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Glossa Psycholinguistics

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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.


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.

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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. 

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Non-plural interpretations of some: Mouse-tracking evidence for quick social reasoning in real-time

In support of an account in which disfluency can cue social reasoning in real time, Loy et al. (2019) showed that listeners are more likely to make an early commitment to a socially undesirable meaning of some as all, if it follows disfluent uh in a context where larger values are associated with greed (“I ate, [uh], some biscuits”). However, their finding is also compatible with an account in which disfluency simply heightens attention to the core semantic meaning of some, namely, some and possibly all. The current study differentiates these two accounts, using contexts in which smaller values are the socially undesirable interpretations of some. In two experiments, we recorded participants’ mouse movements as they heard fluent and disfluent utterances in a job interview context (“I have, [uh], some qualifications”) and clicked on one of four images corresponding to specific interpretations of some. Here, in keeping with an account in which the effects of disfluency reflect social reasoning, and contrary to one in which such effects depend on heightened attention, disfluency reduces the value participants associate with some. We found that participants were more likely to select images corresponding to one, or zero, qualifications following disfluent utterances. However, their mouse movements show that they are quick to commit to one qualification (Experiment 1) and slow to commit to zero (Experiment 2), suggesting that social context and manner of speech can combine to affect the interpretation of some as an utterance unfolds. Assigning its meaning to one is relatively easy, but imposing a meaning of zero – in effect, deciding that a speaker is lying – is more demanding.

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Does productive agreement morphology increase sensitivity to agreement in a second language?

Adult language learners have variable performance with subject-verb number agreement. But it is unclear whether their performance additionally depends on the availability of agreement morphology in their first language. To address this question, we conducted a self-paced reading task comparing different speaker groups: (a) first vs. second language speakers of German; (b) intermediate-to-advanced German learners whose first language had more or less productive number agreement morphology (Spanish vs. English). Two manipulations were used to diagnose number processing: agreement violations and agreement attraction. Our results showed decreased sensitivity to agreement violations in language learners, irrespective of the morphological productivity of their first language. Meanwhile, differences in attraction effects were inconclusive in all between-group comparisons. We suggest that second language variability with subject-verb agreement is unlikely to result from increased retrieval interference – the effect underlying attraction. Instead, variable performance more likely arises because learners have difficulties in the real-time mapping of inflectional morphemes to syntactic features.

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Got it right up front? Further evidence for parallel graded prediction during prenominal article processing in a self-paced reading study

Recent studies suggest that language users generate and maintain multiple predictions in parallel, especially in tasks that explicitly instruct participants to generate predictions. Here, we investigated the possibility of parallel gradedness of linguistic predictions in a simple reading task, using a new measure—imbalance—that captures the probabilistic difference between multiple sentence completions. We focus on prenominal gender-marked articles in German to obtain prediction-specific effects. Native speakers of German read predictable or unpredictable gender-marked nouns that were preceded by prediction-consistent or -inconsistent prenominal articles. Sentence frames either biased expectations more strongly toward the most likely continuation of the sentence, or balanced expectations between the first and second most likely continuation. The results showed reading facilitation for gender-marked articles when sentences were more biased but slowing when sentences were more balanced, irrespective of article predictability. We conclude that readers issue multiple prenominal predictions and weigh them according to their likelihood, providing evidence for parallel gradedness of prenominal predictions. The results are discussed in light of theoretical models on prediction and rational sentence processing.

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Experimental evidence for semantic and morphophonological productivity in Kîîtharaka noun classes

In nominal classification systems, both form (i.e., morphology, phonology or both) and meaning often interact to determine the class or gender of the noun. In Bantu languages in particular, linguistic analysis has often put the emphasis on meaning, both inherent and evaluative (e.g., diminutive). However, recent quantitative studies have argued that both meaning and morphophonology – the ubiquitous nominal prefixes – serve as cues to class in Bantu, with their robustness and specific aspects potentially differing across individual languages. Here, we conducted an experimental study aimed at establishing whether speakers of Kîîtharaka (Bantu, E54) are sensitive to both semantics and morphophonology when classifying novel Kîîtharaka nouns. We used two wug-task-style experiments to establish whether particular aspects of meaning or form (here, nominal prefixes) would influence participants’ production of agreement on nominal dependents. Results showed that speakers are sensitive to two inherent features, Human and Fruit, and evaluative features like Augmentative, Pejorative and Diminutive. On the other hand, they are robustly sensitive to all morphophonological features tested when classifying novel nouns. Our results suggest that semantic features are generally less productive than morphophonology in the Kîîtharaka nominal classification system.

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Revisiting processing complexity of nested and cross-serial dependencies

In two web-based experiments, we compare comprehension difficulty between Dutch and German sentences with clusters of two or three verbs. In Dutch, such sentences involve crossing dependencies, whereas these dependencies are nested in German. Replicating the seminal finding of Bach et al. (1986), we find that the crossing (Dutch) structure is easier to comprehend than the nested (German) structure, although we find a different pattern of results in terms of where this difficulty manifests. The results are in line with predictions from the Dependency Locality Theory.

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Thematic considerations in the processing of local ambiguities: Evidence from Hebrew

In three forced-choice completion experiments in Hebrew, the present study investigates the degree to which attachment decisions in sentences with local ambiguity are driven by the goal to maximize interpretation during incremental processing. In particular, we examine a processing strategy aimed at thematic assignment maximization proposed by Pritchett (1988, 1992): at every point during processing, the Theta Criterion attempts to be satisfied, given the maximal thematic grid of the available verbs. We find a consistent preference for attaching a noun phrase to a preceding verb over attaching it as the subject of a yet-unmentioned verb, in accord with thematic assignment maximization and in line with previous observations. In contrast, when two possible verbs were available before the noun phrase, no consistent attachment preference was observed. This points to a prominent role for thematic assignment in ambiguity resolution. In addition, transitivity bias was found to affect processing choices in the latter case, but not in the former. Finally, we show that local thematic assignment maximization can even override global grammaticality.

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When multiple talker exposure is necessary for cross-talker generalization: Insights into the emergence of sociolinguistic perception

Sociolinguistic research finds that: (i) the speech signal contains talker-specific and socio-indexical structure, with talkers varying idiosyncratically within the same social category and systematically across categories; (ii) both talker-specific and socio-indexical variation influence speech perception. What is unclear is how sociolinguistic perception arises—following exposure to an unfamiliar, socially-mediated variant, how do listeners learn that this feature is characteristic of a broader social group and can generalize to other group members? The current study exposed listeners to an unattested variant in L1-English (a /p/ to [b] phonetic shift), investigating how the number of exposure talkers mediates cross-talker generalization. All participants completed an exposure phase (phrase-final keyword identification) followed by a test phase (categorization along a buy–pie continuum for a novel female and male talker in separate blocks). Experiment 1 exposed listeners to a single shifted female talker (“The novel is now in brint”) and a single unshifted male talker. Experiment 2 presented two shifted female and two shifted male talkers. We find: (i) no generalization in Experiment 1 (no difference in buy–pie response between the novel talkers); (ii) robust generalization in Experiment 2 (greater pie response for the novel female than the novel male talker), but only when the novel female block is presented first (i.e., generalization is short-lived). Taken together, the results support a numerosity account: when a previously unheard social variant is presented, multiple talkers per social group seem to be necessary for socially-mediated, cross-talker generalization. This study highlights a critical role of the listener’s social experiences on generalization—multi-talker exposure might be unnecessary when exposed to more familiar types of speech (e.g., L2-accented English) and necessary when exposed to completely unfamiliar variants. Overall, the present experiments enhance our theoretical understanding of cross-talker generalization and offer insights into the emergence of sociolinguistic perception.

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An investigation of definiteness as a trigger of bridging

A bridged interpretation of a noun phrase (NP) is one in which the referent is understood to stand in some unstated relation to an entity or event previously mentioned in the discourse. For example, in the sequence Yasmin approached the house. The door was open., the NP the door is naturally interpreted as referring to a door of the just-mentioned house. In the theoretical literature, definiteness is often identified as the key driver of bridged interpretations, requiring an alternative analysis for bridged indefinites (Yasmin approached the house. A door was open.). We contrast this two-phenomena approach with a one-phenomenon approach, whereby bridging inferences are understood to be the result of general considerations of discourse coherence, particularly facilitated by entity relatedness, but also responsive to effects of definiteness. We present two new methods aimed at measuring the ease and strength of participants’ bridging inferences when entity relatedness and definiteness are manipulated. The two-phenomena view predicts that definiteness has a distinctive role to play in inducing bridged interpretations, but contra this view, our results show no independent effect of definiteness. Rather, Experiment 1 (a dialogue-continuation task that probes the presence of bridged interpretations) shows only a main effect of entity relatedness. In Experiment 2 (a self-paced-reading task that probes processing difficulty when a potential bridge is broken), we find an interaction whereby high entity relatedness and the presence of the definite together induce an early commitment to a bridged interpretation. We take these findings to support a unified account in which definite NPs do not require a separate bridging mechanism, but rather are treated like other NPs in being subject to the joint satisfaction of a set of linguistic and more broadly pragmatic constraints.

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