predicts spoken production of complex sentences in 8- and 12-year-old children and adults.

There is still much debate about the nature of the experiential and maturational changes that take place during childhood to bring about the sophisticated language abilities of an adult. The present study investigated text exposure as a possible source of linguistic experience that plays a role in the development of adult-like language abilities. Corpus analyses of object and passive relative clauses (Object: The book that the woman carried; Passive: The book that was carried by the woman) established the frequencies of these sentence types in child-directed speech and children's literature.

Language knowledge and event knowledge in language use.

This paper examines how semantic knowledge is used in language comprehension and in making judgments about events in the world. We contrast knowledge gleaned from prior language experience ("language knowledge") and knowledge coming from prior experience with the world ("world knowledge"). In two corpus analyses, we show that previous research linking verb aspect and event representations have confounded language and world knowledge.

Agent-patient similarity affects sentence structure in language production: evidence from subject omissions in Mandarin.

Interference effects from semantically similar items are well-known in studies of single word production, where the presence of semantically similar distractor words slows picture naming. This article examines the consequences of this interference in sentence production and tests the hypothesis that in situations of high similarity-based interference, producers are more likely to omit one of the interfering elements than when there is low semantic similarity and thus low interference. This work investigated language production in Mandarin, which allows subject noun phrases to be omitted in discourse contexts in which the subject entity has been previously mentioned in the discourse.

Visual salience modulates structure choice in relative clause production.

The role of visual salience on utterance form was investigated in a picture description study. Participants heard spoken questions about animate or inanimate entities in a picture and produced a relative clause in response. Visual properties of the scenes affected production choices such that less salient inanimate entities tended to yield longer initiation latencies and to be described with passive relative clauses more than visually salient inanimates.

Dialect awareness and lexical comprehension of mainstream american english in african american english-speaking children.

Purpose: This study was designed to examine the relationships among minority dialect use, language ability, and young African American English (AAE)-speaking children's understanding and awareness of Mainstream American English (MAE).

Method: Eighty-three 4- to 8-year-old AAE-speaking children participated in 2 experimental tasks. One task evaluated their awareness of differences between MAE and AAE, whereas the other task evaluated their lexical comprehension of MAE in contexts that were ambiguous in AAE but unambiguous in MAE.

Experience and generalization in a connectionist model of Mandarin Chinese relative clause processing.

Sentences containing relative clauses are well known to be difficult to comprehend, and they have long been an arena in which to investigate the role of working memory in language comprehension. However, recent work has suggested that relative clause processing is better described by ambiguity resolution processes than by limits on extrinsic working memory. We investigated these alternative views with a Simple Recurrent Network (SRN) model of relative clause processing in Mandarin Chinese, which has a unique pattern of word order across main and relative clauses and which has yielded mixed results in human comprehension studies.