Laboratoire de Psycholinguistique Experimentale, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland.
Published: July 2008
AI Article Synopsis
Article Abstract
Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundaries constrain online syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were used to create sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g., [le petit chien mort], in English, the dead little dog, vs. [le petit chien] [mord], in English, the little dog bites, where brackets indicate phonological phrase boundaries). An expert speaker recorded the sentences with either a maximally informative prosody or a minimally informative one. Participants correctly assigned the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, even without any access to the lexical disambiguating information, in both a completion task (Experiment 1) and an abstract word detection task (Experiment 2). The size of the experimental effect was modulated by the prosodic manipulation (maximally vs. minimally informative), guaranteeing that prosody played a crucial role in disambiguation. The authors discuss the implications of these results for models of online speech perception and language acquisition.
Background: The defective spoken output of persons with aphasia has anomia as a main clinical manifestation. Improving anomia is therefore a main goal of any language treatment.
Aim: This study assessed the effectiveness of a novel, 2-week, rehabilitation protocol (PHOLEXSEM), focused on PHonological, SEmantic, and LExical deficits, aiming at improving lexical retrieval, and, generally, spoken output.
We investigated how lexical form similarity of referential candidates and ambiguity of following pronouns impact the encoding and retrieval of words from memory during sentence processing in younger and older adults. Critical sentences included two noun phrases (henceforth NPs) that were either phonologically and orthographically similar (Jason and Jacob/Jade) or dissimilar (Jason and Matt/Hannah), followed by a pronoun (e.g.
This study investigates whether downstep in Japanese is directly triggered by accents. When the pitch height of a word X is lower after an accented word (A) than after an unaccented word (U), X is diagnosed as downstepped. However, this diagnosis involves two confounding factors: the already lowered F0 before X and phonological phrasing.
Introduction: Prosodic focus marking in Seoul Korean is known to be achieved primarily through prosodic phrasing, different from the use of prosody for this purpose in many other languages. This study investigates how children use prosodic phrasing for focus-marking purposes in Seoul Korean, compared to adults.
Methods: Using a picture-matching game, we elicited semi-spontaneous production of SOV sentences in various focus conditions from monolingual Seoul Korean-speaking children aged 4 to 11 years.
Purpose: This study explored the use of an automated language analysis tool, FLUCALC, for measuring fluency in aphasia. The purpose was to determine whether CLAN's FLUCALC command could produce efficient, objective outcome measures for salient aspects of fluency in aphasia.
Method: The FLUCALC command was used on CHAT transcripts of Cinderella stories from people with aphasia (PWA; = 281) and controls ( = 257) in the AphasiaBank database.
