About
Glossa Psycholinguistics publishes contributions to the field of psycholinguistics in the broad sense. Articles in Glossa Psycholinguistics combine empirical and theoretical perspectives to illuminate our understanding of the nature of language. Submissions from all fields and theoretical perspectives on any psycholinguistic topic are appropriate, as are submissions focusing on any level of linguistic analysis (sounds, words, sentences, etc.) or population (adults, children, multilingual language users, late learners, etc.). Methods and approaches include experimentation, computational modeling, corpus analyses, cognitive neuroscience and others. Glossa Psycholinguistics publishes methodological articles when those articles make the theoretical implications of the methodological advances clear. Contributions should be of interest to psycholinguists and other scholars interested in language.
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2025
Regular Articles
Beware of referential garden paths! The dangerous allure of semantic parses that succeed locally but globally fail
A central endeavor in psycholinguistic research has been to determine the processing profile of syntactically ambiguous strings. Previous work investigating syntactic attachment ambiguities has shown that discarding a locally grammatically available, but globally failing, parse is costly. However, little is known about how comprehenders cope with semantic parsing ambiguities. Using the case study of scopally ambiguous definite descriptions such as the rabbit in the big hat, we examine whether comparable penalties arise for non-lexical semantic ambiguities. In a series of reference resolution tasks, we find dispreference for strings that are globally defined but fail to refer under alternative semantic parses, compared to strings where all readings successfully refer to the same individual. Crucially, this effect is only detectable when the alternative failing reading gives rise to a REFERENTIAL GARDEN PATH, where a dynamic constraint evaluation process temporarily settles on a unique referent before eventually failing. We conclude that failing alternative readings cause dispreference for a definite description, but only when the failing interpretation constitutes a red herring.
- 2 supplemental PDFs
- 1 supplemental file
The role of context in English vowel pronunciation: Evidence from ‹s› clusters
Vowel letters are a source of difficulty in reading English words, for they have both long and short pronunciations. In two studies, we examined how vowels are pronounced before different types of medial consonants in the words of English and the degree to which skilled readers follow those vocabulary statistics in their behavior. We found more short vowels before sequences beginning with ‹s› than before those such as ‹pl›, regardless of whether the letter after ‹s› corresponded to a stop consonant (e.g., ‹sp›) or a sonorant (e.g., ‹sl›). These results show that pronunciation of vowels is influenced by the nature and not just the number of following consonants, contrary to the assumptions that commonly underlie phonics instruction. Although the results support a statistical learning view of reading, in that participants showed an implicit use of untaught patterns, participants’ pronunciations differed in some ways from those expected given the vocabulary statistics.
- 1 supplemental PDF
- 1 supplemental file