Abstracts - Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain - University ...

Abstracts
14th Annual Conference on
Architectures and Mechanisms for
Language Processing
4-6 September 2008
Cambridge, UK

Academic Programme
Wednesday 3 rd September
15.00-17.00 Pre-conference registration, Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain
Sir William Hardy Building, Downing Street
18.30-20.30 Welcome reception, Newnham College
Thursday 4 th September
08.00-09.10 Registration, Queens’ College
09.10-09.20 Welcome
Session 1 – Syntactic processes in comprehension - 1
Chair: Fernanda Ferreira
09.20-09.40 O1 Sturt, P., Keller, F., & Dubey, A. Syntactic priming in comprehension
without lexical repetition
09.40-10.00 O2 Huettig, F., Chen, J., Bowerman, M., & Majid, A. Linguistic relativity:
Evidence from Mandarin speakers’ eye-movements
10.00-10.20 O3 Yoshida, M., Dickey, M-W., & Sturt, P. Sluicing and syntactic
prediction in online sentence processing
10.20-10.50 Coffee
Session 2 –
Discourse constraints in comprehension
Chair: Alan Garnham
10.50-11.10 O4 Kreiner, H., Mohr, S., Kessler, K., & Garrod, S. The interaction
between discourse constraints and gender agreement in lexical and
stereotypical role nouns: Evidence from ERP
11.10-11.30 O5 Ferguson, H.J., & Breheny, R. Investigating the automaticity of
predicting deception in a theory of mind task
11.30-11.50 O6 Arnold, J.E., & Lao, S-Y.C. Non-joint attention influences pronoun
comprehension
11.50-12.10 O7 Richardson, D.C., Dale, R., Kirkham, N.Z., & Tomlinson, J.
Conversation, common ground and gaze coordination
1

12.10-14.30 Lunch and Poster Session 1
14.30-15.30 KN1 Rebecca Gómez
Constraining children’s generalizations: Processing constraints on language
learning
Introduced and chaired by Lorraine K Tyler
Session 3 –
Visual language processing
Chair: Pienie Zwitserlood
15.30-15.50 O8 Thompson, R.L., Vinson, D.P., Jin, M., Pickering, M.J, & Vigliocco,
G. Seeing the world through a visual language: Visual word paradigm in
British Sign Language
15.50-16.10 O9 Orfanidou, E., Adam, R., & McQueen, J.M. Are non-lexical transitions
between signs a segmentation cue in British Sign Language
16.10-16.40 Coffee
Session 4 –
Speech perception
Chair: Matthew Davis
16.40-17.00 O10 Mattys, S.L., & Cooke, M. Effects of perceptual and cognitive loads
on speech segmentation
17.00-17.20 O11 Reinisch, E., Jesse, A., & McQueen, J.M. Speaking rate affects the
perception of word boundaries in online word recognition
17.20-17.40 O12 Snoeren, N.D., Gaskell, G., & Di Betta, A.M. The perception of
assimilation in newly learned novel words
Friday 5 th September
08.00-09.20 Registration, Queens’ College
Session 5 – Language Production – 1
Chair: Martin Pickering
09.20-09.40 O13 Shafto, M.A., Stamatakis, E.A., Tam, P.P., & Tyler, L.K. Senior
moments and the brain: Convergent measures and an aging network
09.40-10.00 O14 Hartsuiker, R.J., & Anton-Mendez, I. Interaction and interactivity in
language production
10.00-10.20 O15 Vernice, M., & Hartsuiker, R.J. Determinants of function assignment
in language production: Is conceptual accessibility enough
2

10.20-10.50 Coffee
Session 6 – Syntactic processes in comprehension – 2
Chair: Patrick Sturt
10.50-11.10 O16 Apel, J., Henderson, J.M., & Ferreira, F. The perceptual span during
regressions in garden path sentences
11.10-11.30 O17 Tily, H., Hemforth, B., Arnon, I., Shuval, N., Snider, N., & Wasow, T.
Eye movements reflect comprehenders’ knowledge of syntactic structure
probability
11.30-11.50 O18 Arai, M., & Keller, F. The use of verb-specific information for
prediction in sentence processing
11.50-12.10 O19 Kuperman, V., Vitoria, P., & Schreuder, R. Bridging locality and antilocality
effects in the processing of long-distance syntactic dependencies
12.10-14.30 Lunch and Poster Session 2
14.30-15.30 KN2 William Marslen-Wilson
The neurobiological foundations of spoken language comprehension
Introduced and chaired by Kathleen Rastle
Session 7 –
Lexical semantics
Chair: Gabriella Vigliocco
15.30-15.50 O20 Ford, M.A., Randall, B., Taylor, K.I., Devereux, B.J., & Tyler, L.K.
Semantic features and the computation of word meaning: A large
correlational semantic decision study
15.50-16.10 O21 Vinson, D.P., Skinner, R., Thompson, R.L., & Vigliocco, G. The link
between meaning and form in British Sign Language: Role of iconic
properties in lexical and conceptual processing
16.10-16.40 Coffee
Session 8 –
Language acquisition
Chair: Rebecca Gómez
16.40-17.00 O22 Bannard, C., Lieven, E.V.M., & Tomasello, M. Evaluating
constructivist theory via Bayesian modeling of children’s early grammatical
development
17.00-17.20 O23 Franck, J., Millotte, S., & Frauenfelder, U.H. Early word order
representation: Evidence against the lexical hypothesis
17.20-17.40 O24 Rabagliati, H.A., Lin, T., Gelfand, H., Marcus, G.F., & Pylkkänen, L.
Development at the syntax-semantics interface: When do children
understand implicit ontological shifts
19.00 Conference Dinner, St John’s College
3

Saturday 6 th September
08.00-09.20 Registration, Queens’ College
Session 9 – Language Production – 2
Chair: Victor Ferreira
09.20-09.40 O25 Huettig, F., & Hartsuiker, R.J. External vs. internal verbal selfmonitoring:
Speakers listen to their own external, but not internal, speech in
speech production
09.40-10.00 O26 Carbary, K.M., & Tanenhaus, M.K. Syntactic priming and message
encoding in unscripted dialogue
10.00-10.20 O27 Langus, A., & Nespor, M. Communication and grammar do not rely
on the same cognitive system
10.20-10.50 Coffee
Session 10 –
Lexical processing: Phonology and morphology
Chair: William Marslen-Wilson
10.50-11.10 O28 Bozic, M., Tyler, L.K., & Marslen-Wilson, W.D. Neuro-cognitive
systems supporting derivational morphology
11.10-11.30 O29 WITHDRAWN - Reilly, E., Solomyak, O., Marantz, A., & Badecker,
W. Full parsing versus dual route models of morphological processing:
Assessing surface frequency effects on response time using MEG
11.30-11.50 O30 Salverda, A.P., & Tanenhaus, M.K. Orthographic and phonological
information in the printed-words paradigm
11.50-12.10 O31 Rastle, K., Havelka, J., & Wydell, T. The cross-script length effect on
reading aloud: Further challenges for PDP models
12.10-14.30 Lunch and Poster Session 3
14.30-15.30 KN3 Jonathan Grainger
Cracking the orthographic code
Introduced and chaired by James McQueen
Session 11 –
Discourse processes
Chair: Jennifer Arnold
15.30-15.50 O32 Sanford, A.J., Bohan, J., Sanford, A.J.S., & Leuthold, H. Fit-to-context
as a controller of the extent of semantic processing during discourse
comprehension.
4

15.50-16.20 Coffee
Session 11 continued
16.20-16.40 O33 Barr, D.J. Evidence for a dissociation between pragmatic and semantic
constraint in lexical processing
16.40-17.00 O34 Paterson, K.B., Filik, R., Mousoulidou, M., & Moxey, L.M.
Interpreting quantifiers in context
17.00-17.10 Concluding remarks
5

Poster Sessions
Poster Session 1 - Thursday 4 th September (12.10-14.30)
P1
P2
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P4
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P8
P9
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P11
P12
P13
P14
P15
P16
P17
P18
P19
P20
P21
P22
Roland, D. Relative clauses and surprisal
Dikker, S., Rabagliati, H.A., Farmer, T.A., & Pylkkänen, L. Sensitivity to syntax in
visual cortex: The role of phonological typicality
Moat, S., Corley, M., & Hartsuiker, R.J. Exchange rate woes for the spreading
activation model too: A large-scale investigation
Weighall, A.R., & Altmann, G.T.M. Explaining disruption in children's processing
of interrupted main clauses: Discourse entities or similarity-interference
Mitchell, L.M., & Rastle, K. Exploring the rules of stress assignment in disyllabic
nonwords
Sturt, P., & Yoshida, M. The speed of relative clause attachment
Martin, A.E., & McElree, B. Susceptibility to retroactive interference in verb-phrase
ellipsis
Ferreira, F., & Jones, M.W. Good-enough language processing in a communicative
situation
WITHDRAWN - Kovacs, A.M., & Mehler, J. Extracting repetition-based patterns
from noise in infancy
Ivanova, I., Pickering, M.J., Branigan, H.P., McLean, J., & Costa, A.M. Mary exists
a ball to John: Structural priming from wrong or nonce verbs exists
Haigh, M., Stewart, A., & Kidd, E. Constraints on the construction of counterfactual
situation representations during comprehension: An examination of on-line
suppositional processing
Myachykov, A., Garrod, S., & Scheepers, C. A unified priming account of structural
choice in sentence production
Brunellière, A.B., & Frauenfelder, U.H. Morpho-syntactic priming effects in spoken
language processing
Thomas, J.D., & Forster, K.I. A cross-task comparison of masked priming effects
for differing semantic prime-target relationships
Taylor, D., Lewis, R., & Badecker, W. Individual differences in agreement
planning: The role of working-memory control
Bannard, C., & Matthews, D.E. 2- and 3-year-olds' accuracy in repeating 4-word
sequences is predicted by familiarity, positional variability and latent semantic
classes
Ferguson, H.J., Scheepers, C., & Sanford, A.J. Be positive! The effect of negation
on factual and counterfactual language processing
Thompson, R.L., Vinson, D.P., & Vigliocco, G. The link between form and meaning
in British Sign Language: Lexical processing effects in semantic and phonological
decisions
Wang, L., Schlesewsky, M., & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I. Topicality and animacy
interact to determine word order preferences in Chinese
Vandekerckhove, B., & Sandra, D. An exemplar-based model of thematic fit
Bohan, J., Sanford, A.J., Glen, K., Clark, F., & Martin, E. Focus and emphasis
devices modulate depth of processing as reflected in semantic anomaly detection
Heide, J., Bartels, L., Lorenz, A., & Burchert, F. Lexical decision on German
prefixed verbs: Full form and root frequency effects
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P23
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P28
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P31
P32
P33
P34
P35
P36
P37
P38
P39
P40
P41
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P43
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P46
Pliatsikas, C., & Marinis, T. Processing of regular and irregular past tense
morphology in highly proficient L2 learners of English: A self-paced reading study
Raffray, C.N., Scheepers, C., & Myachykov, A. Lexical overlap effects on syntactic
priming: Evidence against a privileged status of verbs
Whiting, C.M., Shtyrov, Y., & Marslen-Wilson, W.D. Processing derivational and
inflectional morphology in visual word recognition
Kim, C.S., Gunlogson, C., Tanenhaus, M.K., & Runner, J.T. Focus alternatives and
contextual domain restriction: An eye-tracking study on the interpretation of “only”
Coco, M.I., & Keller, F. Competition of visual and linguistic resources: Effects of
intonational breaks and salience on the interpretation of structurally ambiguous
sentences
Raffray, C.N., Pickering, M.J., & Branigan, H.P. Event structure coordination in
dialogue: Evidence from coercion
Jackson, C., & Roberts, L. Animacy affects the processing of subject/object
ambiguities in the L2
WITHDRAWN - Coppock, E.E. Capturing the productivity of the double object
construction
Arai, M., Keller, F., & Demberg, V. Evidence for the prediction of modifiers during
sentence processing
Cummins, C.R. Scrambled word recognition: Implications for position coding
Jin, Y-S., Logie, R., & Corley, M. Translation takes place before utterance in a
reading for translation task - evidence from two self-paced reading studies
Traxler, M.J. Evidence for determinate attachment of relative clause modifiers
Matthews, D.E., Lieven, E.V.M., & Tomasello, M. What’s in a manner of speaking
Children’s sensitivity to partner specific referential precedents
Carminati, M.N., & van Gompel, R.P.G. Lexical boost effects in comprehension
priming
Brouwer, S.M., Mitterer, H., & Huettig, F. Listeners make optimal use of speaker
and discourse information when recognizing reduced forms
Ding, G., Randall, B., Devereux, B.J., Shestakova, A., & Tyler, L.K. Dynamically
resolving syntactic and semantic ambiguity in comprehending spoken language: A
MEG study
Filipović Đurđević, D. Balance of sense probabilities affects processing: Evidence
from naming
WITHDRAWN - Stockall, L., de Almeida, R., Cook, G., & von Grunau, M. Early
visual compound constituent detection: Distinct roles for the right and left
hemisphere
Leonard Cook, A., Corley, M., Ota, M., & Sorace, A. Implicit learning of second
language structures
Dorjee Khenchen, D., Garrett, M.F., & Glisky, E.L. Frontal mechanisms in language
pragmatics: Evidence from older adults processing implicitures
Lau, K.Y.D. The development of morphological processing in reading Chinese
Andonova, E., & Coventry, K. Perspective priming in spatial descriptions
Zhuang, J., Marslen-Wilson, W.D., Randall, B., Ford, M.A., & Tyler, L.K. The
effect of cohort competition and semantics in spoken word recognition: An fMRI
study
Myachykov, A., Branigan, H.P., & Scheepers, C. Structural priming of voice and the
repetition of the phonological verb form
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P47
P48
P49
P50
Corrêa, L.M.S., Augusto, M.A.R., Miranda, F.V., & Marcilese, M. Avoiding
processing cost: Differential strategies in the production of restrictive relative
clauses
Janssen, N., Melinger, A., Mahon, B.Z., Finkbeiner, M., & Caramazza, A. The
grammatical class effect in the picture-word interference paradigm
Rodrigues, E. dos Santos. The effect of argument status of PP modifiers on subjectverb
agreement errors in Portuguese
Smolka, E., Aviles, A., & Carreiras, M. When hands convey the concreteness of
words: Language production in cued speech
Poster Session 2 - Friday 5 th September (12.10-14.30)
P51
P52
P53
P54
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P56
P57
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P62
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P67
WITHDRAWN - Imada, M., Matsui, H., Miyamoto, E.T., Subacheva, I.P., &
Tagawa, T. Effects of phonological length in the processing of scrambling in
Japanese
Van Assche, E., Duyck, W., Hartsuiker, R.J., & Diependaele, K. Does bilingualism
change native-language reading Cognate effects in sentence context
Huettig, F., & McQueen, J.M. Retrieval and use of components of lexical
knowledge depend on situational demands
Siyanova, A., Conklin, K., & Schmitt, N. Evidence for different processes
underlying idiom comprehension in L1 and L2: An eye-tracking study
Kraljic, T., Siu, Y., & Ferreira, V.S. Rapid effects of linguistic alignment on
communication
Delogu, F., & Sanford, A.J. Intensionality in sentence and discourse processing
Wu, F., & Kaiser, E. Animacy effects in Chinese relative clauses processing
Jacob, G., & von Gompel, R.P.G. The processing of lexical and subcategorization
information from newly acquired verbs
Augurzky, P. Prosodic balance constrains argument structure interpretation in
German
Grewe, T., Schlesewsky, M., & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I. Caught between the
fields: Evidence for the neural reality of topological distinctions in the
comprehension of word order permutations
Gualmini, A., Meroni, L., & Zondervan, A. Experiments on the role of focus
triggered by different types of QUDs in the computation of scalar implicatures
Devereux, B.J., Taylor, K.I., Randall, B., Ford, M.A., & Tyler, L.K. The influence
of conceptual structure in lexical and semantic decision on spoken words
Kreysa, H., Pickering, M.J., Haywood, S.L., & Henderson, J.M. Linked visual
attention between speakers and listeners: Effects on the comprehension of object
descriptions
Tzeng, A.K. ERPs study on lateralization of semantic repetition blindness
Hanne, S., Sekerina, I.A., Vasishth, S., Burchert, F., & De Bleser, R. Processing of
noncanonical sentences in German agrammatic aphasia: Evidence from eye
movements
Hochmann, J-R., & Mehler, J. Identifying and using function words: An eyetracking
study with 17-month-olds
Tydgat, I., Hartsuiker, R.J., & Pickering, M.J. Self-monitoring in speech: Where do
we stop our erroneous utterances
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P68 Merkx, M.M., Rastle, K., & Davis, M.H Learning morphemes: Insights from skilled
readers
P69 Stolterfoht, B., Gese, H., & Maienborn, C. Syntactic category conversion causes
processing costs: Evidence from adjectival passives
P70 Bohan, J., Sanford, A.J., Cochrane, S., & Sanford, A.J.S. Direct and indirect speech
modulates depth of processing
P71 Holland, R., Brindley, L., Tavabi, K., Pulvermüller, F., Patterson, K., & Shtyrov, Y.
Are past-tense verbs special Evidence from a mismatch negativity study
P72 Mirkovic, J., Trenkic, D., & Altmann, G.T.M. Processing of determiners: Task
differences in the ‘visual world’ paradigm
P73 Andrews, M.W., Vigliocco, G., & Vinson, D.P. Integrating statistics from the world
and from language to learn semantic representations
P74 Koornneef, A.W., Wijnen, F., & Reuland, E. Bridging the gap between linguistics
and psycholinguistics: The case of anaphora
P75 Rosenberg, J., Pusch, K., Dietrich, R., & Cajochen, C. Diurnal variations in
language performance
P76 Wonnacott, E., Perfors, A., & Tenenhaum, J.B. Higher order inference in verb
argument structure acquisition
P77 Spalek, K., & Damian, M.F. Of blue bottles and blue flowers: Phonological
representations of L1 are active when producing words in L2
P78 Allured, G., Conklin, K., & van Heuven, W.J.B. Processing overt and zero pronouns
in Mandarin Chinese
P79 Diependaele, K., Sandra, D., & Grainger, J. Lexical and sublexical morphological
influences in visual word recognition
P80 Weber, K.M., & Indefrey, P. Shared syntactic information in German-English
bilinguals: An fMRI repetition suppression study
P81 Garcia Castro, Y., Strijkers, K., Costa, A.M., & Alario, X. When cat competes with
dog but not with perro: Evidence from the semantic competitor paradigm
P82 Shukla, M., & Nespor, M. The vocalic tier constrains statistical computations over
the consonantal tier
P83 Taylor, K.I., Randall, B., Ford, M.A., Devereux, B.J., & Tyler, L.K. The statistical
properties of semantic features influence spoken word recognition: Evidence from
neuroimaging
P84 Uzule, K., Wheeldon, L.R., & Meyer, A.S. Priming local syntactic structure in
speech production: An online study
P85 Dubey, A., Sturt, P., & Keller, F. Delays in the use of discourse information in
syntactic ambiguity resolution
P86 Schwarzkopf, S., Müller, D., Weldle, H., & Konieczny, L. Grammatical person
controls perspective taking in embodied simulation semantics
P87 Staum Casasanto, L., Futrell, R., & Sag, I.A. Extra complementizers increase
syntactic predictability
P88 Moxey, L.M., & Sanford, A.J. When are two characters a set Using scenariomapping
as a guide to equivalence
P89 Race, D.S., Klein, N.M., Hare, M.L., & Tanenhaus, M.K. The role of event
knowledge in verb interpretation
P90 Miranda, F.V., & Corrêa, L.M.S. Resumptive pronouns in relative clauses: A last
resource processing strategy in sentence production
P91 Thornton, R., & Bye, J. Syntactic category ambiguity in sentence production
P92 Rogers, J.C., Marslen-Wilson, W.D., & Davis, M.H. The effect of lexical ambiguity
on spoken word recognition: Homographs versus homophones
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P93 Kim, C.S., & Runner, J.T. Verb phrase ellipsis: Discourse effects in syntax and
syntactic effects in discourse
P94 Klein, M., Frank, S., van Jaarsveld, H., ten Bosch, L.F.M., & Boves, L.
Unsupervised learning of conceptual representations – a computational neural model
P95 Heller, D., Skovbroten, K., & Tanenhaus, M.K. Joint effects of knowledge overlap
(bias) and strength of memory representations
P96 Nilsenová, M., & van Amelsvoort, M.A.A. Testing the alignment model: Syntaxlexicon
& syntax-phonology
P97 Lindsay, S., Sedin, L., & Gaskell, G. Acquiring novel words and their tenses:
Evidence from lexical effects on phonetic categorisation with undegraded and
degraded stimuli
P98 Pattamadilok, C., Perre, L., Dufau, S., & Ziegler, J. On-line orthographic influences
on spoken language in a semantic task
P99 Kaiser, E. Priming pronoun interpretation without using pronouns: Eye-tracking
evidence for coherence
P100 Davis, M.H., Longtin, C-M., & Rastle, K. Is a whisker some one who whisks Tests
of route-emphasis in morphological processing
Poster Session 3 - Saturday 6 th September (12.10-14.30)
P101 Garagnani, M., Shtyrov, Y., Kujala, T., Wennekers, T., & Pulvermüller, F.
Neurocomputational and neurophysiological investigations of brain interactions of
language and attention
P102 Wagner, V., & Jescheniak, J.D. On the flexibility of advance planning during
sentence production: Effects of task demands on multiple lexical access
P103 Meteyard, L., & Patterson, K. How do you find it: An analysis of speech production
in the context of a deteriorating semantic system
P104 Burigo, M., & Lorusso, M.L. Spatial meaning congruity effect with abstract and
concrete words
P105 Davidson, D.J. Event-related spectral changes associated with morphosyntactic
processing
P106 Strijkers, K., & Costa, A.M. Language control in bilingual speech production: A
blocked naming study
P107 De Jong, N.H., Schoonen, R., & Hulstijn, J.H. The origin of pausing and speech rate
in second language speech production
P108 Kaiser, E. Evidence for priming on the level of referential dependencies
P109 Kazanina, N. Morphological decomposition and selection of word meaning
P110 Oppermann, F., Görges, F., Jescheniak, J.D., & Schriefers, H. The activation of
multiple phonological codes during the naming of an object in context
P111 Perniss, P., Vinson, D.P., Vigliocco, G., & Seifart, F. Modality vs. typology effects:
Investigating the divide
P112 O’Seaghdha, P.G., Santiago, J., Chen, J-Y., Roman, A., & Knicely, J. Syllables are
chunks in Mandarin, not in Spanish or English
P113 Hirschfeld, G., Dobel, C., & Zwitserlood, P. Simulating perceptual features during
language comprehension
P114 Gram, L., & Buttery, P. Integrating simulation and experiment: A study of Japanese
second language acquistion
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P115
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P119
P120
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P123
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P125
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P128
P129
P130
P131
P132
P133
P134
P135
P136
P137
Tsai, S-H., Hsu, C-C., Yang, C-L., & Chen, J-Y. The classifier-noun agreement in
Mandarin Chinese is both semantic and syntactic: An event-related-potential (ERP)
study
Lebib, R., & Krott, A. Correctly used rule-governed morphemes elicit left anterior
negativities
Shen, X., & Damian, M.F. Role of phonology in the generation of handwritten
responses
Morgan, J.L., & Weighall, A.R. How do we get from print to meaning: SMS
shortcuts are not so gr8 at fstr lexical access
Frank, R., & Badecker, W. SRNs and the learning of grammatical agreement: The
effect of target-source order and class overlap
Andersson, R., Ferreira, F., & Henderson, J.M. The Visual World paradigm in a
complex world
Szlachta, Z., Randall, B., & Tyler, L.K. Selecting and producing names to common
nouns: The role of the LIFG in the ageing brain
Roehm, D., & Sorace, A. ERP signatures of auxiliary selection in German
Thornton, R., Klein, N., Llewellyn, E., & Hackl, M. Integrating the spatial semantics
of verbs and prepositions during sentence processing
Yuen, I., Rastle, K., & Brysbaert, M. An EPG investigation of auditory interference
on speech execution
Webman, R., Fodor, J.D., & Fernández, E.M. Prosody and attachment in a double-
PP construction in Hebrew
Bögels, S., Schriefers, H., Vonk, W., Chwilla, D.J., & Kerkhofs, R. The role of
prosody in on- and off-line sentence processing: The case of subject- and objectcontrol
verbs
Mohr, S., Kreiner, H., Kessler, K., & Garrod, S. Processing differences between
anaphora and cataphora: Evidence from oscillatory brain activity
Cai, Z., Pickering, M.J., & Sturt, P. The filler may be a gentleman: Local coherence
effect in long-distance dependency processing
Bordag, D., Trompelt, H., & Pechmann, T. (Ir)regularity of verbs revisited:
Evidence for a lexical entry complexity based account
Schimke, S. The processing of negated sentences in Turkish learners of French: A
preference for scope-to-the-right
Langus, A., Marchetto, E., Bion, R.A.H., & Nespor, M. The role of prosody in
discovering hierarchical structure in continuous speech
Anderson, S.E., Zuares, S.N., & Spivey, M.J. Perceptual simulations of negated
binary-state sentences
Loncke, M., Van Laere, S., & Desmet, T. Priming of syntactic attachment between
prepositional phrases and relative clauses
Kim, S., Mauner, G., & Koenig, J-P. Verb repetition is not required for structural
priming in L2 English production in Japanese-English bilinguals
Crepaldi, D., Marelli, M., & Luzzatti, C. Mental representation and processing of
nominal compounds: Evidence from constituent priming in Italian
Severens, E., & Hartsuiker, R.J. Do readers try to salvage incorrect sentences An
ERP-study
Marinis, T., Chondrogianni, V., & Firat, H. Self-paced listening with picture
verification: A new paradigm to investigate on-line sentence processing in children
and adults
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P140
P141
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P143
P144
P145
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P148
Bernolet, S., Bressers, M., Hartsuiker, R.J., & Pickering, M.J. The representation of
L2 syntax is influenced by second-language proficiency: Evidence from crosslinguistic
syntactic priming
Demberg, V., & Keller, F. A theory of processing difficulty based on syntactic
prediction
Shaher, R.F., Logacev, P., Engelmann, F., Vasishth, S., & Srinivasan, N. Clefting,
topicalization and the given-new preference: Eyetracking evidence from Hindi
Bejjanki, V.R., Clayards, M., Knill, D.C., & Aslin, R.N. Speech perception involves
statistically optimal multi-modal integration
De Vries, M.H., Barth, A., Knecht, S., Zwitserlood, P., & Floeel, A. Stimulation of
Broca’s area causes better error detection in an artificial language: A tDCS study
Kamide, Y. The locus of attention in the mapping of motion events onto a visual
world
Schütze, C.T., Gollan, T.H., & Champion, M.K. Does 'you' help you retrieve 'ewe'
TOT evidence on frequency inheritance
Ilkin, Z., & Sturt, P. Negation reveals preferences in long distance dependency
formation
Zawiszewski, A., Fernández, B., & Laka, I. Native versus non-native processing
symmetries in noun/verb morphology
Qiao, X., & Forster, K.I. Object relatives ARE easier than subject relatives in
Chinese
Frank, S.C., Dubey, A., & Keller, F. Syntactic priming between non-identical noun
phrase structures
12

Abstracts - Keynote Presentations
13

KN1
Rebecca Gómez
University of Arizona, USA
E-mail: rgomez@u.arizona.edu
Constraining children’s generalizations: Processing constraints on
language learning
Recent findings with artificial languages demonstrate remarkable learning abilities in infants and
young children. With such extraordinary abilities how is learning constrained I will discuss three
classes of constraint. The first arises from the learning process itself. The second two arise from
naturally occurring memory processes of consolidation and reconsolidation. With respect to learning
constraints, I will present research suggesting that learning is a dynamically guided process, arising in
the interaction of internal and external constraints. Moreover, learners, and the structure they can
acquire, change as a function of experience. Next, I will discuss two memory processes that constrain
learning. One demonstrates a type of memory consolidation (occurring with sleep) that results in
generalization to novel cases. Another demonstrates how reconsolidation enables memory change.
Both memory processes are important for understanding how children sustain sensitivity to prior
knowledge while incorporating new information in complex learning scenarios such as those involved
in acquiring language.
Notes
14

KN2
William D. Marslen-Wilson
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK
E-mail: william.marslen-wilson@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
The neurobiological foundations of spoken language comprehension
The scientific study of speech and language is in a process of fundamental change and transition,
driven by the development of new techniques for imaging the cognitive activities of the intact human
brain, and by strong inputs from neurobiological sources. Neurobiological constraints, deriving from
insights into the properties of related brain systems in non-human primates, are proving to be
particularly influential. Numerous studies confirm the relevance of the basic primate model for the
higher-order structure of the speech understanding process, with evidence for multiple processing
streams emerging in parallel from auditory cortex and from surrounding areas specialised for
processing complex auditory inputs, and with a major impact on current theories of the functional
architecture of the human neuro-cognitive language system.
This cross-disciplinary perspective provides the framework for the approach to spoken language
presented here, which distinguishes a left lateralised fronto-temporal system that is critical for key
linguistic processes of morpho-syntactic analysis, and a more distributed bi-hemispheric system that
supports the computation of the broader semantic and pragmatic interpretation of the incoming
utterance, as well as more basic processes of lexical access from speech – as reflected in
complementary evidence from neuropsychological and neuroimaging research. This leads to a range
of specific questions about the processing and representational properties of the basic bilateral
system, and how these relate to more specialized linguistic processing functions supported by the left
perisylvian system.
Notes
15

KN3
Jonathan Grainger
CNRS & Université de Provence, France
E-mail: jonathan.grainger@univ-provence.fr
Cracking the orthographic code
I will present a theory of orthographic processing that makes a key distinction between a coarsegrained
and a fine-grained orthographic code. The coarse-grained code provides a fast-track to
semantics by optimizing use of limited visual information to constrain lexical identity. The finegrained
code provides accurate information about letter sequences that is used to generate a prelexical
phonological code. The starting point for both routes is a bank of letter detectors that perform parallel,
independent letter identification. Visual features are mapped onto retinotopic letter detectors that in
turn serve as input to two types of location-invariant orthographic code: a relative-position code (for
the fast-track to semantics) and a graphemic code (for the phonological route). The relative-position
code represents combinations of letters in the correct order in the stimulus but not necessarily in
adjacent positions. Thus the word “table” would be coded as a set of letter combinations such as TA,
TB, TL, TE, AB, AL, etc. The activation level of each bigram is determined by the visibility of each
of its component letters, which vary as a function of the position of the letters in the string and eye
fixation location in the string (these two factors determine variations in visual acuity and crowding).
Changes in word location cause a complete change in activity in retinotopic letter detectors, but only
modify the relative activation levels of the same set of bigram units. This flexible orthographic code
allows the system to rapidly home-in on a single word identity, while the more fine-grained
graphemic code is being computed. Contrary to the bigram code, the graphemic code requires precise
information concerning which letters are next to which in the string. This graphemic parsing enables
prelexical phonological activation (a string of phonemes) which provides an additional constraint on
word identity. The theory accounts for why it is easy to read words with letters that have been
jubmled, insernted, or remved, and explains why such effects arise early in the process of word
identification relative to effects of fonology. Behavioral experiments will be reported that investigate
various forms of orthographic and phonological priming, and event-related potentials (ERPs) will be
used to track the time-course of the putative underlying processes.
Notes
16

Abstracts – Oral Presentations
17

O1
Syntactic priming in comprehension without lexical repetition
Patrick Sturt 1 , Frank Keller 1 , & Amit Dubey 2
1 University of Edinburgh, UK, 2 University of Dundee, UK
E-mail: patrick.sturt@ed.ac.uk
Previous research has shown evidence for a parallelism preference in the processing of coordinated
structures. Frazier et al. (JPR 2000) found that the second of two conjoined NPs is processed faster
when it has the same syntactic structure as the first conjunct than when it did not (e.g., "the [tall] boy
and the young girl"). However, Frazier et al. failed to find a similar speedup if the conjunction is
replaced with a verb (e.g., "the [tall] boy noticed the young girl"), which they take as evidence against
an explanation of the parallelism effect in terms of general syntactic priming.
Here, we report two reading eye-tracking experiments which look in more detail at the relation
between parallelism and priming. Unlike Frazier et al.'s studies, we used syntactic alternates with
equivalent semantics. Experiment 1 used alternates like (1):
(1) a. a difficult to read article (Adj)
b. an article that is difficult to read (Rel)
Exp 1 used coordination ("NP1 and NP1"), where the structures of NP1 and NP2 (Adj or Rel) were
crossed in the design. A significant speedup was found in total time if the structures of the two NPs
were identical (NP1 x NP2 interaction), replicating Frazier et al.'s results.
Exp 2 used a sentence frame that did not involve coordination (e.g., "NP1 said that NP2").
Additionally, we used less marked structures (e.g., Adj: "a difficult article" vs. Rel: "an article that is
difficult"), to rule out the possibility that priming is limited to conditions involving marked structures.
Again, a reliable interaction of NP1 x NP2 was observed in total time.
This shows that the parallelism effect can be found in syntactic environments other than coordination,
a result which is compatible with an explanation of the effect in terms of syntactic priming. The
results provide new insight into the processes underlying syntactic priming in comprehension.
Pickering and V. Ferreira (in press, PsychBull) observe that syntactic priming in comprehension
appears to be weaker than priming in production; in nearly all current studies, some extra "boost" is
required to obtain the effect (e.g., extensive repetition of structure, lexical overlap of content words
between prime and target, or prime presented simultaneously with target using fast priming).
However, none of these "boosts" were present in the current experiments.
Notes
18

Linguistic relativity: Evidence from Mandarin speakers’ eye-movements
O2
Falk Huettig 1 , Jidong Chen 2 , Melissa Bowerman 1 , & Asifa Majid 1
1 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 2 California State University, USA
E-mail: falk.huettig@mpi.nl
If a Mandarin speaker had walked past two rivers and wished to describe how many he had seen, he
would have to say “two tiao river”, where tiao designates long, rope-like objects such as rivers,
snakes and legs. Tiao is one of several hundred classifiers – a grammatical category in Mandarin. In
two eye-tracking studies we presented Mandarin speakers with simple Mandarin sentences through
headphones while monitoring their eye-movements to objects presented on a computer monitor. The
crucial question is what participants look at while listening to a pre-specified target noun. If classifier
categories influence general conceptual processing then on hearing the target noun participants should
look at objects that are also members of the same classifier category – even when the classifier is not
explicitly present. For example, on hearing scissors, Mandarin speakers should look more at a picture
of a chair than at an unrelated object because scissors and chair share the classifier ba. This would be
consistent with a Strong Whorfian position, according to which language is a major determinant in
shaping conceptual thought (Sapir, 1921; Whorf, 1956). A weaker influence of language-on-thought
could be predicted, where language shapes cognitive processing, but only when the language-specific
category is actively being processed (Slobin, 1996). According to this account, eye-movements are
not necessarily drawn to chair when a participant hears scissors, but they would be on hearing ba
scissors. This is because hearing ba activates the linguistic category that both scissors and chair
belong to. A third logical possibility is that classifiers are purely formal markers (cf. Greenberg,
1972; Lehman, 1979) that do not influence attentional processing even when they are explicitly
present.
The data showed that when participants heard a spoken word from the same classifier category as a
visually depicted object (e.g. scissors-chair), but the classifier was not explicitly presented in the
speech, overt attention to classifier-match objects (e.g. chair) and distractor objects did not differ
(Experiment 1). But when the classifier was explicitly presented (e.g. ba, Experiment 2), participants
shifted overt attention significantly more to classifier-match objects (e.g. chair) than to distractors.
These data are incompatible with the Strong Whorfian hypothesis. Instead the findings support the
Weak Whorfian hypothesis that linguistic distinctions force attention to properties of the world but
only during active linguistic processing of that distinction (cf. Slobin, 1996).
Notes
19

O3
Sluicing and syntactic prediction in online sentence processing
Masaya Yoshida 1 , Michael-Walsh Dickey 2 , & Patrick Sturt 1
1 University of Edinburgh, UK, 2 University of Pittsburgh, USA
E-mail: y-masaya@ta2.so-net.ne.jp
Recent psycholinguistic studies have shown that the sentence processor is predictive ([1,2]).
However, it has never been clear what exactly is predicted during realtime processing. This study
investigates how much structure can be predicted in sentences like (1), and also investigates what
types of structure are built online.
(1)a. John sold some pictures, but I don't know which picture of himself.
(1)b.*John sold some pictures, but I don't know which picture of himself Mary bought.
The contrast in (1) suggests that an anaphor in wh-phrase can be bound by the subject in the first
clause if the sentence involves a sluicing structure. Given that the anaphor requires a local antecedent,
syntactic theories suggest that there is a hidden antecedent in the elided structure in sluicing ([3]).
Taking advantage of this property, we investigate whether (i) the parser can recognize the possibility
of sluicing and (ii) use the information from the sluiced structure to establish a binding relation. 32
participants read the sentences in (2a) and (2b), in a word-by-word moving window study.
(2) Nicole’s father heard several stories during the holiday party, but it's not clear
a. which story of himself/herself from the party her grandfather/grandmother became so
terribly upset over.
b. over which story of himself/herself from the party her grandfather/grandmother
became so terribly upset over.
The gender of the anaphor and the type of wh-phrase are manipulated as factors in the 2*2 design. If
the parser predicts the upcoming sluicing structure upon encountering the wh-phrase, and if the parser
tries to complete anaphor binding as soon as possible ([4,5,6]), then the gender mismatched anaphor
in (2a) should show a reading time slowdown, where a sluicing structure can potentially be the
continuation. On the other hand, in (2b), there is no possibility of sluicing because of the prepositional
wh-phrase, and therefore no such slowdown is expected. We found that the word immediately
following the anaphor exhibits the interaction of wh-type and gender (p's

The interaction between discourse constraints and gender agreement in
lexical and stereotypical role nouns: Evidence from ERP
O4
Hamutal Kreiner 1 , Sibylle Mohr 2 , Klaus Kessler 2 , & Simon Garrod 2
1 University of Edinburgh,UK, 2 University of Glasgow, UK
E-mail: hamutal@psy.gla.ac.uk
When anaphors (herself) refer to antecedents (minister) that mismatch in gender [a] readers
experience processing difficulty as shown in both eye-tracking (ET) (Sturt, 2003) and ERP
(Osterhout, Bersick & McLaughlin, 1997) studies. In a recent ET study Kreiner, Sturt & Garrod
(2008) used anaphora [a] and cataphora [b] sentences to contrast definitional nouns (king) in which
gender is recovered from the lexicon with stereotypical nouns (minister) where gender is inferred
from discourse or world knowledge (Carreiras, Garnham, Oakhill & Cain, 1996). The findings show
that in cataphora [b], where a gender-marked reflexive precedes its co-referential noun, the mismatchcost
for stereotypical gender is eliminated, suggesting that unlike definitional-gender stereotypical
gender is susceptible to discourse constraints. This dissociation seems inconsistent with previous
findings showing similar ERP (P600) effects for both noun types, suggesting a syntactic rather than
discourse clash between the pronoun and antecedent in anaphora (Osterhout et al, 1997).
[a] Yesterday the KING (MINISTER) left London after reminding HIMSELF (HERSELF) about the
letter.
[b] After reminding HIMSELF (HERSELF) about the letter, the KING (MINISTER) immediately
went to the meeting.
We investigated this seeming discrepancy in two EEG experiments contrasting definitional and
stereotypical gender in anaphora (Exp. 1) and cataphora (Exp.2). Consistent with previous ERP
findings, anaphora sentences show a reliable mismatch effect for both types of antecedent nouns with
a positive pick at 600 ms from the pronoun onset. The cataphora sentences show a smaller mismatch
effect only for definitional gender. We interpret these differences in terms of the interface between
grammatical gender agreement and discourse constraints. While anaphora and cataphora are similar in
terms of the gender agreement constraints, they critically differ in terms of discourse constraints. In
anaphora [a] the gender of the discourse character is determined when the role noun is encountered
based on the lexical or stereotypical gender information associated with it, and this leads to the gender
clash when a mismatching pronoun is subsequently encountered. In contrast, in cataphora [b] the
gender of the discourse character is determined by the pronoun before the role noun is encountered;
as stereotypical gender may be inferred from the discourse the gender clash is prevented. The findings
will be discussed in view of recent models of language related EEG findings and the underlying
processes associated with them.
Notes
21

O5
Investigating the automaticity of predicting deception in a theory of
mind task
Heather J. Ferguson, & Richard Breheny
University College London, UK
E-mail: h.ferguson@ucl.ac.uk
The ability to understand and predict other peoples’ behaviour by attributing independent mental
states to them is commonly referred to as theory of mind (ToM). Several theorists have argued that
inferences about others’ beliefs are made automatically during language processing (1,2). However,
this view is limited due to a lack of experimental research into the on-line processes involved in
representing others’ beliefs. Indeed, a recent false belief reaction time study (3) provided evidence
against an automatic ToM processor since comprehenders showed increased response times to belief
compared to reality probe questions only when they were not explicitly instructed to track the
person’s beliefs. However, reaction time methods such as this only provide a limited insight into the
time course of language processing. Therefore, the issue we examined was how the beliefs of others
are processed on-line as the current sentence is unfolding.
Here we report a visual world study investigating the time-course of language-mediated eye
movements towards objects in a scene within contexts that set up ‘reality’ [1a] and ‘secret’ [1b]
scenarios. The critical second sentence [2] in each passage was presented aurally together with a
picture showing, amongst other things, a reality-consistent referent (pink car) and a secret-consistent
referent (green car).
[1a] John is always telling people that his favourite colour is pink.
[1b] John doesn’t want anyone to know that his favourite colour is pink.
[2] Last week John bought a new *car and he deliberately chose a [green/pink] car.
Relative proportions of anticipatory eye-movements (i.e. eye-movements that started reliably before
the onset of the target word “green” or “pink”) indicated a context-dependent bias towards the
appropriate referent from 1000msec prior to target word onset. Further, examination of the effects
revealed contextually-lead biases emerging from the first mention of the neutral referent (shown by *
in [2]). These results demonstrate that readers quickly make use of information about others’ beliefs
to interpret and predict other peoples’ subsequent actions. We discuss how these results fit with
previous accounts of ToM processing.
References
(1) Stone, V.E., Baron-Cohen, S., & Knight, R.T. (1998). Frontal lobe contributions to theory of
mind. J. Cogn. Neurosci., 10, 640-656.
(2) Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (2002). Pragmatics, modularity and mindreading. Mind & Language,
17, 3-23.
(3) Apperly, I.A., Riggs, K.J., Simpson, A., Samson, D., & Chiavarino, C. (2006). Is belief reasoning
automatic Psych. Science, 17, 841-844.
Notes
22

O6
Non-joint attention influences pronoun comprehension
Jennifer E. Arnold, & Shin-Yi C. Lao
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
E-mail: jarnold@email.unc.edu
Pronoun comprehension is facilitated for referents that are “accessible.” Accessibility has been
described in terms of attention (e.g., Brennan, 1995, LCP; Gundel et al., 1993, Language), but few
studies have explicitly tested this idea. Reference can be directed by eye gaze, a social cue to joint
attention (Hanna & Brennan, 2007, JML; Nappa & Arnold, AMLaP abstract). But internal attentional
mechanisms are likely involved. We hypothesized that even non-public cues to attention may
modulate discourse cues to accessibility.
Experiment 1. Listeners were eyetracked while listening to a story about two gender-matched
characters (Birdy picked apples with Doggy…He was wearing a hat) and decided if it matched the
scene. The pronoun referred to either the first (N1) or second (N2) character (depending on who had
the hat in the scene). A capture cue attracted visual attention to the location of one character at trial
onset. The design was thus 2 (N1 vs. N2 referent) by 2 (N1 vs. N2 cued). Participants did not notice
the capture cue, so it was not a cue to joint attention.
On 71% of trials the capture cue was effective (cued character fixated before the other character
within 1000 msec). On these trials, we analyzed fixations following the pronoun and before the
disambiguating word (e.g., hat). Participants were more likely to fixate N1 than N2 in the ambiguous
region, revealing the expected N1 bias (Arnold et al., 2000, Cognition). Furthermore, the cued was
fixated more than the noncued character. That is, visual attention at the trial onset influenced later
pronoun interpretation preferences. In fact, actual initial attention guided post-pronoun fixations even
when it went against the capture cue. In all analyses trials with target or competitor fixations at
pronoun onset were excluded.
Experiment 2. Attention at trial onset may be critical to adopting a perspective on the story. If so,
trial-initial fixations might drive pronoun processing, regardless of the capture manipulation. The role
of trial-initial attention was tested by placing a capture cue (a yellow flash) in the middle of the first
sentence, rather than at trial onset. Fixations following the pronoun increased for initially-attended
characters, regardless of the capture cue. All participants were aware of the capture cue, and yet the
relevant factor was the participants’ internal decisions about where to attend at trial onset.
In sum, visual attention modulated on-line pronoun processing – even though visual attention was
driven by egocentric preferences, not public, joint cues to attention.
Notes
23

O7
Conversation, common ground and gaze coordination
Daniel C. Richardson 1 , Rick Dale 2 , Natasha Z. Kirkham 3 , & Jack Tomlinson 4
1 University of Reading, UK, 2 University of Memphis, USA
3 CBCD, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK, 4 University of California Santa Cruz, USA
E-mail: dcr@eyethink.org
When two people look at a shared visual scene and talk to each other, their gaze patterns are coupled
(Richardson, Dale & Kirkham, 2007). The degree to which their eye movements are coordinated is
causally related to the knowledge that they share, and the degree to which they understand each other
(Richardson & Dale, 2005). In this study, we examined the role of visual context in conversation and
gaze coordination. In a new paradigm, we separated the fact that a visual scene was shared or not and
the belief that a visual scene was shared or not. We quantified the effects of these factors upon joint
attention by measuring the coordination between conversants’ eye movements. Participants had a
conversation about a controversial topic, such as the Iraq war. The discussion was first framed by four
short videos of actors espousing tendentious views. Participants discussed their own views while they
looked at either a blank screen or pictures of the four actors. Each believed (correctly or not) that their
partner was either looking at a blank screen or the same images. We found that both the presence of
the visual scene and beliefs about its presence for another influenced participants’ discussion and the
coordination of their joint attention.
Notes
24

Seeing the world through a visual language: Visual world paradigm in
British Sign Language
O8
Robin L. Thompson 1 , David P. Vinson 1 , Michael Jin 2 , Martin J. Pickering 2 ,
& Gabriella Vigliocco 1
1 University College London, UK, 2 University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: robin.thompson@ucl.ac.uk
While processing spoken language, people look towards relevant objects in a visual scene, and the
time course of their gaze(s) can inform us about online language processing (Tanenhaus et al, 1995).
For sign language users however, attention must be divided between contextual real-world clues and
visually perceived language input. We used eye-tracking to measure the time course of eye gaze
during sign language (BSL) processing. While a visual world paradigm has shown that people rapidly
exploit linguistic and non-linguistic information during spoken utterance comprehension (Huettig &
Altmann, 2005), we ask to what extent division of ‘visual labor’ during BSL input might alter the
time course and nature of language processing when a visually-presented sign is displayed with a
visual world. Subjects viewed scenes with pictures of objects and were asked to indicate whether a
BSL sign (presented in the center of the screen) matched one of four pictures by pushing a button (yes
or no). In each trial, one picture was related to the sign, either semantically (e.g. target: cow,
distracter: rat) or phonologically (e.g. target: radio, distracter: clown; BSL minimal pairs differing in
location). On ‘yes’ trials, a picture matching the sign and 2 unrelated pictures also appeared. ‘No’
trials contained 3 unrelated pictures with the related distracter. Overall, sign perceivers were adept at
dividing attention between visual and language input, looking at the signer 46% and making decisions
an average of 328ms after the offset of the video. In the no condition gaze was more often toward the
related distracter. When a semantically related distracter was present in a yes trial, gaze was
significantly more often directed toward it than unrelated distracters. For phonological distracters
gaze was more frequently towards minimal pairs differing in movement features, but not more often
for pairs differing along handshape or location features. The findings have important methodological
and theoretical implications. Methodologically, they reveal split visual attention (needed for online
sign language processing) permits use of visual world paradigms to investigate the time course of sign
language processing despite the mandatory presence of a visual linguistic stimulus. Theoretically,
they reveal important aspects of lexical access, concerning the role of lexical variables (semantic
condition) and relative time course of access to different phonological parameters (phonological
condition). We discuss these results in the context of language processing in different modalities.
Notes
25

O9
Are non-lexical transitions between signs a segmentation cue in British
Sign Language
Eleni Orfanidou 1 , Robert Adam 1 , & James M. McQueen 2
1 University College London and City University London, UK,
2 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
E-mail: e.orfanidou@ucl.ac.uk
A substantial body of research has examined segmentation in speech comprehension, that is, how
listeners recognize words in continuous speech. Less is known about sign-language segmentation. A
modality-specific feature of signed languages is that, during continuous signing, there are transitions
between the locations in space and on the body where signs are articulated. These non-lexical
transitions are not part of the signs themselves. We asked here if British Sign Language (BSL)
comprehenders use non-lexical transitions to segment continuous BSL.
We used the sign-spotting task, based on the word-spotting task (Cutler & Norris, 1988). Ninety-six
BSL signs were each preceded by a nonsense sign, articulated either in the same location as the real
sign, or involving a small or large transition to another location. Half of the transitions of each type
were within the same major body area/location (e.g. head) and half were across body areas/locations.
Participants were asked to press a button as fast as possible when they spotted real BSL signs. If
signers use the non-lexical transitions between signs as segmentation cues, then they should be faster
to detect signs when a transition is present. But if signers are sensitive to location-based lexical
constraints, then they should be faster to detect signs when both the nonsense and the real sign are
articulated in the same location (i.e. they might consider only the “cohort” of signs beginning in that
location).
Twenty-three Deaf adult native BSL signers and sixteen Deaf adult nonnative signers were
significantly faster and more accurate to detect target signs when there was no location transition
between the nonsense sign and the real sign than when there was. When a transition was present,
however, both groups performed better when transitions were to a different body area than when they
were within the same area. This effect was larger for the nonnative group. There were also additive
effects of the size and type of transition for the nonnative group.
These results suggest that sign segmentation does not depend on boundaries cued by non-lexical
transitions. Similar to spoken language, segmentation is guided by sublexical information and
phonotactics. Sublexical location features appear to be used to narrow the lexical search space.
Phonotactic constraints (e.g. a transition to a different location cannot occur within a single sign;
Battison, 1978) are also used in sign segmentation, mainly by the nonnative group, consistent with
previous results on the effects of age of acquisition in sign comprehension.
Notes
26

Effects of perceptual and cognitive loads on speech segmentation
O10
Sven L. Mattys 1 , & Martin Cooke 2
1 University of Bristol, UK, 2 University of Sheffield, UK
E-mail: sven.mattys@bris.ac.uk
Listeners segment connected speech using both lexically- and acoustically-driven mechanisms. Here,
we explored the effect of perceptual and cognitive loads on listeners' relative reliance on those two
types of mechanisms. Phrases bearing a conflict between lexical and acoustic segmentation cues, e.g.,
"mild option" realized as "mile doption," with the latter being lexically unacceptable, were played in a
background of babble noise made of 8 talkers (N8) vs. 1 talker (N1). While both loads reduced
segmentation accuracy, N8 babble led to greater reliance on acoustic than lexical cues. N1 babble did
not. However, when the N1 babble was replaced with speech-modulated noise, which removes the
linguistic content of the babble while preserving its temporal intensity fluctuations and long-term
spectral envelope, an acoustic bias appeared. Thus, the linguistic nature of a perceptual load affects
the way in which a concurrent speech stream is segmented, with unintelligible background noise
causing relatively greater reliance on acoustically-driven segmentation. When the target phrases and
the N1 babble were played dichotically, listeners showed a lexical bias. A similar pattern was found
when the cognitive load was mnemonic rather than attentional. Thus, cognitive loads cause listeners
to forgo acoustic details and rely more heavily on lexical knowledge.
These findings show that: (1) speech segmentation is penetrable by perceptual and cognitive loads,
(2) perceptual loads favor acoustically-driven segmentation unless the load is intelligible, in which
case attention is re-directed to lexical processes, (3) cognitive loads favor lexically-driven
segmentation. The acoustic bias under perceptual load suggests that failure to identify component
words in the stream causes listeners to fall back on juncture-relevant acoustic cues peeking through
the babble. The modulation of this bias by the intelligibility of the load indicates that the effect of
perceptual load is not entirely signal-driven or due to energetic masking. Instead, the informational
content of the load can direct attention to acoustic vs. lexical features of the signal. Finally, the lexical
bias under cognitive load is in line with research showing that, in case of conflict between
segmentation cues, listeners assign greater weight to those that have communicative value, e.g.,
lexical knowledge and syntactic-semantic inferences. These findings constitute the first attempt to
link speech segmentation to general cognition and, in doing so, to bring speech-segmentation models
closer to ecological validity.
Notes
27

O11
Speaking rate affects the perception of word boundaries in online word
recognition
Eva Reinisch, Alexandra Jesse, & James M. McQueen
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
E-mail: Eva.Reinisch@mpi.nl
The perception of durational cues in speech depends on speaking rate (e.g. Repp et al. 1978). But
most studies have used offline categorization or goodness rating tasks to demonstrate this effect.
Durational cues, however, are also used in online word recognition. For example, given the Dutch
sequence eens peer ("once peach"), the extent to which an [s]-initial word spuit ("syringe") competes
for recognition with the target peer depends on the duration of the [s] (Shatzman & McQueen 2006).
The longer the [s], the more it sounds word initial, so the stronger the competition is. Since the
perceived duration of sounds depends on the speaking rate of the preceding context, we predicted that
speaking rate would affect online word recognition, specifically, that the rate of a carrier sentence
would affect the strength of a target word’s competitors.
This prediction was addressed using eye tracking. In Experiment 1, Dutch listeners' looks to four
printed words were tracked as they listened to sentences of the type Ze heeft wel eens peer gezegd
("She once said peach"). Listeners had to click on the target word (peer). The display consisted of the
target, an [s]-initial competitor (e.g., speen, "pacifier"), and two phonologically unrelated distractors.
The critical [s] was set to a duration that was ambiguous between whether or not the second word of
the phrase started with an [s]. Listeners looked more at [s]-initial competitors when targets followed
fast carrier sentences than when targets followed slow carriers. Correspondingly, they tended to look
earlier at targets in slow than in fast contexts. They thus apparently perceived the [s] as being longer
when the preceding context was faster, leading to more competition from the [s]-initial word. As
predicted, the pattern of results reversed when the target was [s]-initial (e.g., schade, "harm") but the
competitor was not (e.g., chaos, "chaos"). Furthermore, these rate effects were not dependent on
whether targets were members of minimal pairs such as eens (s)peer ("once peach/spear").
In Experiment 2, similar effects of speaking rate in online word recognition were found for another
durational boundary cue (stop closure duration in ambiguous sequences such as nooit (t)aal, "never
language/eel"). Both experiments show that lexical competition, and hence the perception of word
boundaries, is modulated by fine-grained phonetic information. Critically, they show that durational
information does not provide absolute cues to word boundaries but instead is perceived relative to the
phonetic context in which it appears.
Notes
28

O12
The perception of assimilation in newly learned novel words
Natalie D. Snoeren 1 , Gareth Gaskell 2 , & Anna Maria Di Betta 3
1 LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France, 2 University of York, UK, 3 University of Sheffield,UK
E-mail: ndsnoeren@gmail.com
How listeners recognize spoken words in spite of regular variations in the speech signal has been a
major research question in the psycholinguistic study of speech perception over the past decade.
Uncertainty remains over the extent to which compensation for assimilation depends on lexical
knowledge, largely because most comparisons between words and nonwords may involve a confound
with articulatory factors. In the present study, we investigated levels of perceptual processing in
compensation for assimilation using two sets of novel words learned on consecutive days. This kind
of design avoid potential confounds by manipulating lexical status within the same physical stimuli.
Exposure took place through a phoneme decision task in which the isolated canonical spoken form of
novel words (e.g., decibot) was presented repeatedly. In a subsequent phoneme monitoring test,
participants were asked to monitor for the underlying word-final phoneme of an assimilated novel
word. Here, the novel words were presented with word-final alternations (e.g., decibop) in carrier
sentences that either licensed assimilation (viable context: Our decibop behaved badly) or did not
(unviable context: Our decibop does very well). For instance, a participant might have to monitor for
/t/ in a sentence like Our decibop behaved badly, where /t/ in decibop is present only in the underlying
representation generated from the labial surface form /p/. In order to respond, the listener must infer a
coronal place of articulation, possibly making use of lexical and/or contextual information. Response
proportions to the underlying form (e.g., /t/) showed that targets provoked more responses
corresponding to the underlying form in viable than in unviable contexts. This viability effect was
equivalent for novel words learned on the same day and on the previous day, but crucially was absent
for unexposed control items, demonstrating the importance of lexical knowledge in compensation for
assimilation. Additionally, analyses of RTs showed a main effect of learning, with overall faster
reaction times to novel words learned on the previous day than on the day of testing, suggesting a
sleep-consolidated lexicalization. The processing difference between exposed and control novel
words supports the idea that listeners can compensate for assimilation in novel words and therefore
suggest that listeners perceive newly acquired speech at a more abstract level. These results can be
accounted for by hybrid episodic/abstractionist models of speech perception, plus a two component
process of lexicalization.
Notes
29

O13
Senior moments and the brain: Convergent measures and an
aging network
Meredith A. Shafto, Emmanuel A. Stamatakis, Phyllis P. Tam, & Lorraine K. Tyler
University of Cambridge, UK
E-mail: mshafto@csl.psychol.cam.ac.uk
One of the best-documented findings from language research with older adults is an increase in wordfinding
problems, perhaps most clearly observed in their increasingly frequent tip-of-the-tongue states
(TOTs) - temporary inabilities to retrieve a familiar name. Behavioral data localize the cause of TOTs
to deficits retrieving the phonology of words, deficits which increase in old age (e.g., Burke & Shafto,
2004).
However, the neural underpinnings of this age effect have not been examined, despite the finding that
normal aging is accompanied by wide-ranging loss of grey and white matter in regions that are
important for language processing.
We address this issue in an ongoing program of research using converging neuroimaging and
behavioural methods. Our results demonstrate that normal aging does not fundamentally affect the
network of brain regions underpinning language production. Instead, grey and white matter loss in old
age appears to affect older adults’ ability to regulate this network to prevent or overcome retrieval
failures.
Evidence that grey matter loss underpins word finding failures comes from a study correlating
increasing TOTs across the lifespan with decreasing grey matter in left insula, a region important for
phonological retrieval (Shafto et al., 2007). A follow-up fMRI study (Shafto et al., submitted)
demonstrates that during TOTs compared to successful naming, younger adults generate a “boost” of
activity in the left insula. Older adults do not generate a significant activity boost during TOTs,
indicating that older adults’ grey matter loss impairs their ability to modulate activity levels during
difficult word retrieval. This modulation requires interaction between brain regions involved in
language production, which are connected by white matter tracts. The importance of white matter
connections during word retrieval is demonstrated using Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI): age-related
increases in TOT rates are associated with deteriorating white matter integrity in a region of the
superior longitudinal fasciculus, a structure important for connecting regions involved in processing
language (Stamatakis et al., submitted). This finding indicates that white matter deterioration in old
age may affect the ability of different language regions to interact with each other. This possibility is
tested using magnetoencephalography (MEG), a technique which provides fine-grained time course
information about the activation of regions in the language network during successful and failed
retrieval.
Notes
30

O14
Interaction and interactivity in language production
Robert J. Hartsuiker 1 , & Ines Anton-Mendez 2
1 Ghent University, Belgium, 2 Utrecht University, The Netherlands
E-mail: Robert.Hartsuiker@ugent.be
Theories of language production differ in their assumptions about the information flow between
levels. The marking and morphing model of the production of subject-verb number agreement
(Eberhard, Cutting, & Bock, 2005) assumes a serial information flow, with conceptual factors
affecting one level, and morphophonological factors affecting a subsequent level. In contrast,
interactive models allow meaning-based and form-based processes to interact. This study asks
whether (a) meaning-based and form-based processes have additive or non-additive effects on
proportions of agreement errors; (b) the results are consistent with serial models of agreement
production.
A sentence-completion experiment elicited subject-verb agreement errors in Dutch. We varied
notional number of the subject NP and number-ambiguity of the head noun’s determiner. We
operationalized notional number by presenting distributed (1a -1b) or non-distributed phrases (2a –
2b); in distributed phrases, “ashtray” (“menu”) is notionally plural, because there is an ashtray (menu)
on each of several tables. Number ambiguity was varied by presenting singular subject head nouns
with common-gender (which take the number-ambiguous determiner “de” in Dutch (1a and 2a) or
with neuter-gender (which take the number-unambiguous determiner “het” (1b and 2b).
(1a)
(1b)
(2a)
(2b)
De asbak op de tafels (the ashtray on the tables)
Het menu op de tafels (the menu on the tables)
De boot van de vissers (the boat of the fishermen)
Het schip van de vissers (the ship of the fishermen)
Agreement occurred more frequently in the distributive than the non-distributive condition, and more
frequently in the number-ambiguous than in the number-unambiguous condition. These factors
interacted, with an overadditive number of errors in the distributive, number-ambiguous condition. In
principle, these results would seem to support interactive models of language production.
Next, we report simulations with a Dutch implementation of the marking and morphing model, which
we validated on earlier Dutch data. Although the model is serial, and thus predicts additive effects of
our manipulations on underlying number specifications, it provided an excellent fit with our data.
This is so because the model assumes a non-linear mapping rule between mental representations (of
plurality) and overt behaviors (proportions of verbs that are plural). Our study, therefore,
demonstrates the danger of using additive-factors logic to arbitrate between serial and interactive
models of language production. Interactions don’t prove interactivity.
Notes
31

O15
Determinants of function assignment in language production: Is conceptual
accessibility enough
Mirta Vernice 1 , & Robert J. Hartsuiker 2
1 University of Pavia, Italy, 2 Ghent University, Belgium
E-mail: mirta.vernice@unipv.it
Studies on language production suggest that speakers tend to assign the highest syntactic role to the
element with the highest conceptual accessibility (Bock, 1985). An event with an animate agent and
an inanimate patient should elicit more actives than another with inanimate agent and animate patient,
because the more accessible (animate) element is more likely to win the competition for the subject
slot. The implication tested here is that events with agents and patients of the same animacy (both
animate or inanimate) should elicit comparable numbers of actives, because in neither of these cases
is the competition for subject slot influenced by a difference in the animacy of agent and patient.
We conducted five picture naming experiments on 200 Italian speakers. We orthogonally manipulated
the animacy of agent and patient, leading to four between-item conditions. The baseline preference
for active vs. passive was manipulated between-subjects using syntactic priming. Prime sentences
were presented either interspersed with the critical pictures (short-term priming) or in a separate block
before the experiment (long-term priming). To control for differences in verb bias or in saliency of
the elements, we analyzed a subset of 32 (out of 72) targets that were matched on these variables.
The experiments showed clear effects of priming. Targets with animate agents and inanimate patients
elicited more actives than those with inanimate agents and animate patients. The proportion of actives
was higher when agent and patient were both animate than when both were inanimate. This difference
was 21% in the condition with no syntactic priming, 8% with short-term active priming, 15% with
short-term passive priming, 4% with long-term active priming, and 19% with long-term passive
priming. Importantly, the animacy of the agent is a more potent determinant of structural choice than
the animacy of the patient.
We simulated these data with a mathematical model that computes active proportions as a function of
(1) general bias for active; (2) changes to this bias from priming; (3) changes to this bias from
differences in agent/patient accessibility (i.e., animacy). Model fit improved when a further parameter
was included, which specified a preference to assign subjecthood to animate agents.
We suggest that a full account of function assignment needs to consider conceptual accessibility of
the elements participating in the event, but also their thematic role status. More accessible elements
tend to become subjects, but this effect is enhanced when this element is an agent.
Notes
32

The perceptual span during regressions in garden path sentences
O16
Jens Apel, John M. Henderson, & Fernanda Ferreira
University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: J.Apel@sms.ed.ac.uk
The perceptual span during normal reading extends approximately 12-15 characters to the right and 3-
4 characters to the left of a current fixation. In the present study we investigate whether the perceptual
span for regressions is asymmetric to the left. We used a contingent display-change paradigm to
investigate whether the perceptual span extends to the left right before (and presumably during) a
regression. We also sought to examine the scan patterns for regressions made during the reading of
garden path sentences.
In the current experiment, when the region beyond the 4th character (associated with the normal
reading span) of the breakdown region (BR) (region in brackets in 1-4) was fixated, material to the
left was either changed or left intact. In condition (1), the word immediately to the left of the BR
changed to incorrect characters; in condition (2), the second word left of the BR was changed; in (3),
both were altered; and in (4), neither was changed, providing the baseline condition. We also assessed
whether the changes affect forward as well as backwards eye movements; the prediction is that they
will only affect regressions, because only movements to the left should be affected by manipulations
to material left of fixation.
1. While the motorist parked the lorry that was so cvlzq cat[apulted] along the high street.
2. … was zv noisy cat[apulted] …
3. … was zv cvlzq cat[apulted]…
4. … was so noisy cat[apulted] …
We found significantly shorter regressive saccades in conditions 1 and 3 (ps < .01) in comparison to
condition 4. Forward saccades were entirely unaffected by the manipulations. Therefore, we conclude
that the perceptual span during reading changes depending on the direction of the eye movements. If
people are about to move left because they have programmed a regression, then the left side of the
perceptual span expands. In addition, we replicated a finding we reported earlier that most regressions
are no more than one word to the left, so that any syntactically critical region must be reached via
successive regressive sweeps. The pattern of data as a whole suggests that regressions made during
the reanalysis of garden-path sentences are typically short and not intelligently targeted, but they are
programmed on the basis of preview information obtained from a directionally flexible perceptual
span.
Notes
33

O17
Eye movements reflect comprehenders' knowledge of syntactic
structure probability
Harry Tily 2 , Barbara Hemforth 1 , Inbal Arnon 2 , Noa Shuval 1 , Neal Snider 2 , & Tom Wasow 2
1 CNRS, Université Paris Descartes, France, 2 Stanford University, USA
E-mail: barbara.hemforth@univ-paris5.fr
Language comprehension is guided by expectation. In this study we show that verb bias influences
listeners’ expectations about upcoming referents. We look at the dative alternation:
1. The nurse will feed the soup to the patient DO-bias, PO realization
2. The nurse will feed the patient the soup DO-bias, DO realization
3. The nurse will bring the soup to the patient PO-bias, PO realization
4. The nurse will bring the patient the soup PO-bias, DO realization
We used Bresnan & al.’s (2007) model of the dative in spontaneous conversational speech to
determine the syntactic bias of dative verbs toward the PO construction: the model's Best Linear
Unbiased Predictors estimate the bias of the verb, while regressing out the effects of all of the other
contextual factors on construction choice. Using this estimate of verb bias, we chose 7 verbs that were
biased towards PO, and 7 verbs that were biased towards DO. These verbs were paired to allow the
construction of sentences like (1) and (3) or (2) and (4) which only differ in the bias of the verb.
Using each verb twice, we constructed 28 items, each with an inanimate patient and an animate
recipient. We registered 18 participants’ fixations on three objects corresponding to the subject
(nurse) and the two arguments (soup and patient) while they listened to the sentences (see Altmann &
Kamide, 1999). We removed prosodic cues to realization by using a subject and verb spliced from a
DO recording in half of the PO stimuli, and vice versa. If listener’s expectations reflect verb-bias,
they will fixate on the first argument faster (earlier) when verb-bias matches the realization (2 faster
than 4, 3 faster than 1).
The results showed the expected effect; in the given example, participants were faster to fixate the
first argument when the verb bias corresponded to the construction spoken (‘the soup’ when the verb
was biased towards a PO realization, ‘the patient’ after DO-biased verbs) (ps

O18
The use of verb-specific information for prediction in sentence processing
Manabu Arai, & Frank Keller
University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: manabu.arai@ed.ac.uk
Recent research has shown that language comprehenders make predictions about upcoming linguistic
information using various sources of information (Altmann & Kamide, Cognition 1999; Arai et al.,
CogPsy 2007; Staub & Clifton, JEP 2006). An important question is whether lexically-specific
information can be used for prediction. Such a finding would support both constraint-based
(MacDonald et al., PsyRev 1994) and probabilistic models of processing (Jurafsky, Cogsci 1996).
We conducted two experiments to address this issue using the visual world paradigm. In Exp 1, we
compared transitive verbs such as "scold" to intransitive verbs such as "shout" and examined whether
the verb's subcategorization information is used for predicting a direct object. Participants heard
sentences such as (1) while looking at a picture that included a rugby player, a shop assistant, and a
distractor. The results showed that participants looked more quickly and frequently at the direct object
picture (i.e., the shop assistant) while they heard "scolded" in (1a), compared to "shouted" in (1b).
This indicates that they predicted an upcoming direct object for transitive verbs, but not for
intransitive ones.
1a. Surprisingly, the rugby player scolded the shop assistant.
1b. Surprisingly, the rugby player shouted at the shop assistant.
Exp 2 examined whether listeners can predict the correct syntactic analysis using verb frequency
information (e.g., Trueswell, JML 1996). We contrasted verbs that are infrequent in the past participle
form (e.g., "watch") with ones that are frequent in that form (e.g., "select"). Participants heard
sentences like (2) while looking at a picture that depicted all the objects referred to. The reduced
relative clause condition was compared to an unreduced control (including "that is").
2a. The videotape (that is) watched by the student was found under the chair.
2b. The camera (that is) selected by the ballerina was more expensive than the bicycle.
We found that during "watched", the reduced and the unreduced condition differed in the number of
looks to the correct subject picture (student in (2a), ballerina in (2b)), reflecting processing difficulty
due to ambiguity. However, there was no such difference during "selected", suggesting that
participants used the frequency information to predict the correct subject, thus resolving the
ambiguity.
Taken together, Exps 1 and 2 confirm that listeners can and do make predictions about upcoming
syntactic structures using verb-specific information such as subcategorization frame and
morphological frequency.
Notes
35

O19
Bridging locality and anti-locality effects in the processing of
long-distance syntactic dependencies
Victor Kuperman, Piai Vitoria, & Robert Schreuder
Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
E-mail: victor.kuperman@mpi.nl
Current theories of sentence comprehension offer opposite predictions with respect to the processing
of long-distance syntactic dependencies (e.g., "send off" in "She sent the kids off to school"). The
locality theories (e.g., Gibson, 1998) argue that the further apart the dependent elements are, the more
resources are required for the processing of the distant element. Conversely, the expectation-based
theory (Levy, 2008) claims that the longer distance between the dependent elements allows readers to
lower the surprisal of the upcoming words and hence the actual processing of "off" may be easier, the
further away that word is from "sent".
We report new evidence for both locality and anti-locality effects stemming from two large regression
studies on phrasal verbs in Dutch and English. The eye-tracking study of Dutch phrasal verbs (60
sentences with different phrasal verbs, 25 participants) and the self-paced reading study of English
phrasal verbs (130 sentences, 20 participants) manipulated the distance between the main verb
(“send”) and the particle (“off”), as well as the Cloze predictability of the particle in the sentential
context. Both studies showed main effects of distance and predictability, and, crucially, an interaction
between these two predictors. For more predictable particles, a robust anti-locality effect emerged,
i.e., the larger distance in the dependency came with shorter reading times. However, for particles
with a low Cloze predictability we found a locality effect: the increase in the distance came with the
increase in the processing time. These findings suggest a processing trade-off between the
probabilistic assessment of upcoming words and the demands of the short-term memory. We discuss
implications of these findings for theories of sentence processing.
Our data question the claim of Levy (2008) that the word’s surprisal in context exclusively
determines the word’s processing difficulty. We show that several distributional measures quantifying
the relationship between the main verb and the particle in phrasal verbs (semantic transparency of
phrasal verbs, morphological family of the main verb, the frequency of the phrasal verb as a whole,
etc.) make independent contributions to the ease of processing. Apparently, the estimates of surprisal
(typically derived from probabilistic grammars) need to rely on a broader range of lexical variables.
References
Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1–76.
Levy, R. (2008). Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition, 106, 112
Notes
36

Semantic features and the computation of word meaning: A large
correlational semantic decision study
O20
Michael A. Ford, Billi Randall, Kirsten I. Taylor, Barry J. Devereux, & Lorraine K. Tyler
University of Cambridge, UK
E-mail: mford@csl.psychol.cam.ac.uk
Distributed feature-based models of semantic memory claim that variation in the distributional
properties of features across semantic space, feature distinctiveness and feature correlation, determine
conceptual processing. (McRae et al, 1997; Tyler et al, 2000). Distinctive features,
() are highly diagnostic of particular concepts whereas highly shared features
() provide category level information for concepts (Taylor et al, 2008). Features
that co-occur systematically across concepts (, ), mutually activate one
another thus feature correlation has a strong influence on the initial computation of word meaning
(McRae et al, 1997). The studies providing the basis this for these claims however, have typically
used factorial designs which are potentially susceptible to the kinds of retrospective effects that can
influence semantic priming (Besner et al, 2005). A further more pertinent limitation is that many of
the theoretically interesting variables are correlated both with each other and with other variables
such as word-frequency. The consequences of these limitations are that variation between conditions
has not always been adequately controlled and cell sizes have been small, potentially causing
problems of statistical power. The current study used a large correlational visual semantic decision
design to assess the influence of the distributional properties of semantic features on access to word
meaning. Eighteen form, lexical and semantic variables were reduced to six orthogonal vectors using
PCA and correlation with these vectors was partialled out from measures of feature distinctiveness
and correlation. Analysis with linear mixed effect models showed that when semantic decisions were
easy, the more shared the features of a concept, the faster response times. This suggests that responses
were made based on broad category level information rather than concept specific information. When
semantic decisions were difficult, strong facilitatory effects of feature correlation were found,
suggesting that concept specific information was necessary in such cases. This study supports
previous claims the feature correlations play an important part in the computation of word meaning,
but also that previous findings may have been influenced by the necessity of unique concept
identification. Recent claims of predominant role for distinctive features in the computation of word
meaning (Cree et al, 2006) were not supported in this study.
Notes
37

O21
The link between meaning and form in British Sign Language:
Role of iconic properties in lexical and conceptual processing
David P. Vinson, Robert Skinner, Robin L. Thompson, & Gabriella Vigliocco
DCAL, University College London, UK
E-mail: d.vinson@ucl.ac.uk
In signed languages, a high proportion of signforms contain iconic elements which visually reflect
some aspect of their referents. For example in British Sign Language (BSL), the sign LION reflects a
lion's outstretched claws. Despite the prevalence of iconicity, the extent to which it affects sign
language processing remains unclear. Initial evidence1 suggests that sign iconicity facilitates
performance in a linguistic task (picture-sign/word matching), suggesting that iconic properties of
signs may have privileged status in signers' semantic or conceptual representations, in line with
linguistic relativity hypotheses. In three experiments contrasting BSL signers to nonsigners we
explore the extent of this facilitatory effect, contrasting iconic properties of BSL signs (e.g. lion's
claws) with noniconic ones (e.g. lion's mane). Experiment 1 replicated our previous study1 in BSL,
and also manipulated the general salience of iconic properties (based on English semantic feature
norms2) to test whether iconicity effects are modulated by a property's general salience (e.g. an
elephant's trunk appeared often in feature norms and thus is highly salient to English speakers, while
a lion's claws are not2). We contrasted pictures where the iconic property was salient (e.g. a lion with
prominent claws) vs. those where it was not (e.g. a lion with prominent mane and claws not visible).
As in 1, BSL signers responded faster when the iconic property was salient, while English speakers
showed no such advantage, and this effect was not modulated by properties' general salience.
Experiment 2 used a non-linguistic task (visual property verification) where participants were
presented with a picture (e.g. lion) followed by a picture of a visual property (e.g. claws), and pressed
a button to indicate whether the picture and its property matched. BSL signers showed no temporal
advantage in identifying the iconic property compared to nonsigners. Experiment 3 used a similar task
conducted entirely in English (the signers' second language); again the signers showed no advantage
for iconic properties. These results show that the facilitatory effect of sign iconicity does not extend to
conceptual representations as would be predicted by strong linguistic relativity hypotheses, but
instead is extremely constrained, applying only to a linguistic task where the iconic property is
relevant.
References
1 Thompson, R, Vinson, D & Vigliocco G (submitted), The link between form and meaning in
American Sign Language: Lexical processing effects.
2 McRae, K, et al (2005), Behav Res Methods, 37: 547-55
Notes
38

O22
Evaluating constructivist theory via Bayesian modeling of children’s early
grammatical development
Colin Bannard, Elena V.M. Lieven, & Michael Tomasello
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
E-mail: bannard@eva.mpg.de
Theories of grammatical development differ in how much abstract knowledge they attribute to young
children. While it has long been popular to discuss early linguistic competence in terms of abstract
categories and rules, a number of researchers have recently argued that in the absence of commitment
to UG, it is inappropriate to pre-empirically assume continuity with adult language (e.g. Tomasello,
2003). Such usage-based researchers have proposed that children's speech for at least the first 2 years
of multiword speech is very restricted, with constructions being verb-specific and utterances being
built from lexically-specific frames. We here report on a series of experiments in which we use a
computational model to evaluate the explanatory power of such a model of early production.
We recorded 2 English-speaking children for 30 hours each over 6 weeks immediately following both
their 2nd and 3rd birthdays. We employed a Bayesian procedure to extract grammars from the child’s
(not caregiver’s) speech in the first 28 hours of transcriptions at each age. Our basic grammars were
formally equivalent to context-free grammars (Chomsky, 1956). However they crucially involved no
abstract categories and consisted entirely of lexically-specific schematic patterns, words and
multiword sequences.
In a first experiment we used these grammars to parse all the child’s unique multiword utterances
from the remaining two hours of speech for each child at each age. At 2 years the children's
productions were accounted for effectively (as much as 87% coverage) and perspicuously (as much as
65% of utterances requiring application of two rewrite rules or less). In a second experiment we
examined the explanatory value of positing that the children have productive morphology and
knowledge of abstract categories. At age 2 this had, with the exception of the noun category, very
little effect on coverage. At age 3 the addition of abstract information over verbs also markedly
improved performance. These results are consistent with experimental findings regarding children’s
early knowledge of linguistic categories (Olguin and Tomasello, 1993). Our results support an
account of development in which abstract linguistic knowledge develops gradually.
References
Chomsky N (1956) Three models for the description of language. IEEE Trans. on Inform. Theory
2:113–124.
Olguin R and Tomasello M (1993) Twenty-five-month-old children do not have a grammatical
category of verb. Cognitive Development 8:245–272.
Tomasello M (2003) Constructing a language, Harvard University Press.
Notes
39

O23
Early word order representation: Evidence against the lexical hypothesis
Julie Franck, Séverine Millotte, & Ulrich H. Frauenfelder
University of Geneva, Switzerland
E-mail: julie.franck@pse.unige.ch
One major controversy in the field of language development concerns the nature of children’s initial
grammatical knowledge. This paper focuses on the nature of their initial representation of word order.
According to the grammatical hypothesis, word order develops through the operation of a mechanism
of parameter-setting that is triggered early by the input and that rapidly yields an abstract
representation of the mapping between the positions of words in the sentence and their thematic role.
The lexical hypothesis assumes that children’s initial representation of word order develops from
lexically specific schemas formed around frequent items and only slowly becomes abstract.
Many of the studies favouring the lexical hypothesis have been based on the weird word order
paradigm. Although we have replicated these results on two groups of French-speaking children and
confirmed the reliability of the data, we question their validity and provide a critical analysis of the
general conclusions drawn involving three arguments. First, we claim that the performance elicited in
the weird word order task involves non-grammatical, inferential processes. Second, these studies
discard much missing data that critically depend up on the variables manipulated and are therefore not
Missing At Random. Third, even in the original analyses that exclude missing data, patterns emerge
that were not interpreted by the authors: (a) Young children rarely re-use the modelled ungrammatical
order, and they do, they fail to show the signs of grammatical processing observed in their correct
sentences; (b) They more easily re-use correct word orders than incorrect ones, even with novel verbs
and when they change incorrect orders they always convert them to the correct order and, critically,
they never change correct orders; (c) Verb familiarity influences the production of ungrammatical
orders in older children like young ones. In sum, critical inspection of these studies including our own
replication shows that they not only fail to provide evidence for the lexical hypothesis, but that they
actually support the alternative, grammatical hypothesis.
References
Abbot-Smith, K., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2001). Cognitive Development, 16, 679-692.
Akhtar, N. (1999). Journal of Child Language, 26, 339-356.
Akhtar, N., & Tomasello, M. (1997). Developmental Psychology, 33, 952-965.
Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Theakston, A., & Tomasello, M. (2005). Cognitive Development, 20, 121-
136.
Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Theakston, A., & Tomasello, M. (2007). Journal of Child Language, 32(2),
381-409
Notes
40

Development at the syntax-semantics interface: When do children
understand implicit ontological shifts
O24
Hugh A. Rabagliati, Tracie Lin, Hanna Gelfand, Gary F. Marcus, & Liina Pylkkänen
New York University, USA
E-mail: hugh@nyu.edu
Ordinary language understanding frequently requires listeners to shift the basic meaning of a
constituent, as in (1) and (2).
1. The boy began the book [Complement-coercion]
2. The CD was loud [Metonymy]
In (1), the event-selecting verb begin receives an object-denoting complement. Since objects do not
'begin', we might expect the sentence to be uninterpretable. Instead adult listeners “coerce” the object
into the appropriate ontological category, an event interpretation (eg began reading the book). In (2),
the adjective loud predicates not on the meaning of CD as a physical object but rather on an enriched
meaning of CD in terms of its abstract contents.
What do children know about such ontological shifts, and when are they acquired compared to other
aspects of natural language We present the first experimental investigation of the development of
children’s understanding of coercion and metonymy. Under the guise of a game with an ignorant
robot, 32 children (3 groups: 7) and 17 adult controls answered predicability questions
(could an X be Y) to assess children’s understanding of 4 common shifts:
A. Object-> Event [1]
B. Object-> Abstract Content [2]
C. Container-> Contents [4]
D. Institution-> Person [eg Could a hospital call the lady]
Each shift was assessed by 5 sets of 4 questions, such as
3. Could a pot be cracked (Yes)
4. Could a pot be stirred (Yes/No)
5. Could some soup be stirred (Yes)
6. Could some soup be cracked (No)
The critical condition was (4), which subjects would be less likely to deny if they could use the shift
than if they could not. Sentences like 6 served as a control, these impossible shifts would be denied
unless subjects were confused about the distinctions between the ontological sorts tested (cf Keil
1979).
A shift was considered acquired (ie adult-like) if accuracy on the impossible shift (6) was both above
chance, and higher than the possible shift condition (4). By these criteria, adults had mastered all four
types of shifts. In addition, all four groups were above chance (p event (complement-coercion)
shift [A] was the first to be acquired (p

O25
External vs. internal verbal self-monitoring: Speakers listen to their own
external, but not internal, speech in speech production
Falk Huettig 1 , & Robert J. Hartsuiker 2
1 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 2 Ghent University, Belgium
E-mail: falk.huettig@mpi.nl
When we speak we can listen to ourselves, and so we can use speech perception to monitor our own
overt speech for deviations from plan. Theories of verbal self-monitoring generally assume an
internal (pre-articulatory) monitoring channel, but there is debate about whether this channel relies
on speech perception or on production-internal mechanisms. Perception-based theories predict that
listening to one's own inner speech has similar behavioral consequences as listening to someone
else's speech.
To test whether internal monitoring engages speech perception, we registered eye-movements while
speakers named objects, hypothesizing that hearing ourselves should influence eye-movements
similarly as hearing others. Participants viewed displays containing a target object to be named and
three written-word distractors. In the critical condition, one of these words was phonologically
related to the name of the object and two words were unrelated. Of interest was the pattern of
fixations to the phonologically related distractors prior to and after the onset of overt articulation. A
perceptually-based theory of internal monitoring predicts that speech perception is already engaged
in the time interval before overt articulation (e.g., Hartsuiker & Kolk, 2001; Indefrey & Levelt,
2004).
Our data show that listening to one's own speech drives eye- movements in the visual world in a very
similar way as listening to someone else's speech (Huettig & McQueen, 2007). In both modalities,
shortly after the acoustic onset of a word, participants fixate phonologically-related written words
more often than unrelated words. Importantly, the time-course of fixating phonological competitors
was very similar in self-perception and other-perception, even though perceptually-based monitoring
theories predict that phonological information is available much earlier (145 - 250 ms) in selfperception
than other-perception. We therefore conclude that the internal monitoring channel does
not rely on speech perception; the data are more compatible with production-based monitoring
theories (e.g., Laver, 1980; see Postma, 2000 for review).
Notes
42

Syntactic priming and message encoding in unscripted dialogue
O26
Kathleen M. Carbary, & Michael K. Tanenhaus
University of Rochester, USA
E-mail: kcarbary@bcs.rochester.edu
We examined how context and priming interact to determine referential form in unscripted dialogue,
in order to evaluate whether syntactic priming affects the content of message encoding. We also
asked whether priming effects are stronger in dialogue than monologue, as has been recently
suggested [1, 2].
Pairs of naïve participants sat at separate computers, and took turns describing a target from a set of
pictures to their partner, whose task was to click on the target. In some cases, contrast sets (e.g. two
cats) required the use of an adjective to accurately describe the target (e.g. the striped cat). Effects
were evaluated using mixed-effects logit models. Experiment 1 replicated standard priming effects:
when participants used an adjective, they were biased to repeat the syntactic structure (pre- or postnominal)
just used by their partner. If priming affects structure at the level of message planning, the
prime structure should also increase adjective use, even when the context doesn’t require it. This was
not the case. Although participants were more likely to repeat the prime structure than to choose an
alternative structure when they modified, primes had only minimal effects on modification rates when
context did not require it. Thus, although priming affects the availability of alternative structures, it
does not affect the content of the message.
In a second experiment, primes were produced by an interlocutor, or pre-recorded and played over
headphones. For trials where modification was used, priming was significantly more likely in
response to primes produced by a dialogue participant than in response to pre-recorded primes.
However, the impact of prime type was small: when all trials were included in the model, there was
no effect of dialogue on priming. This suggests that priming may not play a special role in dialogue.
In addition, when added to a mixed-effects model along with contrast and prime type, trial order did
not predict priming, indicating that priming did not increase as the dialogue unfolded.
We conclude that syntactic priming affects the availability of alternative syntactic forms, but has little
influence on message content. Moreover, priming effects during unscripted dialogue are only slightly
stronger than priming in an otherwise identical non-dialogue context.
References
1. Pickering & Garrod (2004). Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral & Brain
Sciences, 27, 169-226.
2. Branigan, Pickering, McLean, & Cleland (2007). Participant role and syntactic alignment in
dialogue. Cognition, 104, 163-97.
Notes
43

O27
Communication and grammar do not rely on the same cognitive system
Alan Langus 1 , & Marina Nespor 2
1
SISSA, Trieste, Italy, 2 University Milano Bicocca, Italy
E-mail: langus@sissa.it
Our understanding of the uniqueness of human language is primarily based on syntaxctic properties
(e.g. reursivity). However, besides adhering to the computationally precise syntactic rules and
structures, human language serves also as a powerful tool for communication. We present 3
experiments that dissociate communication from grammar and show that the two aspects of human
language rely on different cognitive mechanisms.
In the 1st Experiment, Italian native speakers were asked to use only gestures when describing simple
scenarios consisting of a Subject, an Object and a Verb. The results show a strong preference to place
gestures of Subjects and Objects before those of Actions – an order which is ungrammatical in Italian,
suggesting that we are observing structural biases in communication in the absence of grammar.
In order to test whether this bias is strong enough to elicit language like constructions, in the 2nd
Experiment, Italian native speakers were asked to use only gestures when describing complex
scenarios consisting of a Main Clause and a Subordinate Clause. The results show that participants
could not elicit language like structures that would be based on the SOV order and reverted to their
native grammar to communicate complex constructions instead.
In the 3rd Experiment, we investigated the costs and benefits of these biases in comprehension.
Participants saw digitally edited video clips of simple gesture strings that differed only in the order of
the Subjects, Objects and Verbs. We measured participants’ reaction times in a forced choice task
between two images: one of which described the video-clip just seen and another that did not.
Participants were faster in choosing the correct image when the clips followed a consistent order
across trials. Interestingly, participants were also significantly faster in choosing the correct image
when the clips were in the SOV order (dominant in gesture production but ungrammatical Italian)
than when the clips followed the native SVO order.
The results are discussed in the framework of possible forces influencing the nature of human
language production and comprehension.
Notes
44

O28
Neuro-cognitive systems supporting derivational morphology
Mirjana Bozic 1 , Lorraine K. Tyler 2 , & William D. Marslen-Wilson 1
1 MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK, 2 University of Cambridge, UK
E-mail: mirjana.bozic@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
Speech comprehension is primarily supported by bilateral fronto-temporal language processing
networks. The existing evidence suggests that these networks consist of a general bilateral component
and a more specialised left hemisphere subsystem, which have different functional roles: the bilateral
system supports access to stored semantic representations for simple words (e.g. dog, house), while
the processing of linguistically more complex inputs shifts the hemispheric balance towards the leftlateralised
subsystem (Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 2007). Previous research with inflectionally complex
words suggests that it is specifically their morpho-phonological complexity (i.e., as stems +
inflectional affixes) that triggers left-lateralised processing. Compared to simple words, regular and
pseudoregular inflected items (e.g. played or trade) activate left-lateralised frontal areas, while
general lexical-semantic processing complexity (e.g. competition due to presence of embedded stems,
claim/clay) engages fronto-temporal regions bilaterally.
The current efMRI experiment asked whether similar hemispheric patterns hold for derivationally
complex words, where the stem-affix relationship is more strongly lexicalised and less semantically
predictable than for regular inflection. In a set of single spoken words we manipulated the presence of
embedded stems and derivational suffixes with varying degrees of productivity. Words were
contrasted against a baseline that has the complex auditory properties of speech but does not trigger a
speech percept (envelope-shaped ‘musical rain’, Uppenkamp et al, 2006). We found that stem
competition generated by derivational lexical complexity (e.g., warmth/warm) engages bilateral
fronto-temporal language regions; however the presence of derivational affixes did not trigger the
strong hemispheric dissociation seen for inflections. This is arguably because derivational affixes do
not trigger decompositional processes in the same way as inflectional affixes. We suggest a neurocognitive
account of the representation and processing of derivationally complex forms in English.
References
Marslen-Wilson, W. & Tyler, L. K. (2007). Morphology, language and the brain: The
decompositional substrate for language comprehension. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society: Biological Sciences, 362, 823-836.
Uppenkamp, S., Johnsrude, I. S., Norris, D., Marslen-Wilson, W. & Patterson, R. D. (2006). Locating
speech-specific processes in human temporal cortex. NeuroImage, 31, 1284-1296.
Notes
45

O29
Full parsing versus dual route models of morphological processing:
Assessing surface frequency effects on response time using MEG
Ehren Reilly 1 , Olla Solomyak 2 , Alec Marantz 2 , & William Badecker 1
1 Johns Hopkins University, USA, 2 New York University, USA
E-mail: reilly@cogsci.jhu.edu
In a visual lexical decision experiment based on Baayen, Dijkstra & Schreuder (1997), but using
concurrent magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording, we contrasted parallel dual-route models of
lexical processing with full parsing models. We measured neural activity at each stage of processing
prior to reaction time to determine the stage of processing at which surface frequency effects arise.
Our behavioral results concur with Baayen et al (Fig. 1).
Figure 1. Interacting effects of affixedness and affix-dominance
Dominance-Affixedness Interaction
RT (ms)
790
740
690
640
unaffixed
affixed
Aff-Rec 678 750
Affix- 673 700
Dom
However our MEG data suggest that these surface frequency effects did not arise during lexical
access, and they are therefore not lexical. We used the latency of the M350 response as an index of
initial access to lexical representations. The M350 has been identified as the earliest MEG response
that is sensitive to lexical frequency in the lexical decision task (Embick et al 2001), and our results
replicated that finding (Table 1).
Table 1. M350 latency for high & low frequency stems.
M350 Peak Latency SE
High Stem Freq. 343 3.57
Low Stem Freq. 372 4.52
The effect of affix-dominance of the lemma that we found behaviorally for affixed words was not
reflected in the M350. That is, although lexical frequency effects were already present at the M350,
surface frequency effects did not manifest until after the M350 response: They were only reflected in
RT (Fig. 2).
46

Figure 2: RT and M350 peak latency plotted by affixedness and affix-dominance.
800
750
Dominance-Affixedness Interaction at RT; No Dominance-Affixedness
Interaction at M350
Response Latency (ms)
700
650
600
550
500
450
400
350
300
unaffixed
affixed
Affix-Rec (RT)
Affix-Dom (RT)
Affix-Rec (M350)
Affix-Dom (M350)
We also found that highly affix-recessive words cause higher amplitude in the M170 response. We
believe this effect is attributable to statistical properties of the visual wordforms themselves, rather
than of their corresponding lexical entries. Our M170 findings are evidence of an early, pre-lexical
stage of modality-specific wordform processing, one which is sensitive to transitional probabilities
between morphemes, but not to the lexical properties of the morphemes.
Taken together, our M170 and M350 result support a model of lexical-morphological processing
featuring:
1) A decompositional mode of lexical access, whereby the parsed-out stems of morphologically
complex words are accessed in the lexicon.
2) An inventory of modality-specific n-gram representations, whose activation is a precursor to full
lexical access.
References
Baayen, H., Dijkstra, T., & Schreuder, R. (1997). Singulars and plurals in Dutch: Evidence for a
parallel dual route model. JML, 37, 94-117.
Embick, D., Hackl, M., Schaeffer, J., Kelepir, M. & A. Marantz. (2001). A magnetoencephalographic
component whose latency reflects lexical frequency. Cog. Brain Res., 10(3), 3.
Notes
47

O30
Orthographic and phonological information in the printed-words
paradigm
Anne Pier Salverda, & Michael K. Tanenhaus
University of Rochester, USA
E-mail: asalverda@bcs.rochester.edu
In visual world studies of spoken word recognition, participants typically follow spoken instructions
to manipulate pictures in a visual display. Eye movements to pictures provide insight into the
activation of lexical candidates as the input unfolds. But how are participants able to so rapidly link
spoken words to pictures One hypothesis is that perceptual information activated by the unfolding
word draws attention to a matching referent (Dahan & Tanenhaus, 2005). Another is that fixations are
mediated by phonological information associated with the picture—i.e., its name.
Two recent studies replaced pictures with printed words. McQueen and Viebahn (2007) find the same
pattern of fixations as with pictures (e.g., Allopenna et al., 1998); Huettig and McQueen (2007) find
that phonological similarity effects precede visual/semantic effects--which the authors interpret as
evidence that the earliest effects are phonologically mediated. However, it has long been known that
orthographic representations are accessed when a spoken word is heard (cf. Seidenberg & Tanenhaus,
1979), though we know little about the time course of this process. Because McQueen and colleagues
used Dutch, which has a fairly transparent orthography, their results do not distinguish between a
phonological and an orthographic linking hypothesis. We conducted two experiments in English,
which has an opaque orthography, to dissociate the role of orthography and phonology.
Participants heard a spoken instruction, e.g. "Click on the word bead". As in the McQueen studies,
the display with four printed words appeared 200ms before target word onset. The display included
the target, a competitor and two distractors. In Experiment 1, orthographic overlap between the target
and competitor was either high (target bead, competitor bear) or low (target bead, competitor bare).
Phonological overlap between the target and each competitor was low and the same for each type of
competitor. We found more fixations to high-overlap orthographic competitors than to low-overlap
orthographic competitors. In Experiment 2, phonological overlap was high (target bead, competitor
bean) or low (target bead, competitor bear), with each competitor matched for orthographic overlap
with the target. Participants were equally likely to fixate each type of competitor.
The results suggest that orthographic information for lexical candidates is activated as a spoken word
unfolds and fixations to the printed words reflect a visual search for a matching orthographic form.
Notes
48

O31
The cross-script length effect on reading aloud: Further challenges for
PDP models
Kathleen Rastle 1 , Jelena Havelka 2 , & Taeko Wydell 3
1 Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, 2 University of Leeds, UK, 3 Brunel University, UK
E-mail: kathy.rastle@rhul.ac.uk
One of the key controversies in psycholinguistics concerns the nature of processing in the reading
aloud system. While PDP models of reading aloud make the a priori claim that the orthography-tophonology
transformation is accomplished solely using parallel processing, the DRC and CDP+
models posit that this transformation is accomplished using a combination of parallel and serial
processes. This controversy has been hard to resolve experimentally, because it has been difficult to
demonstrate that the various serial effects that have been reported arise in the orthography-tophonology
transformation itself, instead of in peripheral visual or articulatory processes that everyone
agrees have a serial component. Our research resolves this issue by using the special properties of the
Serbian and Japanese writing systems to investigate the interaction between length and lexical status.
This interaction reflects the fact that length effects on reading aloud are much larger for nonwords
than they are for words, and has been one of the key findings used in support of serial models of
reading aloud.
Experiment 1 examined the interaction between length and lexical status in Japanese Kana, with
stimuli across the manipulation of lexical status being phonologically identical. Participants were
presented with Hiragana and Katakana words varied on length. The manipulation of lexical status was
achieved by presenting these words (a) as orthographically-familiar forms in the script in which they
normally appear; or (b) as orthographically-unfamiliar forms transcribed into the script in which they
never appear. Experiment 2 examined the interaction between length and lexical status in Serbian,
with stimuli across the manipulation of lexical status being orthographically identical. Participants
were presented with Roman and Cyrillic bivalent stimuli varied on length. Bivalent stimuli are
typically words if interpreted in one alphabet and pronounceable nonwords (with a different
pronunciation) if interpreted in another alphabet. Thus, the manipulation of lexical status was
achieved by asking participants to interpret the bivalent stimuli (a) in the alphabet in which they were
words; or (b) in the alphabet in which they were nonwords. Results of both experiments showed a
larger length effect when stimuli were treated as nonwords than when they were treated as words.
These results offer strong support to models of reading aloud that postulate a serial process in the
transformation of orthography to phonology.
Notes
49

O32
Fit-to-context as a controller of the extent of semantic processing during
discourse comprehension
Anthony J. Sanford 1 , Jason Bohan 1 , Alison J.S. Sanford 2 , & Hartmut Leuthold 1
1 University of Glasgow, UK, 2 University of Strathclyde, UK
E-mail: a.sanford@psy.gla.ac.uk
Although readers usually notice semantic anomalies in discourse, this depends upon anomalous words
having a poor fit to general context (e.g., “Mary likes her tea with socks”.). When a word has a good
fit to global context, it is often not detected as anomalous, even though it has a local poor fit (“After
the aircrash, the authorities had to decide where to bury the survivors”; Barton & Sanford, 1993).
Here survivors is a word that is common in the context of an aircrash, and is well-fitting, unlike socks
in the first case.
The experiments bring new evidence to bear on differences between processing words with good and
poor fits to global context. In Experiments 1 and 2, we use eyetracking to probe whether anomalous
words that have a good fit are in fact detected at a systems-level, but do not register in awareness, or
whether there is no evidence for unconscious detection. There was little evidence for unconscious
detection in either experiment. Only in cases of conscious detection was there an effect on tracking
pattern. We conclude that unconscious detection of an anomaly is highly unlikely.
Experiments 3 and 4 used ERPs. Two interesting results emerged. While anomalous words with a
poor fit to global context produced an N400 effect, anomalous words with a good fit produced no
N400 effect: They produced a late positive complex. This supports the distinction between the two
types of anomaly, and fits with other literature on late positivities (Kuperberg, 2007). There was also
no evidence for unconscious recognition in the ERP pattern. The late positivity emerged only on trials
where there was an overt detection of the anomaly. In Experiment 3 (auditory presentation) there was
no difference between the ERPs to nonanomalous controls and undetected anomalies. In Experiment
4 (visual presentation) there was a reduced positivity in the case of undetected anomalies compared to
control. This effect is likely due to judgment confidence.
We have demonstrated differences in the way contextually predictable words are processed over less
predictable words (reflected in ERPs), and have provided evidence that semantic processing is more
shallow in the case of the predictable terms. We argue that a mechanism supporting such effects is
optimal for normal language processing.
References
Barton, S.B & Sanford, A. J. (1993). A case-study of anomaly detection: Shallow semantic
processing and cohesion establishment. Memory and Cognition, 21, 477-487.
Kuperberg, G. (2007) Neural mechanisms of language comprehension: Challenges to syntax. Brain
Research, 1146:23-49.
Notes
50

O33
Evidence for a dissociation between pragmatic and semantic constraint in
lexical processing
Dale J. Barr
University of California, Riverside, USA
E-mail: dale.barr@ucr.edu
When listeners interpret a speaker's references, they consider privileged information that is
unavailable to the speaker. This finding has launched a longstanding debate over listeners' use of
speaker perspective during language comprehension. Some have suggested that listeners process
language "egocentrically" by default and consider speaker information only to monitor and repair
misunderstandings (Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 2000). However, inconsistent with this view,
listeners show early effects of common ground during reference resolution, suggesting that
knowledge of the speaker's perspective imposes a partial constraint on processing (Hanna, Tanenhaus,
& Trueswell, 2003).
One possibility that has been neglected in this debate is that listeners try to use common ground, but
are unable to fully do so due to processing limitations: Listeners may unsuccessfully attempt to
restrict attention to information in common ground prior to hearing a referring expression, but find
themselves unable to inhibit activation of this information because low-level processing systems
operate independently of this knowledge. Thus, "early" effects of common ground may reflect
anticipation, but not integration, of pragmatic knowledge.
To test this hypothesis, listeners viewed pictures and interpreted speakers' references to a target
picture (e.g., click on the bucket) while their eyes were tracked. A critical picture was either of a
competitor (e.g., buckle) or noncompetitor (e.g., stepladder). The picture could be ruled out by a
constraint that was either pragmatic (the picture was privileged) or semantic (the picture was an
implausible object of the verb; e.g., the verb "empty" in "empty the bucket" rules out both a buckle
and a stepladder, which can't be emptied). It was found that semantic constraint eliminated competitor
interference, while pragmatic constraint produced anticipation without any reduction in interference.
This is consistent with a processing-limitations account but not with an egocentrism or a constraintbased
view.
References
Hanna, J., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Trueswell, J. C. (2003). The effects of common ground and
perspective on domains of referential interpretation. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 43-61.
Keysar, B., Barr, D. J., Balin, J. A., & Brauner, J. S. (2000). Taking perspective in conversation: The
role of mutual knowledge in comprehension. Psychological Science, 11, 32-38.
Notes
51

O34
Interpreting quantifiers in context
Kevin B. Paterson 1 , Ruth Filik 2 , Marilena Mousoulidou 1 , & Linda M. Moxey 2
1 University of Leicester, UK, 2 University of Glasgow, UK
E-mail: kbp3@le.ac.uk
An important goal of research into discourse comprehension is to explain how noun-phrases are
understood relative to the discourse context. Recent research has focused on the interpretation of
quantifiers, such as “three ships”. Such phrases often are ambiguous. For instance, in “Six ships were
on the horizon. Three ships…” “three ships” can refer to a subset of an established referent (i.e., three
of the six ships) or introduce a new referent into the discourse. Research suggests that the subset
reading is preferred but is unclear as to how this preference emerges on-line. Nevertheless, two
accounts exist. One proposes that a syntactic principle of “minimal-lowering” creates a preference for
the subset reading of ambiguous quantifiers (e.g., Frazier, 1999). The other account attributes this
preference to the avoidance of costs associated with establishing a new referent, and proposes that
such costs emerge late in processing (Kaan et al., 2007). We report two eye-tracking experiments that
assessed these claims.
Experiment 1 used short discourses such as the following:
1. The fishermen saw six ships appear on the horizon. Apparently, three ships had been bombarded by
enemy fire.
2. The fishermen saw two ships appear on the horizon. Apparently, three ships had been bombarded
by enemy fire.
These included a quantifier (e.g., “three ships”) that was ambiguous or unambiguous. Ambiguous
quantifiers could (e.g., 1) or could not (e.g., 2) receive a subset reading, and unambiguous stimuli
were created by including a determiner that required a subset reading (e.g., "Of these, three ships…")
or new set reading (e.g., "Another three ships…"). Eye movement data showed no evidence of a
preference for the subset reading of an ambiguity during early processing. But, in line with Kaan et
al., there was a late processing cost for ambiguous and unambiguous quantifiers that introduced a new
referent.
Experiment 2 further investigated the timing of this effect by including stimuli in which the subset
reading was both obligatory and impossible (e.g., "The fishermen saw two ships appear on the
horizon. Of these, three ships…"). Although this semantic contradiction had effects in early
processing measures, effects associated with introducing a new referent still emerged late. We
conclude that this late effect reflects integration and storage costs associated with the establishment of
a new discourse referent.
References
Frazier, L. (1999). On sentence interpretation. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Kaan, E. et al. (2007). Processing bare quantifiers in discourse. Brain Research, 11
Notes
52

Abstracts – Poster Presentations
53

P1
Relative clauses and surprisal
Douglas Roland
University at Buffalo, USA
E-mail: droland@buffalo.edu
Surprisal, or the negative log probability of a word given its context, has been shown to account for
processing difficulties and reading times in a wide variety of situations ranging from the reading
times of specific structures (e.g., Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) to the reading times of words in running
text (e.g., Boston et al., 2008; Demberg & Keller, 2008).
While surprisal is able to account for relative clause processing difficulties in a variety of languages
where other accounts fail (e.g., the anti-locality effects observed in head final languages), current
models predict the wrong locations for the difficulties in English relative clauses, and do not capture
the effects of animacy, pronominal status of NPs, discourse structure, or other factors which have
been shown to affect the processing of relative clauses (e.g., Gennari & MacDonald, 2008; Mak et al.,
2008; Reali & Christiansen, 2007; Traxler et al., 2005).
To illustrate why surprisal models fail on English relative clauses, we present data from participantpaced
moving window experiments examining the influence of discourse context on relative clause
processing.
We find that when object relative clauses are preceded by a Topic context (1), where the embedded
NP is the topic of the preceding discourse, the processing difficulties are reduced compared to the
Neutral case (3). This is because in natural use, object relatives nearly always contain old information
and are typically used to relate the modified noun back to the topic of discourse (Fox & Thompson,
1990).
When object relative clauses are preceded by a Mention context (2), the embedded NP 'writer' is read
more slowly than in either the Topic or Neutral case, but the remainder of object relative clause (at
both the embedded verb and main verb region) is faster than when following the Neutral context. This
suggests that there is initial surprise at 'writer', since 'publisher' is expected, but that this is still better
than when there is no preceding referent.
We argue that the problem with current surprisal models is that they rely only on structure-based
contextual probabilities, and that their ability to account for human performance is improved as their
models of context are improved.
Examples of Object Relative Clauses preceded by:
(1) Topic Context: The writer was very friendly. The agent that the writer trusted …
(2) Mention Context: The publisher sent the writer a check every month. The agent that the writer
trusted …
(3) Neutral Context: Publishing a book is a very complicated process. The agent that the write …
Notes
54

Sensitivity to syntax in visual cortex: The role of phonological typicality
P2
Suzanne Dikker 1 , Hugh A. Rabagliati 1 , Thomas A. Farmer 2 , & Liina Pylkkänen 1
1 New York University, USA, 2 Cornell University, USA
E-mail: suzanne.dikker@nyu.edu
Introduction
Surprisingly, syntactic violations can affect event-related potentials as early as 120ms (e.g., the
ELAN, 1). Recently, (2) demonstrated in MEG that reading violations of syntactic expectations
increases the amplitude of the visual M100 component, generated in visual cortex at ~130ms. This
finding suggests that fine-grained form estimates based on syntactic context are available to sensory
cortices, potentially a key element for understanding how language processing can be so remarkably
fast. Specifically, in 2 experiments an M100 modulation is reported for word category violations, but
only if the unanticipated element contained a closed-class category-marking morpheme (prepositions
and participles with –ed). No M100 effect was found for bare stems (e.g., report) or lexically
unambiguous nouns (e.g., tree). This suggested that closed-class morphemes have a special status in
early syntactic processing.
In this study we evaluate an alternative hypothesis—in terms of phonological typicality. It has
previously been shown that phonologically typical nouns are read faster than less typical nouns (3).
We tested whether an M100 effect of expectedness would be elicited for phonologically typical
monomorphemic nouns, which would show that closed-class morphology is, in fact, not necessary for
this early effect of expectedness.
Method/Design
We evaluated this hypothesis by splitting the monomorphemic unambiguous noun targets of (2) into
phonologically typical and phonologically neutral conditions (the latter sharing features with both
nouns and verbs), using the typicality scores of (3).
TYPICAL
NEUTRAL
The monster was in the horrid STORY
* The monster was in the horridly STORY
The bird was behind the clean WINDOW
* The bird was behind the cleanly WINDOW
Analysis/results
Dipole analysis of the M100 peak—consistently localizing in visual cortex—revealed that an M100
effect of expectedness is, in fact, elicited for phonologically typical monomorphemic nouns (p=.04).
No such effect was found for the phonologically neutral nouns.
Conclusion
These findings show that closed-class morphemes are not necessary for the visual M100 effect of
syntactic expectations: even a probabilistic cue to word category such as phonological typicality is
sufficient for this effect to emerge.
References
(1) Friederici AD TiCS 2002
(2) Dikker S, Rabagliati H, Pylkkänen L subm
(3) Farmer TA, Christiansen MH, Monaghan P PNAS 2006
Notes
55

P3
Exchange rate woes for the spreading activation model too:
A large-scale investigation
Susannah Moat 1 , Martin Corley 1 , & Robert J. Hartsuiker 2
1 PPLS, University of Edinburgh, UK, 2 Ghent University, Belgium
E-mail: h.s.moat@sms.ed.ac.uk
The spreading activation model proposed by Dell (1986) to account for a wide variety of speech error
results has been highly influential. However, some of the evidence which the model was based on has
recently been questioned. In particular, Nooteboom (2005) has highlighted inadequacies in his
previous corpus calculations of anticipation and exchange proportions. We therefore used 6 corpora
of speech errors to determine upper and lower limits on proportions of anticipations, perseverations,
exchanges and non-contextual errors, and tested the ability of a 50 word model with word, phoneme
and feature layers to meet these limits.
To avoid restricting our conclusions to behaviour at an arbitrary point in parameter space, we
orthogonally varied parameter settings, taking into account those used by 5 other published
simulation studies based on Dell (1986). We were also interested in the effect of connectivity settings,
and tested the model with and without phoneme to word feedback, phoneme to feature cascade and
feature to phoneme feedback. Combining these parameter and connectivity settings resulted in 21,870
simulations, each involving 10,000 productions of randomly selected two word utterances.
Results revealed that 96.8% of simulations did not generate enough exchanges. Across simulations,
an average of only 0.87% of contextual word pair errors were exchanges. The models which did
display enough exchanges nearly all generated too many non-contextual errors. 40% of these were
governed by intrinsic noise, with low connection weights, high decay and long processing stages. The
other 60% were flooded with activation, with high connection weights, feedback from features to
phonemes, low decay, and high activation dependent noise. 5% of these latter models generated an
appropriate proportion of non-contextual errors, but either no perseverations, or less than 85% correct
utterances, depending on the presence of phoneme to word feedback.
Both experimental and computational future research into phonological encoding needs to take into
account the highly surprising but extensive difficulties of this important speech error model in
accounting for this basic behaviour pattern.
References
Dell, G. S. (1986). A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. Psychological
Review, 93, 283–321.
Nooteboom, S. G. (2005). Listening to oneself: Monitoring in speech production. In R. Hartsuiker, R.
Bastiaanse, A. Postma, & F. Wijnen (Eds.), Phonological encoding and monitoring in normal and
pathological speech (pp. 167–186). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Notes
56

P4
Explaining disruption in children's processing of interrupted main clauses:
Discourse entities or similarity-interference
Anna R. Weighall 1 , & Gerry T.M. Altmann 2
1 Sheffield Hallam University, UK, 2 University of York, UK
E-mail: a.r.weighall@shu.ac.uk
Given a sentence like The cat that bumped the bear will hug the cow deciding who hugged the cow is
difficult for children, whereas knowing that the cat bumped the bear is less error prone (Weighall &
Altmann, 2001). We investigated whether this disruption is specific to structures containing relative
clauses, or whether it generalises to any construction where the main clause is interrupted by a
subordinate clause (e.g. prepositional phrases or adjectival comments). Two experiments will be
reported that used an auditory comprehension task with 6- to 8- year-olds (N=60; 30 in each
experiment). Children responded to comprehension questions about the main clause of structurally
different centre-embedded sentences, the mean correct responses (%) for each sentence type are
shown below.
Experiment 1 Experiment 2
_________________________________________________________________
SS that bumped the bear 27 that bumped the lamppost 59
PP next to the bear 28 next to the lamppost 53
ADJ with the striped tail 67 with the striped tail 58
__________________________________________________________________
Experiment 1 revealed equal disruption for SS and PP sentences, suggesting that the disruption is not
limited just to relative clauses. Disruption did not extend to all interruption types as performance in
the adjectival comment condition was significantly better. These results could be explained by the
integration cost account (Gibson, 1994) which suggests that the number of unique discourse referents
intervening between a filler and attachment site determines processing difficulty. Under this account,
the properties of a given entity (e.g., animacy, frequency) do not further contribute to processing cost.
However, the results of Experiment 1 are also compatible with the similarity-based interference
account (Gordon, Hendrick & Johnson, 2001) which suggests that the confusability of entities has an
important role to play in sentence complexity. These accounts were contrasted in Experiment 2 by
constructing PP and SS sentences maintaining the number of discourse entities, but reducing their
confusability by including an inanimate object in the interruption. The data indicate that reducing
confusability greatly improved processing of the interrupted main clause, consistent with the
similarity-based interference account. We conclude that this account can be extended to children’s
syntactic processing and that children, who have reduced cognitive capacity compared to adults, may
be particularly susceptible to such interference.
Notes
57

P5
Exploring the rules of stress assignment in disyllabic nonwords
Lesley M. Mitchell, & Kathleen Rastle
Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
E-mail: l.m.mitchell@rhul.ac.uk
When faced with reading disyllabic English words aloud, how does the reader know which syllable to
stress Readers can rely on lexical information for words that they know, but how is stress assignment
achieved for printed nonwords Our work explored this question in the context of the dual-route
model of reading aloud. Previous research has suggested a number of cues that may play a role in the
nonlexical assignment of stress, including the length of the vowel in each syllable, the phonological
weight of each syllable, the orthographic weight of each syllable, and the presence of prefixes in the
string. Five experiments that examined the reading aloud of disyllabic nonwords were conducted to
test the influence of each of these cues. Experiment 1 examined the influence of vowel length, the
rule being that long vowels draw stress. Experiment 2 examined the influence of phonological weight,
the rule being that syllables with more phonemes draw stress. Experiments 3 and 4 examined the
influence of orthographic weight, the rule being that syllables with more letters draw stress. Finally,
Experiment 5 examined the influence of morphology, the rule being that prefixes repel stress. Results
showed effects of all of these variables on the assignment of stress. However, the phonological
variables (vowel length and phonological weight) had a much more limited influence than did the
orthographic variables (orthographic weight and morphology). Results are discussed in terms of
models of reading aloud.
Notes
58

P6
The speed of relative clause attachment
Patrick Sturt, & Masaya Yoshida
University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: patrick.sturt@ed.ac.uk
Studies in head final languages has shown that a fully connected syntactic structure is built before the
phrasal head is reached in the input, contra Pritchett 1992; Abney 1986. This study investigates
whether a similarly eager parsing strategy is applied in English. Because heads in English normally
occur soon after phrasal onsets, much of the existing evidence for early structural commitment could
be compatible with a head-driven parsing strategy. A second aim of this research was to examine the
extent to which a globally coherent syntactic unit is maintained during processing; is each new word
immediately incorporated into a syntactic structure (indicating a strong top-down component to the
parsing strategy), or is processing better viewed as a sequence of local integrations, which are later
pieced together into a global structure, as predicted by more bottom-up parsing strategies.
We focus on the processing of post-modifiers, where structural relations are sometimes thought to be
established with delay (e.g. Frazier & Clifton, 1996: Construal).
36 participants read sentences like 1a,b, while their eye-movements were monitored:
1a Tony doesn't believe it, but Vanity Fair is a film which I ever/never really want to see.
1b Tony doesn't believe that Vanity Fair is a film which I ever/never really want to see.
The critical word "ever"/"never" was varied as a factor in the 2x2 design. In 1a, a negative element c-
commands, thus licenses, "ever" and, but not in 1b, where processing difficulty is expected for "ever".
Conversely, "never" is expected to exhibit processing difficulty in 1b relative to 1a, because due to
the configuration where 'never' must be interpreted under another negation operator. This predicted
interaction of Word x Structure was found in regression-path times at the critical word, as well as at
the following adverb (p's < .05). Because the regression-path measure reflects processing before
following words have been fixated, this result indicates that the structural relations necessary for
computing the scope of negation (e.g. c-command) were available early during the processing of the
relative clause; certainly before its verbal head had been processed. Thus, the modifier was
immediately incorporated into the structure. Moreover, the relevant structural relation spanned
multiple clauses, supporting the notion that the syntactic structure is maintained as a globally coherent
unit. A self-paced reading experiment reaching the same conclusions with a similar design will be
described as well.
Notes
59

P7
Susceptibility to retroactive interference in verb-phrase ellipsis
Andrea E. Martin, & Brian McElree
New York University, USA
E-mail: aem357@nyu.edu
Nonadjacent dependency resolution crucially relies on access to memory representations outside the
current focus of attention. Unlike many dependencies, the antecedent of a verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE)
is fully integrated in its local context, and is not grammatically marked. Thus, subsequent retrieval of
the antecedent cannot be predicted, precluding the engagement of special stacks or buffers in
memory.
Martin and McElree (2008) argued that VPE antecedents are content-addressable and directly
accessed via a pointer, not a backward search. However, their data are not incompatible with a
forward search, where the search for the antecedent is launched from the beginning of the sentence.
We contrasted two retrieval contexts: 1) with interfering material occurring before the onset of the
antecedent (proactive interference; PI) and 2) with material intervening between antecedent and VPE
(retroactive interference; RI). In a forward search, PI should slow processing relative to RI, as more
material must be searched to find the antecedent. We varied the type of interfering material (see
below) in case the search operates over a restricted set, endeavoring to test for a forward search and to
investigate potential sources of interference. We used the speed-accuracy tradeoff procedure, where
participants responded (yes/no acceptability) at multiple times during processing, allowing derivation
of accuracy functions over time.
Contra a search process, no differences in processing speed were found. Type of interfering material
did not affect speed or accuracy. However, RI significantly lowered accuracy relative to PI,
suggesting that susceptibility to interference sensitizes comprehenders to the recency of the
antecedent, and that comprehension depends on successful retrieval.
PI
1 Sometime in the early morning yesterday, Claudia filed a complaint. Ron did too.
2 Even though Claudia was not particularly angry, she filed a complaint. Ron did too.
3 Even though Claudia did not write an angry letter, she filed a complaint. Ron did too.
4 Claudia wrote an angry letter, and she also filed a complaint. Ron did too.
RI
5 Claudia filed a complaint. Sometime in the early morning yesterday, Ron did too.
6 Claudia filed a complaint. Even though he was not particularly angry, Ron did too.
7 Claudia filed a complaint. Even though he did not write an angry letter, Ron did too.
8 Claudia filed a complaint and she also wrote an angry letter. Ron did too.
References
Martin, A. E., & McElree, B. (2008). A content-addressable pointer underlies comprehension of verbphrase
ellipsis. J Mem Lang, 58, 879-906.
Notes
60

P8
Good-enough language processing in a communicative situation
Fernanda Ferreira, & Manon W. Jones
University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: fernanda.ferreira@ed.ac.uk
Recent evidence suggests that the language comprehension system does not consistently create
accurate and detailed representations. Sentence reading experiments show that garden-path (GP)
sentences are sometimes only partially reanalyzed (Christiansen et al., 2001) and lead to shallow
processing of material presented after the disambiguator (Ferreira & Jones, 2008). Such effects occur
even though the tasks allow processing to be extended indefinitely.
In an eye-tracking experiment, we focus on the arguably more typical communicative situation in
which input is auditory and the comprehender has little control over how it is presented. Any limit on
how much time is devoted to processing and reanalyzing already presented material is not selfimposed,
but arises from the need to deal with new material or generate a response.
We used the Visual World Paradigm, in which participants were required to execute an action based
on an ambiguous (GP) or unambiguous (non-GP) auditory instruction (excluding or including the
word “that’s”). Our measures were performance accuracy and eye movements.
Distractor object Distractor location Click object
e.g., Put the book (that’s) on the chair into the bin. Then click on the dress.
Target object
Target location
We predicted that in the ambiguous condition, participants would show evidence of difficulty
processing the initial instruction, leading to a trade-off in processing post-disambiguating material.
Results supported this prediction. In the ambiguous condition, participants showed explicit evidence
of being garden-pathed: They made significantly more errors in picking up the distractor object and
dropping it onto the distractor location. Participants also successfully reanalysed the sentence on 71%
of these trials (following the initial error, they picked up the correct target and placed it on the correct
location). Interestingly, even on correctly-executed trials, participants made a longer first fixation
(associated with cognitive load) to the distractor location in the ambiguous condition. Moreover, the
initial processing cost of the first instruction led to a trade-off on later material: On postdisambiguator
objects, (target location and click object), participants were slower to fixate and made
fewer fixations on these regions.
These experiments show that in a typical communicative situation, one or more difficulties during
comprehension leads to shallow processing of later material. We argue that the processor’s limited
capacity necessitates this trade-off, such that processing is often just ‘good enough’ to accomplish the
task at hand.
Notes
61

P9
Extracting repetition-based patterns from noise in infancy
Agnes M. Kovacs 1 , & Jacques Mehler 2
1
SISSA, Hungarian Academy of Science, 2 SISSA, Italy
E-mail: agikov1@yahoo.co.uk
In the course of language acquisition infants have to learn not only the vocabulary of their native
language, but also its underlying grammatical rules. To extract a specific regularity from the rich
linguistic signal infants must possess the ability to disregard patterns they cannot yet interpret.
Previous studies suggest that preverbal infants can learn rule-like regularities from artificial minilanguages
(Marcus et al., 1999; Gerken, 2006). In these studies infants could discriminate repetitionbased
regularities when trained with speech-like stimuli that all followed the same pattern (e.g.,
AAB). However, in natural environments infants are exposed to a ‘noisy’ linguistic input that
contains multiple regularities. Moreover, for an efficient learning one has to go beyond discrimination
and integrate the extracted patterns into other representations.
In two experiments we explore whether preverbal infants can extract regularities from a noisy input,
which contains more than one regularity. Using a TOBII 1750 eye-tracker we investigate how infants
integrate patterns of varying complexity (e.g., adjacent and non-adjacent repetitions) into differential
anticipatory eye-movements. This procedure also allows us to directly compare adjacent identity
relations against non-adjacent ones in terms of processing demands. In Experiment 1, we found that
7-month-old infants generalized the AAB patterns (monotonous trisyllabic non-words with repeated
syllables in the beginning) but not the ABA ones (non-adjacent repetitions), after they were
familiarized with both AAB and ABA patterns. Experiment 2 investigated whether non-adjacent
repetitions (ABA patterns) can be learned when contrasted with random ABC structures. In this case
7-month-old infants could generalize ABA patterns and disregard the ABC ones. Infants thus could
extract the non-adjacent relations when this was the salient regularity.
The data suggests that adjacent repetitions are computationally preferred over non-adjacent
repetitions. Infants seem to consider non-salient patterns as noise and successfully ignore it. The
results show that preverbal infants posses powerful abilities to extract regularities from a ‘noisy’
linguistic signal, and the presence of other patterns does not impair learning.
References
Gerken, L. A. (2006). Decisions, decisions: infant language learning when multiple generalizations
are possible, Cognition 98, 67–74.
Marcus, G. F., Vijayan, S., Bandi Rao, S., & Vishton, P. (1999). Rule- learning in seven-month-old
infants. Science, 283, 77–80.
Notes
62

Mary exists a ball to John: Structural priming from wrong or nonce
verbs exists
P10
Iva Ivanova 1 , Martin J. Pickering 2 , Holly P. Branigan 2 , Janet McLean 2 , & Albert M. Costa 1
1 Universitat de Barcelona, Spain, 2 University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: aivichka@yahoo.com
In conversation, speakers tend to repeat their own and each other’s linguistic choices, which
facilitates communication (a phenomenon known as “alignment”: Pickering & Garrod, 2004). Among
other things, people are known to repeat sentence structure (e.g., Branigan, Pickering & Cleland,
2000; Gries, 2005). Is alignment affected, however, when part of the input from the interlocutor is
erroneous or incomprehensible, as in the frequent case when we converse with non-native speakers of
our language More specifically, we ask if the linguistic processor can recognise a sentence structure
when the verb a) occurs with wrong morphology; b) is not associated with any semantic information;
or c) is associated with wrong semantic and structural information.
Three structural priming experiments with native English speakers using the dative alternation were
conducted to answer these questions. Experiment 1 revealed that a prime sentence containing an
incorrectly regularised past tense (1a) produced the same lexical boost as the correct form in 1b (there
was more priming from 1a and 1b than from 1c). Experiment 2 showed that a sentence containing a
nonce verb (2a) did prime, and it primed to the same extent as the “different verb” prime (2c), in the
presence of a lexical boost (2b primed more than 2a and 2c). In Experiment 3, an existing but strictly
intransitive verb used in the ditransitive construction (3a) also produced priming, which was again the
same as for the “different verb” condition (2c).
Taken together, our results indicate that a structure is recognised and can influence subsequent
production even in the absence of (correct) semantic and structural information associated with the
verb. Our findings are consistent with a view of language representation, in which syntactic frames
carry their own meanings which are independent of verb meanings. Our results also suggest that, even
though non-native speakers of our language might be having vocabulary or grammar problems, we
still align with them.
Experiment 1
Primes (here DO versions only):
1a. The waitress gived the boxer the banana.
1b. The waitress gave the boxer the banana.
1c. The waitress tossed the boxer the banana.
Target:
1d. nun GIVES ball soldier
Experiment 2
Primes:
2a. The waitress brunks the boxer the banana.
2b. The waitress gives the boxer the banana.
2c. The waitress tosses the boxer the banana.
Target: As in Exp.1
Experiment 3
3a. The waitress exists the boxer the banana.
3b. The waitress gives the boxer the banana.
3c. The waitress tosses the boxer the banana.
Target: As in Exp.1
63

P11
Constraints on the construction of counterfactual situation representations
during comprehension: An examination of on-line suppositional processing
Matthew Haigh, Andrew Stewart, & Evan Kidd
University of Manchester, UK
E-mail: Andrew.J.Stewart@manchester.ac.uk
In two self-paced reading experiments we examined how readers construct counterfactual situation
representations associated with subjunctive conditionals (e.g., If Darren had been athletic, he could
have tried out for the rugby team.) While there has been much research on how conditionals are
interpreted in the context of reasoning (Evans & Over, 2004), the means by which they are
comprehended on-line has not received a similar level of attention in the psycholinguistic literature
(but see Ferguson & Sanford, in press).
We develop an account of suppositional processing that is grounded in the literature on reasoning. In
Experiment 1 we manipulated the degree of congruency between the antecedent of a conditional and
preceding context (e.g., whether prior context describes ‘Darren’ as being atheltic or not athletic), and
whether the conditional was presented in subordinate-main or main-subordinate clause order. The
predictions of two accounts of suppositional processing were tested. A clause order-sensitive account
predicts a congruency effect, but only for subordinate-main clause order conditionals. In contrast, a
clause order-invariant account predicts a congruency effect for both subordinate-main and for mainsubordinate
clause order conditionals. We found an interaction between clause order and congruency
on reading times (F1(1,35)=9.25, p

A unified priming account of structural choice in sentence production
P12
Andriy Myachykov 1 , Simon Garrod 2 , & Christoph Scheepers 2
1 University of Edinburgh, UK, 2 University of Glasgow, UK
E-mail: a.myachykov@ed.ac.uk
When people speak, they have to make rapid structural choices taking into account constantly
changing discourse-relevant parameters, stretching from perceptual properties of the described
entities to the availability of lexical and structural information. Independent contributions of
perceptual, lexical, and structural priming on the speaker’s dynamic choice of grammatical structure
are well documented. However, there is a lack of studies exploring interactions between priming
effects associated with different production stages. Such studies are necessary for a unified account of
priming of structural choices.
Four Experiments investigated English transitive sentence production using a combination of priming
manipulations associated with different production stages. In each study, participants were presented
with a prime and then they described target pictures of transitive events. Perceptual priming was
operationalized as a visual cue to either the Agent or the Patient. Structural priming was achieved by
presenting either active or passive voice prime sentences. Verb overlap between primes and targets
ensured lexical priming. Experiment 1 used all the three priming manipulations. Experiment 2 used
only the perceptual priming manipulation. Experiment 3 paired perceptual and lexical (verb overlap)
priming. Experiment 4 contrasted perceptual and structural priming (no verb overlap).
Our results revealed three independent priming effects: speakers were more likely to produce passive
voice sentence when their attention was directed to the Patient. There was also a reliable structural
priming effect. Finally, speakers were more likely to alternate toward passives when the verb was
repeated from prime to target. Importantly, interactions between these priming components only
emerged between ‘neighbouring’ production stages. For example, perceptual priming interacted with
lexical priming, which in turn interacted with structural priming while there was no interaction
between the perceptual and the structural priming effects and no three-way interaction. This pattern,
first demonstrated in Experiment 1 (including all three priming manipulations), was successfully
replicated in Experiment 3 and 4, which tested possible interaction pairs separately. Our findings
provide initial support for a unified priming theory of perceptual, lexical, and structural determinants
of structural choice in sentence production. The observed interaction patterns suggest differential
decay functions for the priming effects associated with different production stages.
Notes
65

P13
Morpho-syntactic priming effects in spoken language processing
Angèle B. Brunellière, & Ulrich H. Frauenfelder
University of Geneva, Switzerland
E-mail: angele.brunelliere@pse.unige.ch
It has often been observed that words in context are recognised more rapidly and easily than isolated
words. Although many studies have investigated semantic context effects, the literature on morphosyntactic
context effects is sparse. Moreover, there are serious doubts about whether the latter really
reflect automatic processes during word recognition or whether they are more strategic in nature. This
study addresses this issue with grammatical priming experiments in which participants made lexical
decisions on target items that are preceded by a single item that provides different types of
grammatical context. All involved pairs of primes (pronoun vs. neutral) and targets (verb vs. pseudoverb)
producing three contexts: grammatically pronoun congruent (nous chantons), pronoun
incongruent (*vous chantons) or neutral (zous chantons). Three experiments were conducted; the first
two involved auditory intramodal priming and the third crossmodal (visual-auditory) priming. The
two experiments with auditory intramodal priming had ISI durations of 50 and 500 ms respectively. A
long ISI was used to determine whether the morpho-syntactic context effects were strategic. A
decrease in the size of priming effect at a long ISI with respect to the short ISI suggests no strategic
involvement (following the same approach as Radeau, Morais & Segui, 1995 and Luce, Goldinger,
Auer & Vitevitch, 2000). The results at the short ISI showed that the pronoun facilitated or inhibited
the lexical decision on the verb depending on the relation (congruent or incongruent) between the
pronoun and the verb. In addition, with pseudo-verb targets, faster reaction times (RTs) in the
pronoun incongruent context were found with respect to the neutral and pronoun congruent contexts.
No interaction was obtained between grammatical context and ISI. The fact that the size of morphosyntactic
context effects did not decrease for the longer ISI suggests that these effects were strategic
and already present at short ISI. In the third experiment which aims to determine the type of strategy
is involved, no effects of context were observed for verb targets and only slower RTs for the neutral
context were found with respect to the pronoun incongruent context for pseudo-verb targets. These
latter results indicate that the strategies which develop in intramodal stimulus presentations involved
an expectancy of verbal inflection from the pronoun prime on the target at sub-lexical level.
Notes
66

P14
A cross-task comparison of masked priming effects for differing semantic
prime-target relationships
J. Denard Thomas, & Kenneth I. Forster
University of Arizona, USA
E-mail: jdt1@email.arizona.edu
Recent studies have shown that there is a differential priming effect for prime-target pairs with
different types of semantic relationships (Bueno & Frenck-Mestre, 2002). In the present study, we
sought to investigate the extent to which masked semantic priming is an automatic process and
whether its effects vary depending upon the type of stimuli used. Here, we compared the effects of
synonym, antonym, and associatively related non-exemplar prime-target pairs in a semantic
categorization task using a masked priming paradigm. These results were contrasted with those seen
when using the same stimuli in a lexical decision task. Though an overall semantic priming effect was
obtained when collapsing over all three types of semantic relations in both tasks, significant priming
for individual semantic prime-target relationships were only seen in the lexical decision task.
Subsequent analysis of the data, however, indicates that the pattern of priming seen across prime and
task type vary as a function of participants’ “partial awareness” of the prime (Kouider & Dupoux,
2004). As a result, the present study demonstrates that masked semantic priming consists of both an
automatic component and a strategic component such that it yields differential effects depending on
the context of prime exposure.
References
Bueno, S., & Frenck-Mestre, C. (2002). Rapid activation of the lexicon: A further investigation with
behavioral and computational results. Brain and Language, 81(1), 120-130.
Kouider, S., & Dupoux, E. (2004). Partial awareness creates the “illusion” of subliminal semantic
priming. Psychological Science, 15(2), 75-81.
Notes
67

P15
Individual differences in agreement planning: The role of
working-memory control
David Taylor 1 , Richard Lewis 2 , & William Badecker 1
1 Johns Hopkins University, USA, 2 University of Michigan, USA
E-mail: badecker@jhu.edu
We present agreement production data bearing on theories of individual differences in working
memory (WM). Retaining several words in memory elicits more agreement attraction errors—and
more so for participants with low verbal span (attributed by some to WM capacity differences [2]).
We argue such performance differences follow instead from variation in acquired skills engaged in
the efficient control of WM during sentence formulation [3,4]. Our account has the advantage that it
is grounded in a detailed computational model of both WM architecture and its control structure,
along with explicit hypotheses about what constitutes efficient control.
Participants generated sentences with subjects containing subject relatives (Sub-RCs: the lawyer that
— saw the men) or object relatives (Obj-RCs: the lawyer that the men saw —). Afterwards, they
performed a reading span task [1]. More agreement errors occurred with Obj-RCs (8% of scorable
responses) than Sub-RCs (2.6%). Resource limitation theories predict more attraction errors for low
span participants because by hypothesis they have reduced WM capacity to devote to the agreement
calculation; but errors were in fact more common for high-span participants (16%) than for low span
participants (4%).
Our computational theory of WM and its control suggests that the effect may be due to differences in
production control strategies. The theory posits two control tactics that characterize efficient
processing in the face of severe WM constraints. One, the Minimal-Lag Strategy, maintains a tight
parallelism between syntactic and phonological processing. But in this context, the strategy interacts
with a key independent property of WM (i.e., retrieval interference) to yield poorer performance.
More specifically, adhering more closely to the ideal Minimal-Lag means that elements of the relative
clause are planned before the matrix verb’s agreement values are calculated. Accordingly, retrieving
the agreement source (the matrix subject) is more likely to be impeded by similarity-based
interference from the local noun phrase (the subject of the relative clause), an effect for which there is
independent evidence. In short, more skilled and efficient processors are more likely to produce
attraction errors on this construction, consistent with the empirical finding and the assumption that the
high-span participants are more highly skilled.
References
[1] Daneman & Carpenter 1980, JVLVB19 450-466.
[2] Hartsuiker & Barkhuysen 2006, Lang&CogProc21 181-204.
[3] Lewis 2006, PhD Thesis, CMU.
[4] MacDonald & Christiansen 2002, PsyRev109 35-54.
Notes
68

P16
2- and 3-year-olds' accuracy in repeating 4-word sequences is predicted by
familiarity, positional variability and latent semantic classes
Colin Bannard 1 , & Danielle E. Matthews 2
1 Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany,
2 University of Manchester, UK
E-mail: bannard@eva.mpg.de
Two studies set out to test recent accounts of the development of grammar (Tomasello, 2003), which
propose that children 1) remember utterances they hear and 2) draw on these to form their earliest
syntactic generalizations, which are limited-scope constructions with productive slots (e.g. 'A piece of
X') extracted from familiar sequences of words (e.g. 'A piece of toast'). To test the first proposal, in
study 1, we used a newly-available, dense corpus of child directed speech (1.7 million words of
maternal input over 0.3 million utterances) to identify frequently-occurring chunks in the input (e.g. a
drink of milk) and matched, infrequent sequences (e.g. a drink of tea). We tested preschoolers’ ability
to produce these sequences in a sentence repetition test. Twenty-one 3-year-olds and 17 2-year-olds
were significantly more likely to correctly repeat frequent than infrequent sequences. Moreover, 3-
year-olds were significantly faster to repeat the first 3 words of an item if they formed part of a chunk
(e.g. quicker to say 'a drink of' when followed by 'milk' than 'tea'). Study 2 tested the proposal that
children draw on stored utterances to extract basic syntactic generalizations in the form of lexically
specified constructions (e.g. on the basis of knowing 'A piece of toast', 'A piece of cheese' and 'A
piece of jigsaw' one might produce a less familiar expression 'A piece of brick'). This study tests the
hypotheses that children are most likely to detect a productive slot in the final position of a four-word
construction if 1) the final word is unpredictable given the first three words (high slot entropy, or
variability cf. Gomez, 2002) and 2) the words observed in the final position are semantically similar
(high semantic density; measured using a distributional proxy, cf Mirman and Magnusson, 2006).
Twenty-eight 2-year-olds and 31 3-year-olds were significantly more likely to correctly repeat
unfamiliar variants (e.g. 'A piece of brick') of frequent constructions (e.g. 'A piece of X') if that
construction had high slot entropy and semantic density. These results illustrate how plausible
statistical inference might give rise to the kind of representations proposed in usage-based accounts of
language acquisition.
References
Gomez, R. L. (2002). Variability and detection of invariant structure. Psychological Science, 13(5),
431-436
Mirman, D. and Magnuson, J.S. (2006). The Impact of Semantic Neighborhood Density on Semantic
Access. In Proceedings of Cogsci, 1823-1828.
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language. Harvard University Press.
Notes
69

P17
Be positive! The effect of negation on factual and counterfactual
language processing
Heather J. Ferguson 1 , Christoph Scheepers 2 , & Anthony J. Sanford 2
1 University College London, UK, 2 University of Glasgow, UK
E-mail: h.ferguson@ucl.ac.uk
Though they are plentiful, previous studies of negation (3) have not lead to a clear account on the
mechanisms and constraints associated with representing negated information. Specifically, negation
raises two important processing questions: how quickly is factual knowledge negated, and when is an
alternative mental model created It is often reported that negation leads to a delay in processing as
comprehenders must first integrate the falsity of the negated entity (1,2). However, this suggestion is
difficult to accept in cases where negation is used to affirm a factual proposition. Thus, we examined
the relative effects of factuality and negation on peoples’ ability to interpret an unfolding spoken
sentence on-line.
Here we report a visual world study investigating the time-course of language-mediated eye
movements towards objects in a scene within contexts that set up factual and counterfactual scenarios
that either did or did not include a negation operator. Linguistic contexts crossed factuality (factual vs
counterfactual) and negation (negative vs affirmative) to create four conditions, as in [1a] to [1d]. The
critical second sentence [2] in each passage was presented aurally together with a picture showing,
amongst other things, a factually consistent referent (fish) and a counterfactually consistent referent
(carrots).
[1a] If cats were vegetarians...
[1b] If cats were not carnivores...
[1c] Because cats are carnivores...
[1d] Because cats are not vegetarians...
[2] Families could/can feed their cat something special and listen to it purr happily.
Relative proportions of eye-movements to either of these referents indicated a lasting factualitydependent
bias towards the appropriate factually or counterfactually consistent referent from
1140msec prior to target word onset, e.g.“something special” in [2]. Further examination of the
timing and strength of these preferences showed that negated information is more difficult to process
than affirmative, unless it confirms our factual knowledge [1d]. However, even in a factual utterance,
negation leads to intrusion from the negated concept during language processing.
References
(1) Giora, R. 2006. Anything negatives can do affirmatives can do just as well, except for some
metaphors. Journal of Pragmatics,38,981-1014.
(2) Kaup,B. et al. 2006. Processing negated sentences with contradictory predicates: Is a door that is
not open mentally closed Journal of Pragmatics,38,1033-1050.
(3) Kaup,B. et al. In press. The experiential view of language comprehension: How is negated text
information represented
Notes
70

P18
The link between form and meaning in British Sign Language: Lexical
processing effects in semantic and phonological decisions
Robin L. Thompson, David P. Vinson, & Gabriella Vigliocco
University College London, UK
E-mail: robin.thompson@ucl.ac.uk
Signed languages exploit the visual/gestural modality to create iconic expression across a wide range
of basic conceptual structures in which the phonetic resources of the language are built up into an
analogue of a mental image. Previously, we demonstrated an advantage when there is an iconic link
between phonological form and meaning for signers of American Sign Language (ASL). While
performing a picture-word matching task signers were faster to make a decision when a specific
property of an object was represented visually in an ASL sign, providing evidence that a strong
relationship between iconic properties of a sign and features of an object/picture can aid lexical
retrieval (Thompson, Vinson, Vigliocco, submitted).
Here we ask at which level(s) of representation iconicity plays a role. Signers of British Sign
Language were asked to make either semantic judgments (object/non-object), or phonological
judgments (does the sign have straight or bent fingers). If iconicity facilitates processing at the level
of meaning only, it should affect performance in semantic decision, but not in phonological decisions
where the meaning of signs is unimportant. Subjects' response latencies were subjected to multiple
regression with iconicity entered after familiarity and age of acquisition ratings. For phonological
decisions, iconicity was a significant predictor (standardized beta = .065, t=2.135, p=.033,
rpartial=.055): more iconic signs led to slower responses. However, in the semantic condition
iconicity ratings did not predict response times (standardized beta = -.016, p>.5). The significant
effect of iconicity in the phonological condition indicates that iconicity affects processing
automatically: if meaning related properties are activated because they are iconically represented in
the form, they can render judgments on other dimensions more difficult. The lack of iconicity effects
on semantic decision can be explained in terms of lack of direct relevance between the specific
decision (object/non-object) and the iconic link being activated (i.e., that the sign for CAT is iconic of
cat’s whiskers gives no clues about whether it is an object or not). The findings are discussed in terms
of the relationship between language and imagery (including how language can be influenced by
modality, i.e., speech/sign) and more generally between language and cognition.
References
Thompson, R. L., Vinson, D. P., Vigliocco, G. (submitted).The link between form and meaning in
American Sign Language: Lexical processing effects
Notes
71

P19
Topicality and animacy interact to determine word order preferences
in Chinese
Luming Wang 1 , Matthias Schlesewsky 2 , & Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky 1
1
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany,
2 Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany
E-mail: bornke@cbs.mpg.de
Word order preferences are among the most robust phenomena in sentence comprehension. For
example, the tendency to analyse an ambiguous first argument as the subject of the sentence has been
observed in several languages including Dutch, German, Italian and Turkish. Furthermore, previous
findings from German and Turkish suggest that the “subject-preference” is independent of animacy
(Schlesewsky et al., 2000; Demiral et al., 2008).
To examine whether these properties generalise cross-linguistically, we investigated word order
preferences in Mandarin Chinese. Chinese has been described as a “topic prominent” language, in
which grammatical generalisations are better described via the notion of topic rather than subject.
This might lead to an object-preference given the right contextual setting. Furthermore, analyses of
Chinese often highlight the importance of semantics/pragmatics. Hence, features like animacy may
influence word order preferences.
These issues were investigated by means of an auditory ERP study, in which native Chinese speakers
(N=25) listened to question-answer pairs as in (1). OSV/SOV word orders are possible in Chinese
when a context is provided. We employed a context which is possible for all the conditions but favors
an OSV word order. The two preverbal arguments always differed in animacy and word order was
disambiguated by the clause-final verb.
(1) Literal translations of the Chinese conditions
Context: What about the detective
a. Detective bullet kept. (“The detective kept the bullet.”)
b. Detective bullet hit. (“The bullet hit the detective.”)
Context: What about the bullet
c. Bullet detective kept. (“The detective kept the bullet.”)
d. Bullet detective hit. (“The bullet hit the detective.”)
ERPs at the disambiguating verb showed an interaction of order and animacy. Sentences with initial
inanimate NPs (1c/d) showed an anterior negativity (450-850 ms) for SOV (1d) vs. OSV (1c). By
contrast, sentences with initial animates (1a/b) showed a somewhat less pronounced, but reversed
effect, i.e. a negativity for OSV (1b) vs. SOV (1a).
Our results suggest that the processing system strongly prefers an OSV analysis when it is supported
by animacy. In case of a conflict between animacy and word order, by contrast, the animacy cue
dominates, thus leading to an SOV-preference. However, the smaller ERP effect points to some
residual processing cost for (1a) in comparison to the optimal (1c).
We conclude that word order preferences during online sentence comprehension are crucially
influenced by language-specific characteristics.
Notes
72

P20
An exemplar-based model of thematic fit
Bram Vandekerckhove, & Dominiek Sandra
University of Antwerp, Belgium
E-mail: bram.vandekerckhove@ua.ac.be
This study presents an exemplar-based model that learns Thematic Fit between noun phrases and
verbs, i.e. the plausibility that the noun phrase is the agent or patient of the verb, from a text corpus.
Thematic Fit is one of the constraints that have been said to play a role in the resolution of the wellinvestigated
main verb / reduced relative ambiguity (MacDonald & Seidenberg, 2006). The model
presented here forms the first step in the development of an exemplar-based model of human sentence
comprehension. Exemplar-based models of language processing (Daelemans & Van den Bosch,
2005) explicitly store every language experience in memory. New linguistic tasks are solved on the
basis of similarity-based analogies with these stored experiences. The relatively recent success of
exemplar-based parsers in computational linguistics (Bod, 2006) opens up opportunities for
exemplar-based language processing as an explanatory model of human sentence processing.
We will discuss the results of ongoing simulations in which an exemplar-based learning mechanism
assigns verb-noun pairs (e.g. arrest–cop) to semantic roles. These test items were taken from a
number of Thematic Fit rating studies. The training set for the exemplar-based learner consists of
verb-noun pairs extracted from a large text corpus that has been automatically enriched with semantic
role labels. The model predicts that Relative Support for a semantic role among the exemplars in
memory that are semantically most similar to the test item (i.e. the relative frequency of that semantic
role among the nearest neighbors) correlates well with the mean participant ratings for the assignment
of the test item to that semantic role (Thematic Fit). We use dependency-based word similarity (Lin,
1998) as a measure of semantic similarity. Preliminary simulations with a smaller training set suggest
that exemplar-based generalization could indeed be a good model of human semantic role
preferences.
References
Bod, R. (2006). Exemplar-based syntax: How to get productivity from examples. The Linguistic
Review, 23, 275-290.
Daelemans, W. & Van den Bosch, A. (2005). Memory-based language processing. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lin, D. (1998). Automatic retrieval and clustering of similar words. In: Proceedings of
COLING/ACL-98 (pp. 768-774). Montreal.
MacDonald, M. C. & Seidenberg, M. S. (2006). Constraint satisfaction accounts of lexical and
sentence comprehension. In: M. J. Traxler, & M. A. Gernsbacher (Eds.), Handbook of
psycholinguistics (pp. 581-611). Amsterdam: Academic Press.
Notes
73

P21
Focus and emphasis devices modulate depth of processing as reflected in
semantic anomaly detection
Jason Bohan, Anthony J. Sanford, Kirsten Glen, Fiona Clark, & Emily Martin
University of Glasgow, UK
E-mail: j.bohan@psy.gla.ac.uk
The failure to detect that Moses is anomalous in “How many animals did Moses take on the Ark”
(Noah built the Ark), has been ascribed to shallow semantic analysis (Erickson & Matteson, 1981;
Sanford & Sturt, 2002). There is also some evidence that when a word is in linguistic focus, it is
afforded more extensive semantic processing (Bredart & Modolo, 1988; Bredart & Docquier, 1989),
but the evidence is very restricted. We present three experiments that support and extend these
findings.
Participants judged whether stories contained an anomalous word or not and reported anomalies
reported to the experimenter. In all experiments, critical words were rendered anomalous or coherent
through a manipulation of context, as in (1):
(1) (Scenario: A hijacked plane) The authorities {negotiated/communicated} with the scared
hostages and helped calm them down.
The critical word, hostages, was rendered anomalous in the context negotiated, and coherent in the
context communicated.
First, it was found that the rate of detection was higher when an anomalous word was placed within
the scope of focus in an it-cleft sentence (Experiment 1), and when attention was focussed through the
use of typographical devices such as bold or uppercase lettering (Experiments 2 and 3). This supports
earlier work. Secondly, it was shown (Experiment 2) that uppercase emphasis increased detection rate
whether the context word or the target word was emphasized, showing that shallow processing of
context words can occur. Finally, in Experiment 3 reading time data was recorded, and participants
rated how confident they were in their own judgment of whether an anomaly was present or absent.
These data was partitioned into instances of detected and undetected anomalies. Detected anomalies
were read faster when focused, but undetected anomalies were read more slowly when focussed.
Confidence was lower for undetected anomalies that were focussed. The results independently
suggest that focus controls attention deployment, and that detection/non-detection states may be on a
continuum rather than all-or-none,
References
Brédart, S., &Modolo, K. (1988). Moses strikes again: Focalization effect on a semantic illusion. Acta
Psychologica: International Journal of Psychonomics, 67, 135-144.
Erickson, T.D., & Mattson, M.E. (1981) From Words to Meaning: A Semantic Illusion. Journal of
Verbal Learning and Behaviour, 20, 540-551.
Sanford, A.J. & Sturt, P. (2002). Depth of processing in language comprehension: not noticing the
evidence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 382-386.
Notes
74

Lexical decision on German prefixed verbs: Full form and root
frequency effects
P22
Judith Heide, Luise Bartels, Antje Lorenz, & Frank Burchert
University of Potsdam, Germany
E-mail: burchert@ling.uni-potsdam.de
One possibility to determine whether a complex word’s full form and/ or its constituent morphemes
are accessed when they are processed is to test for frequency effects. While effects of surface
frequency are commonly interpreted as evidence for full listing models, root frequency effects
support parsing theories. Diverging evidence led to the development of dual route models, and
several lexical parameters have been proposed to determine which route is activated when processing
a complex word. One of these parameters is surface frequency and it is suggested that high frequent
words are processed holistically while low frequent full forms undergo morphological
(de)composition (e.g. Baayen & Dijkstra, 2003).
The aim of the present study was to investigate if and how the processing of German derived words is
influenced by the items’ root and surface frequency. Furthermore, we tested whether masked
morphological priming is equally effective for items with high and low frequent roots and full forms.
We used two sets of German ver-prefixed verbs (e.g. verarmen ~ to impoverish): In Set 1, items were
matched for root frequency and surface frequency was either high or low. In Set 2, surface frequency
was comparable but the root was either high or low frequent. 64 native speakers of German took part
in the experiment. Targets were presented together with various fillers in a visual lexical decision
task. Masked morphological priming was applied using a 66 ms prime which was either a related or
unrelated root or a related or unrelated combination of root and suffix (-en).
Response latencies revealed that both surface and root frequency influence the processing of German
ver-prefixed verbs. Items with high root or surface frequencies are processed faster than their low
frequent counterparts. To explain such a pattern, Taft (1979) suggested that root frequency effects
reflect access to the lemma level while surface frequency effects suggest how easily the stem can be
combined with its affixes. A decompositional account is supported by the fact that we found
morpheme-based priming effects. However, priming was more effective for low frequent than for
high frequent full forms, which points to dual route processing.
References
Baayen, H. & Dijkstra, T.R. (2003). Frequency effects in regular inflectional morphology: revisiting
Dutch plurals. In H. Baayen & R. Schreuder (Eds.), Morphological structure in language
processing (pp. 355-390), Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Taft, M. (1979). Recognition of affixed words and the word frequency effect. Memory & Cognition,
7, 262-272.
Notes
75

P23
Processing of regular and irregular past tense morphology in highly
proficient L2 learners of English: A self-paced reading study
Christos Pliatsikas, & Theodoros Marinis
University of Reading, UK
E-mail: c.pliatsikas@reading.ac.uk
According to dual-models of processing, e.g., Pinker (1999), processing of English past-tense
morphology involves two distinct routes: regular verbs involve the application of a rule, whereas
irregular verbs are retrieved directly from the mental lexicon.
For the processing of past-tense morphology in Second Language (L2) learners, Ullman (2001)
suggested that for the processing of regular verbs, L2 learners should rely more on memory rather
than rule application. This was recently supported in a masked priming experiment with L2 learners
of English (Silva & Clahsen, in press).
The present study investigates the processing of regularly and irregularly inflected verbs along with
regularised and irregularised verbs embedded in sentences using the self-paced reading paradigm.
Regular and irregular verbs were matched on frequency, length and neighbourhood density. 30 native
speakers of English and 60 highly proficient Greek learners of English completed this task along with
an English proficiency test. Half of the Greek participants were living in the UK and had exposure to
English in a naturalistic environment, and the other half were living in Greece and had no naturalistic
exposure to English. Participants pressed a button to read each phrase and at the end of the sentence
they had to answer a comprehension question.
All groups were equally accurate in answering the comprehension questions. Reaction Time (RT)
data at the critical segment revealed that overall native speakers had shorter RTs than L2 learners.
Irregularized verbs showed longer RTs than irregular verbs across all groups, but regularised were
slower than regulars only for L2 learners. Finally, regular verbs showed longer RTs than irregular
verbs in all three groups. This suggests that similarly to native speakers, highly proficient L2 learners
of English are capable of using combinatorial processing of morphologically complex words when
they process verbs embedded in sentences irrespectively of their exposure to the L2.
References
Pinker, S. (1999). Words and Rules: The ingredients of language. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Silva, R. & Clahsen, H. (in press): Morphologically Complex Words in L1 and L2 Processing:
Evidence from Masked Priming Experiments in English, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
Ullman, M. T. (2001): The neural basis of lexicon and grammar in first and second language: the
declarative/procedural model. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 4: 105-122.
Notes
76

P24
Lexical overlap effects on syntactic priming: Evidence against a privileged
status of verbs
Claudine N. Raffray 1 , Christoph Scheepers 1 , & Andriy Myachykov 2
1 University of Glasgow, UK, 2 University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: c.raffray@psy.gla.ac.uk
Research on PO/DO priming in production has shown enhanced priming when the verb is repeated
between prime and target (e.g., Pickering & Branigan, 1998; Branigan et al., 2000; Corley &
Scheepers, 2002). Such effects have been explained in relation to combinatorial information linked to
verbs (e.g. Pickering & Branigan, 1998). However, to date it remains unclear whether such lexical
boost effects are indeed specific to verb-repetition or whether they also occur with repetition of non-
VP-heads.
We report an experiment (60 participants, 80 items) examining the degree to which lexical overlap
effects on PO/DO priming are bound to verb repetition, and measured the contribution of verbarguments
to such effects. Using the Potter and Lombardi (1990, 1998) sentence recall paradigm,
participants were presented with PO/DO sentences for production. Following a nested pattern of
presentation and recall, participants first read aloud the target (e.g., The editor gave the critic the
manuscript), followed by the prime (e.g., The cardinal sent the envelope to the jury). They were then
prompted to verbally recall the prime followed by the target. (The reverse prompting order was
employed in 100 out of 120 fillers.) We manipulated three factors: Prime Structure (PO vs. DO),
Target Structure (PO vs. DO), and Lexical Overlap (no overlap vs. agent vs. verb vs. theme vs.
recipient overlap).
Results showed an overall tendency to repeat prime structure during target recall, exceeding chance
by 7% (ps < .01). Crucially, there was also an interaction between Lexical Overlap and amount of
structural repetition (ps < .03): both the no overlap and the agent overlap conditions produced scant
priming, whereas the verb, theme, and recipient overlap conditions elicited above-chance priming.
Contrasts with the no overlap condition revealed no effect of agent overlap (ps > .3), but reliable
effects of verb overlap, theme overlap, and recipient overlap (ps < .05); the latter three were roughly
equal in magnitude (9% priming compared to the baseline).
Hence, the verb does not enjoy a privileged status with respect to lexical overlap effects since
repetition of VP-internal arguments (theme or recipient) yields the same boost in priming. In contrast,
repeating the VP-external subject (agent) does not enhance priming. In line with Chang et al. (2006),
we argue that repeated content words serve as memory cues to the syntax of the prime. However, the
effectiveness of such cues is constrained by syntactic constituency, as lexical repetition of a VPexternal
agent does not boost PO/DO priming.
Notes
77

P25
Processing derivational and inflectional morphology in visual word
recognition
Caroline M. Whiting, Yury Shtyrov, & William D. Marslen-Wilson
MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK
E-mail: caroline.whiting@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
The role of morphological complexity during word recognition was assessed in a series of
behavioural and electrophysiological experiments. Previous research has argued for an early
decomposition stage based on the presence of morpho-orthographic cues, even in the absence of any
semantic relationship between the stem and whole form (corn-er as well as farm-er). This raises
issues about the structure of lexical representations and access to the meanings of complex forms
through visual and auditory input. This work aimed to compare processing of inflectionally and
derivationally complex forms, focusing on visual word recognition. Within the masked priming
paradigm, we found equivalent priming for complex (blink-ed, farm-er) and pseudo-complex (corner)
forms, but not for words that share form overlap (scan-dal). Using magnetoencephalography
(MEG), we examined the precise time course of morphological processing and the stages involved in
decomposing potential complexity. Source analysis using L2-minimum-norm estimates (MNE)
revealed a largely left-lateralised fronto-temporal network activated during word recognition. At the
M170, complex and pseudo-complex words could be differentiated from words containing form
overlap. Lexicality effects were found at approximately 200 ms, indicating the initiation of lexical
access. At 400 ms, pseudo-complex forms showed greater activation than complex forms in left
frontal and superior temporal regions. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that additional
processing at a post-lexical stage is required to access the appropriate meaning of incorrectly
segmented words. Our findings support recent behavioural and imaging results pointing to a
processing stage during visual word recognition that is sensitive to orthographic complexity.
Notes
78

P26
Focus alternatives and contextual domain restriction: An eye-tracking
study on the interpretation of “only”
Christina S. Kim, Christine Gunlogson, Michael K. Tanenhaus, & Jeffrey T. Runner
University of Rochester, USA
E-mail: ckim@bcs.rochester.edu
Interpreting sentences with focus-sensitive items like only requires the context to restrict the domain
of alternatives for evaluating the focused expression [1]. But what information sources do listeners
actually use Two visual world eyetracking experiments show they use both preceding linguistic
context (Exp1) and implicit conceptual knowledge about the world (Exp2).
Exp1. How does preceding discourse context affect only interpretion Participants heard a context
sentence mentioning 2 items and a target sentence mentioning a target item that was either discoursenew
or previously mentioned; the target sentence contained only or not (1). Eye movements were
tracked as they listened to the target sentence and clicked on Sue’s items in a 4-picture display.
Earlier target disambiguation was predicted when Mention or Only created an expectation that the
focused word corresponded to the target.
There was a main effect of Mention (all p

P27
Competition of visual and linguistic resources: Effects of intonational
breaks and salience on the interpretation of structurally ambiguous
sentences
Moreno I. Coco, & Frank Keller
University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: M.I.Coco@sms.ed.ac.uk
Visual world experiments have shown that speech processing and visual attention are closely
timelocked, and that both visual and linguistic information can be used for disambiguation during
utterance comprehension (e.g., Tanenhaus et al., 1995; Crocker, 2006). However, it is currently
unclear how these two sources of information interact; it is conceivable, for instance, that low-level
visual information is used rapidly, before any linguistic knowledge can be brought to bear.
Alternatively, an interactive view is possible that assumes all information sources are used
concurrently.
We present two visual world studies that address this issue by investigating the assignment of
referents in a syntactically ambiguous context. Experiment 1 tested the role of intonational breaks in
the resolution of PP attachments ambiguities in sentences such as "The girl will put the orange on the
tray in the bowl". These sentences were presented in a fully ambiguous visual context (depicting, e.g.,
an orange on the tray, a tray in the bowl, and a tray). The design crossed the number of visual
referents (one or two oranges) with the position of the intonational break, either at the NP modifier
(break after "orange") or at the PP goal modifier (break after "on the tray"). The results show that the
intonational information facilitates the resolution of the attachment ambiguity, both in the onereferent
and in the two-referent condition.
Experiment 2 tested the effect of visual saliency on ambiguity resolution. Saliency (e.g., Itti et al.,
1998) is a low-level measure of visual prominence. It can be computed automatically based on image
features such as color, intensity, and orientation. This experiment crossed the one/two referent
condition from Experiment 1 with a saliency manipulation analogous to the intonation condition:
either the NP modifier or the PP goal modifier were visually salient. A no-saliency baseline was also
included. The results show that saliency influences ambiguity resolution, though its effect differs
from that of intonation. Intonational breaks mainly influence the time course over which competing
syntactic representations are maintained, while saliency information can resolve competition by
making it possible to anticipate continuations of syntactic structure. This finding suggets a model in
which low-level visual features are used before linguistic information such as intonation is brought to
bear.
References
Crocker, P. K. M. W. (2006). The coordinated interplay of scene, utterance, and world knowledge:
Evidence from eye tracking. Cognitive Science, 30 , 481-529.
Itti, L., Koch, C., & Niebur, E. (1998). A model of saliency-based visual attention for rapid scene
analysis. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 20 , 1254-1259.
Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of
visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268, 1632-1634.
Notes
80

Event structure coordination in dialogue: Evidence from coercion
P28
Claudine N. Raffray, Martin J. Pickering, & Holly P. Branigan
University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: claudine.raffray@ed.ac.uk
Verbs such as 'begin' semantically select for event complements. Where they occur with entity nouns,
the complement undergoes semantic type coercion to the event associated with that NP (Jackendoff,
2001). The elided semantic content ('writing' in 'the author began the book') is provided by the NP
complement’s lexical representation (Pustejovsky, 1995).
We report two experiments that investigated whether speakers align abstract event structure in
dialogue. In a confederate-scripting paradigm (Branigan et al., 2000), pairs of speakers took turns to
describe unrelated pictures to each other. One speaker was a confederate who produced scripted
coerced and non-coerced Prime descriptions. We examined the form of participants' subsequent
Target descriptions. Experiment 1 involved three prime conditions: coerced NP, full-VP or [noncoerced]
event NP (1). Targets comprised a subject NP followed by a coercing verb, allowing a
coerced or full-VP (event-argument) completion (2). Results showed a reliable effect of Prime (ps <
.001); the event-NP condition was significantly different from both the coerced and full-VP
conditions (all ps < .05). Hence participants tended both to repeat syntactic structure (V NP structure)
but also semantic structure in the absence of syntactic repetition.
Experiment 2 manipulated Form (coerced vs. full-VP) and (coerced) Verb (same vs. different
between prime and target) (3, 4). The coercing verb was held constant between prime and target.
Results again showed reliable priming (ps < .001), and a significant Form x Verb interaction (ps ≤
.005). The coerced-/same and coerced-/different conditions differed significantly from each other (ps
< .05). This suggests that even if speakers choose not to make explicit the underlying predicate
('playing' in 'playing the bagpipes'), the event structure associated with that predicate nevertheless
influences the subsequent grammatical choice of their interlocutor. We discuss these findings in the
context of theories of production and dialogue.
1. Prime: The author began [the book/writing the book/the speech]
(coerced NP/full-VP/event NP)
2. Target: The guest began…[the pudding/eating the pudding]
(coerced NP/full-VP)
3. Prime: The busker enjoyed [the bagpipes/playing the bagpipes/the cigar/smoking the cigar]
(coerced NP, same verb/full-VP, same verb/coerced NP, different verb/full-VP,
different verb)
4. Target: The entertainer enjoyed…[ the piano/ playing the piano] (coerced NP/full-VP)
Notes
81

P29
Animacy affects the processing of subject/object ambiguities in the L2
Carrie Jackson 1 , & Leah Roberts 2
1 Penn State University, USA,
2 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
E-mail: cnj1@psu.edu
One debate in L2 sentence processing is whether learners can anticipate upcoming structure in the
absence of lexical/semantic information (cf. Clahsen & Felser, 2006). A previous self-paced reading
study with German L2 learners of Dutch (Havik et al., in press) found that L2 learners did not exhibit
an on-line preference for subject-first word order with subject/object ambiguities like ‘Dat is de
vrouw die de meisjes heeft/hebben gezien’ (that is the woman who has seen the girls/who the girls
have seen) although both German and Dutch native speakers do (Konieczny et al., 1997; Mak, 2001).
The present study compared 24 advanced German L2 learners of Dutch to 24 Dutch controls in a selfpaced
reading task in which the animacy of one of the NPs was manipulated, as in ‘De peuters die de
muziek hebben/heeft gehoord/beziggehouden’ (the kids who listened to the music/the music which
occupied the kids)(cf. Mak, 2001). As in Havik et al., the NPs were ambiguous until number
information on the auxiliary determined their syntactic roles. Thus, this study measured whether early
access to semantic information would bias the L2 learners to make an on-line commitment to a
particular analysis.
The reading times of the Dutch controls indicated that having an animate subject in the dispreferred
object-first word order eased the processing burden from the lexical verb (beziggehouden) onwards.
The L2 learners exhibited a similar pattern, although the animacy x word order interaction appeared
immediately at the auxiliary verb. Among L2 learners, later segments revealed only a main effect of
animacy, suggesting a semantic bias, in which they dispreferred an inanimate subject, regardless of
word order.
We conclude that (1) L2 learners can use semantic information in real-time to build syntactic
structure and (2) they can do so without early access to the lexical verb, which is particularly relevant
given that most L2 processing studies to date have relied on materials in which the lexical verb
appears early on.
References
Clahsen, H., & Felser, C. (2006). Grammatical processing in language learners. Applied
Psycholinguistics, 27(1), 3-42.
Havik, E., Roberts, L., van Hout, R., Schreuder, R., & Haverkort, M. (in press). Processing subjectobject
ambiguities in L2 Dutch. Language Learning.
Konieczny, L., Hemforth, B., Scheepers, C., & Straube, G. (1997). The role of lexical heads in
parsing: Evidence from German. Language and Cognitive Processes, 12, 307-348.
Mak, W. (2001). Processing relative clauses, effects of pragmatic, semantic and syntactic variables.
PhD, KU Nijmegen
Notes
82

P30
Capturing the productivity of the double object construction
Elizabeth E. Coppock
Stanford University, USA
E-mail: coppock@stanford.edu
Ditransitivity is productive: When a new verb with an appropriate meaning enters the English
language, it can be used ditransitively (e.g. "text me your address"). Yet there are certain verbs that
are relatively unacceptable as ditransitives, for apparently historical reasons (e.g. *"donate them
money"). If these restrictions must be memorized individually, then the learner of English must store
a great amount of detail about the usage of individual words. This paper demonstrates that verbs like
"donate" are subject to a general restriction, which obviates the need for such storage. Evidence
comes from two nonce word experiments, building on Gropen et al.’s (1989) finding that
monosyllabic nonce words like "moop" are more acceptable as ditransitives than trisyllabic ones like
"dorfinize". Several possible factors governing the productivity of the ditransitive construction are
compared:
(i) prosodic weight, measured in metrical feet rather than syllable (Grimshaw and Prince 1986,
Grimshaw 2005)
(ii) morphological complexity (e.g. Harley 2006)
(iii) the lexicon (or lexical stratum) to which a verb belongs; English speakers are hypothesized
to have one which allows ditransitives and one which does not (Grimshaw 2005).
Experiment 1 tests whether prosodic weight alone can account for the effect, and shows that it cannot.
Experiment 2 replicates Gropen et al.'s (1989) result and investigates the role of syllable count,
morphological complexity, and perceived etymology on the acceptability of ditransitive uses. The
degree to which a given nonce word is perceived as deriving from Latin was found to be the only
predictor of ditransitivity, controlling for number of syllables. This finding supports the hypothesis
that speakers classify words into two lexical strata based on their perceived etymology, and more
generally, the view that speakers do not need to store arbitrary exceptions to productive patterns.
References
Grimshaw, J. (2005). Words and Structure. CSLI Publications, Stanford.
Grimshaw, J. and Prince, A. (1986). A prosodic account of the to-dative alternation. Ms., Rutgers
University.
Gropen, J., Pinker, S., Hollander, M., Goldberg, R., and Wilson, R. (1989). The learnability and
acquisition of the dative alternation in English. Language, 65(2):203--257.
Harley, H. (2006). The bipartite structure of verbs cross-linguistically (or Why Mary can't exhibit
John her paintings). Ms., University of Arizona.
Notes
83

P31
Evidence for the prediction of modifiers during sentence processing
Manabu Arai, Frank Keller, & Vera Demberg
University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: manabu.arai@ed.ac.uk
A number of studies have shown that comprehenders anticipate upcoming material on the basis of
only part of a sentence. However, all experimental evidence for prediction to date has only dealt with
the prediction of grammatical heads and their complements (Altmann & Kamide, Cognition 1999;
Arai et al., CogPsy 2007; Staub & Clifton, JEP 2006; Van Berkum et al., JEP 2005). Here, we
address the question of whether people also predict modifiers, syntactically non-obligatory elements.
Previous work investigated discourse-based effects on the processing of modifiers (e.g., Altmann et
al., JML 1998; Spivey-Knowlton & Sedivy, Cognition 1995), but in these studies, context effects
were only observed after content words in a modifier were encountered. It is therefore impossible to
determine whether the modifier was made easier to integrate by the supportive context or whether is
was predicted and thus processed faster.
We conducted an eye-tracking reading experiment to examine whether the processing of a postnominal
relative clause is facilitated when it can be predicted. We contrasted two preceding contexts;
one introduces two referents of the same type (two eggs in (1a)) and the other one introduces only one
referent of that type (one egg and one sausage in (1b)). These two contexts were crossed with two
target conditions: In the first one (see (2a)), there was a relative clause that modified the target noun,
while in the second condition (see (2b)), there was a while-clause instead.
1a. Mary boiled an egg and Peter fried an egg.
1b. Mary boiled an egg and Peter fried a sausage.
2a. Max ate the egg which Mary boiled.
2b. Max ate the egg while Mary slept.
We observed a significant interaction between context (one or two referents) and modifier type
(relative clause or while-clause) at the word following the target noun (i.e., "which"/"while"). In the
two referent condition, "which", a relative pronoun that is consistent with a modifier prediction, was
processed faster than "while", a conjunction inconsistent with that prediction. Importantly, this was
observed in a first-pass measure (regression path time), i.e., the effect occurred before readers saw
any content words of the modifier.
This is the first demonstration of the prediction of non-argument modifiers in sentence processing.
The result has important theoretical implications, e.g., it is compatible with a surprisal-based view of
processing complexity (Hale, NAACL 2001), but not with Gibson's (Cognition 1998) notion of
prediction memory cost, which only applies to heads.
Notes
84

P32
Scrambled word recognition: Implications for position coding
Chris R. Cummins
RCEAL, University of Cambridge, UK
E-mail: crc37@cam.ac.uk
Various proposals have been made regarding 'position coding' in human visual word recognition - that
is, how the information about the positions of letters within the word is processed and exploited. Our
ability to resolve typographical errors without being conscious of them indicates that letter position
information is somewhat redundant. The so-called Scrambler effect purports to show that permuting
medial letters within a word does not impede recognition, although this is an oversimplification.
Position coding proposals (e.g. Wickelgren 1969, Whitney and Berndt 1999, Grainger and van
Heuven 2003) vary in how well they are able to explain such effects.
This paper proposes a novel methodology for evaluating these proposals, based on 'pop-out' anagram
solutions. 'Pop-out' solutions are those which are subjectively sudden. Such solutions are widespread,
especially among expert solvers (Novick and Sherman 2003), and appear to rely upon a similar
process to that underlying typo correction in skilled reading.
Using this methodology I test a number of expert anagram solvers, obtaining high rates of pop-out
solutions. The speed and reliability with which these solutions arise is shown to depend on how the
word is disarranged. These levels of disarrangement can be quantified in terms of position coding
proposals.
Broadly, Wickelgren's (1969) approach is shown to make the most reliable predictions, in that the
loss of trigrams greatly impedes solution accuracy and speed. 'Open bigram' approaches - involving
the relative position of letter pairs - do not appear to make such reliable predictions. The spatial
coding schema discussed by Davis and Bowers (2006) is also consistent with these data, and the data
may help constrain the hypotheses we make within that schema.
Notes
85

P33
Translation takes place before utterance in a reading for translation task -
evidence from two self-paced reading studies
Ya-Shyuan Jin, Robert Logie, & Martin Corley
University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: ys.jin@ed.ac.uk
In translation theories (Gerver, 1976; Seleskovitch, 1976), it is commonly assumed that a sourcelanguage
(SL) discourse has to go through stages such as comprehension and linguistic code
switching before it is rendered in a target language (TL). But there is a disagreement between two
theories on the seriality of these processes. Horizontal translation argues that translators engage in
partial reformulation in a TL during text comprehension, whereas vertical translation maintains that
reformulation only starts after comprehension is completed (de Groot, 1997). Recently, Ruiz, Paredes,
Macizo and Bajo (in press) found that translators’ reading times were longer in read-to-translate but
not in read-to-repeat conditions when the word orders were incongruent between SL and TL. This
interaction between reading purposes and word order congruency was taken as an evidence for
horizontal translation.
In this present study, we conducted two experiments in an attempt to replicate Ruiz et al.’s
congruency effect and also explore the role of working memory in the reading for translation task. In
experiment one, we recorded 24 Chinese-English late bilinguals' reading times under four conditions,
composed of congruency (congruent vs. incongruent) and reading purposes (repeat vs. translate). In
addition, we also measured their Chinese reading span. Our results seemed to support Ruiz et al.’s
argument, but did not establish a relation between working memory and reading time.
In experiment two, we used dual-task paradigm to test our hypothesis that horizontal translation and
serial digit recall might share the same working memory resource during the encoding phase.
Participants were presented with a list of digits before self-paced reading a sentence, after which they
had to serially recall the digit list and finally translate the sentence from Chinese into English. If our
hypothesis was supported, in addition to the main effects in congruency and preload, we would expect
to find an interaction. 18 Chinese-English late bilinguals’ reading times were recorded in six
conditions composing of congruency (congruent vs. incongruent) and digit preload (no load, 5 digits,
7 digits). We found an effect of congruency and preload, and the two factors interacted. Surprisingly,
the interaction showed the opposite pattern from our prediction, i.e. digit preload seemed to reduce
reading time. Our results suggest that the impact of congruency on translation does not reflect
demands on verbal working memory.
Notes
86

Evidence for determinate attachment of relative clause modifiers
P34
Matthew J. Traxler
University of California, Davis, USA
E-mail: mjtraxler@ucdavis.edu
Some parsing theories, such as the Garden-path, Construal, and Constraint-based accounts propose
that comprehenders routinely complete syntactic analysis, even for complicated structures. By
contrast, Good-Enough Parsing proposes that comprehenders routinely underspecify the syntax of
sentences and sometimes adopt syntactic analyses that are not licensed by the grammar. For example,
an unlicensed parse may occur when people interpret "baby" as the object of "washed" in (1):
(1) While Susan washed the baby slept.
An indeterminate parse may occur in sentences with an attachment ambiguity, as in (2) (Swets et al.,
in press):
(2) The daughter of the princess who wore a blue dress enjoyed the party.
Good-Enough parsing proposes that the processing advantage observed in sentences like (2),
compared to semantically disambiguated controls, is the result of readers underspecifying the
syntactic representation of (2) (but cf. Traxler et al., 1998). Good-Enough parsing proposes further
that readers adopt a determinate analysis of sentences like (2) if they are motivated by comprehension
questions that focus on the ambiguity.
Two eye-tracking experiments tested whether readers underspecify the syntactic structure of
sentences like (2). Both experiments contrasted sentences like (3a) with controls like (3b):
(3a) The brother of the mayor that was populated with young people phoned.
(3b) The brother of the mayor that was popular with young people phoned.
Pre-testing confirmed that (3a) was semantically implausible, starting at "populated", while (3b) was
plausible throughout. The adjectives in the critical position (e.g., "populated" and "popular") were
matched for length and frequency. Other control conditions were run so that readers could not
determine that the sentence would be implausible simply by assessing the selection restrictions of the
adjective.
Good-enough parsing predicts that readers should not notice the implausibility of (3a) unless
comprehension questions focus their attention on the ambiguity. If so, there should be no observable
difference in processing of sentences like (3a) and sentences like (3b).
In the first eye-tracking experiment, standard two-option comprehension questions were asked after
some, but not all, of the test and filler sentences. Eye-movements indicated substantial disruption of
processing in (3a) shortly after readers fixated the critical adjective (populated).
In the second eye-tracking experiment, the same sentences were tested, but the secondary task was
plausibility judgment. The eye-tracking results were essentially the same as Experiment 1.
So, readers did adopt a determinate syntactic analysis of sentences like (3a) and (3b) and they did so
under two secondary task conditions that did not focus on the ambiguity. Hence, the eye-movement
results likely reflect processes routinely that are routinely undertaken during reading.
87

P35
What’s in a manner of speaking Children’s sensitivity to partner specific
referential precedents
Danielle E. Matthews 1 , Elena V.M. Lieven 2 , & Michael Tomasello 2
1 University of Manchester, UK, 2 Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
E-mail: danielle.matthews@manchester.ac.uk
Do young children form ‘referential pacts’ If a person has referred to an object with a term (e.g., ‘the
horse’), will children expect this person to use this term with reference to the same object in the
future but allow others a different expression (e.g., ‘the pony’) 128 children aged 3 and 5 years cooperated
with an experimenter (E1) to move toys to new locations on a shelf. E1 established
referential terms for all toys in a warm up game (e.g. car, pony, girl). Then, either the original
partner, E1, or a new partner, E2, played a second game with the same toys. In this game, toys were
referred to with either their original terms from the warm up or with new terms (e.g. truck, horse,
lady). Reaction times were recorded from the onset of the critical referring expression to the time the
child reached into the target box to retrieve the referent (fig1). All children were significantly slower
to react to new terms than old. This difference in reaction times was significantly greater in the
original partner condition (but only the first time a new term was used, suggesting that once a
referential history has been broken children no longer expect precedents to be maintained – see fig2).
We discuss the finding that 3-year-olds show partner-specific sensitivity to referential precedents in
the context of recent cue-based explanations in the adult literature (Kronmüller & Barr, 2007;
Metzing & Brennan, 2003; Shintel & Keysar, 2007). The main developmental difference from early
childhood to adulthood is that young children have difficulty processing new terms no matter who
produces them. This suggests that referential precedents are processed with both partner specific and
partner independent expectations in mind, with older children and adults being quicker to apply
partner specific information. Analysis of children’s regular protests at the use of new terms (e.g., ‘It’s
not a tree, it’s a bush!’) further suggests that it is possible to show sensitivity to referential pacts
without understanding that different terms might be equally valid from different perspectives.
Difference in reaction time to original and new
expressions
2.5
Difference (seconds)
2
1.5
1
0.5
Original Partner
New Partner
Fig1. Coding RTs.
0
Trial 1 Trial 2 Trial 1 Trial 2
3yrs N = 62 5yrs N = 64
Fig2. Difference in RTs.
References
Kronmüller, E., & Barr, D. (2007). Perspective-free pragmatics: Broken precedents and the recoveryfrom-preeemption
hypothesis. JML, 56(3), 436-455.
Metzing, C., & Brennan, S. E. (2003). When conceptual pacts are broken: Partner-specific effects on
the comprehension of referring expressions. JML, 49, 201-213.
Shintel, H., & Keysar, B. (2007). You said it before and you'll say it again: expectations of
consistency in communication. JEP:LMC, 33(2), 357-369.
88

P36
Lexical boost effects in comprehension priming
Maria Nella Carminati, & Roger P.G. van Gompel
University of Dundee, UK
E-mail: m.n.carminati@dundee.ac.uk
Most studies on structural priming in comprehension have found priming only when the verb in prime
and target is the same, but not when it is different (Branigan et al., 2005; Traxler & Pickering, 2005;
Arai et al., 2007, but cf. Thothathiri & Snedeker, in press). This suggests that comprehension priming
is more lexically-dependent than production priming, where priming also occurs when the verb is
different. However, the precise nature of the lexical boost effect in comprehension priming is still to
be determined. In production, Pickering & Branigan (1998) have suggested that this boost is specific
to syntactic heads. In contrast, according to Chang et al.(2006), the boost is due to an explicit memory
mechanism. In the latter account, not only verbs, but also nouns (i.e. any content word) are assumed
to act as effective retrieval cues in short-term memory.
Two visual world eye-tracking studies investigated the nature of the lexical boost effect in
comprehension in order to test whether it is specific to syntactic heads, in our case, the main verb.
Experiment 1 explored whether repeating the subject noun enhanced priming in cases where the verb
was also repeated. Participants first read either a DO (The Indian will hand the politician the petition)
or a corresponding PO prime sentence. Next, they listened to an auditorily presented ditransitive
target while their eye-movements to objects in a scene were recorded. We observed clear priming
effects (as in previous studies, cf. Arai et al.). Importantly, priming was stronger when the subject was
repeated than when it was not.
Experiment 2 explored whether repeating only the subject noun, and not repeating the verb, results in
a lexical boost. There were no priming effects nor interactions. This shows that subject repetition
alone is not an effective retrieval cue leading to comprehension priming (unlike verb repetition).
This evidence is inconsistent with both Chang et al. (2006) and Pickering & Branigan (1998): subject
repetition results in a lexical boost but only if the verb is repeated. The results show that the verb (i.e.
the head) plays a central role in comprehension priming. When listeners process the target verb, they
reactivate the structure used with this verb in the prime sentence. Moreover, reactivation is facilitated
if the subject is also repeated. This suggests that structural information is associated both with the
verb and the subj + verb combination. We discuss these findings in relation to recent results obtained
in our lab investigating similar lexical boost effects in production.
Notes
89

P37
Listeners make optimal use of speaker and discourse information when
recognizing reduced forms
Susanne M. Brouwer, Holger Mitterer, & Falk Huettig
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
E-mail: susanne.brouwer@mpi.nl
In casual speech, words often differ severely from their citation form pronunciation, such that
'computer' might be pronounced as 'pjuter'. Our previous work showed that such reductions, taken
from a spontaneous speech corpus, make word recognition harder, even if presented within the
conversational turn in which they had been produced. In a series of new experiments we examined to
what extend speaker and discourse information mediates how listeners process these reductions. We
tracked participants' eye movements to four printed words on a computer screen, while they listened
to conversational turns from a casual speech corpus containing reduced forms. We displayed the
target word (e.g., computer), an "underlying" competitor phonologically similar to the unreduced
form (e.g., companion), a "surface" competitor similar to the reduced form (e.g., pupil), and a
completely unrelated distractor (e.g., holiday). The participants' task was to click on the word they
heard in the utterance. Critically, we varied the context in which the reduced forms occurred. The
reduced form was presented within the conversational turn (control condition) or with an additional
context that provided discourse and/or speaker information.
In Experiment 1, reduced forms were presented with at least 5s of preceding discourse context. We
observed that the discourse context facilitated recognition of the reduced forms and decreased the
degree of competition from phonologically similar words in comparison with the control condition.
Experiment 1, however, left open which aspect of the discourse context aided word recognition: the
pragmatic and semantic cues or speaker information. In Experiment 2, we presented the same
reductions as in Experiment 1, but now preceded by 5s of speech from the same speaker but from a
different discourse. This context hence provided speaker information but no pragmatic or semantic
cues to the intended word. The data showed that speaker information on its own facilitated word
recognition to a lesser degree than discourse context. Moreover, speaker information did not reduce
the amount of competition from phonologically similar words.
In conclusion, our eye movement data reveal that listeners make optimal use of both speaker and
discourse information while processing reduced forms. If both cues are available, listeners tend to
focus primarily on discourse information which leads to less phonological competition. If speaker
information is the only available cue, however, listeners maximize the use of bottom-up information.
Notes
90

P38
Dynamically resolving syntactic and semantic ambiguity in comprehending
spoken language: A MEG study
Guosheng Ding, Billi Randall, Barry J. Devereux, Anna Shestakova, & Lorraine K. Tyler
University of Cambridge, UK
E-mail ding@csl.psychol.cam.ac.uk
Ambiguity is a ubiquitous property of language and the question of when and how ambiguity is
resolved has generated much research in psycholinguistics. In the case of both semantic and syntactic
ambiguity, a key issue has been whether only a single reading is ever activated or whether all possible
analyses are activated and one is subsequently selected. In spite of many behavioural studies, this
issue remains contentious.
In the present study, we aimed to address this issue by using magnetoencephalography (MEG) to
determine both the time-course and brain regions involved in the processing of syntactic or semantic
ambiguity. In a previous fMRI study (Rodd et al, 2004), we found that the activity in the left posterior
middle temporal gyrus (LpMTG) for syntactic ambiguity was modulated by the strength of the
preference for one syntactic reading vs another, suggesting that subjects had constructed a single
parse which was overturned when it mismatched the subsequent input. While the fMRI study was
suggestive, it did not provide conclusive data concerning the issue of single vs multiple activated
representations since fMRI is relatively insensitive to the temporal dynamics of processing.
The present study was designed as a more direct test of the single vs multiple parse hypotheses, by
probing the moment-by-moment processing of sentences containing semantic or syntactic
ambiguities. Subjects listened to spoken sentences containing two-word phrases; these phrases were
either semantically ambiguous, semantically unambiguous, syntactically ambiguous or syntactically
unambiguous. In all sentences the two-word phrase was immediately followed by a verb which
disambiguated the ambiguous phrases (e.g. incredible muscles taste, playing cards is, burning forests
are). The verb to be was always the disambiguating verb in the syntactic condition (appearing as
either is or are).
In the present study, participants passively listened to the sentences while we recorded the activity
using MEG. MEG epochs were aligned to the onset of each of the words in the ambiguous phrase.
The distributed model of the source reconstruction implemented to localize the sources of the neural
activity. We found sensitivity to ambiguity resolution later in the sentence with peak amplitudes
occurring after the disambiguating word, suggesting that some subjects only carried out a single
parse of the sentence, which was later overturned by the subsequent disambiguating input. We will
discuss the implications of these results for models of sentence processing.
Notes
91

P39
Balance of sense probabilities affects processing: Evidence from naming
Dusica Filipović Đurđević
University of Belgrade, Serbia
E-mail: dmfilipo@f.bg.ac.yuu
Rodd and colleagues (2002) demonstrated that facilitatory lexical ambiguity effect was bound to
polysemy. They showed that an increase in number of related senses was followed by a decrease in
processing latencies. Filipović Đurđević and Kostić (2006) demonstrated that in addition to number
of senses, balance of sense probabilities also affected processing time. In a lexical decision task,
polysemous words with balanced sense probabilities took less time to process. Balance of sense
probabilities was described as redundancy of sense probability distribution. Number of senses and
redundancy were succesfully combined in a unique Information Theory measure of entropy,
demonstrating that the greater uncertainty of a word's true sense was followed by shorter reaction
time (as anticipated by Gilhooly & Logie, 1980).
In this study, in order to bring additional evidence of the effect of balance of sense probabilities, the
set of stimuli from Filipović Đurđević and Kostić study was presented in a standard naming task.
Fifty-five participants were presented with 150 polysemous Serbian nouns for which number of
senses, and sense probabilities were collected in a previous norming study. While controlling for
several psycholinguistic variables, a special attention was paid to the effect of number of senses and
redundancy (balance of sense probabilities).
Linear mixed effect regression of log reaction times, with participants as random effects, revealed
significant linear fixed effects of word length in letters, (log) lemma frequency, word familiarity, and
importantly, both number of senses and redundancy (balance of sense probabilities). On the one hand,
this finding demonstrates the effect of semantic variables on naming in a language with transparent
orthography, and on the other hand it brings additional evidence of relevance of sense probabilities in
processing polysemous words.
References:
Filipović Đurđević, D. & Kostić, A. (2006). The Balance of Sense Probabilities Affects Processing of
Polysemous Words. The 12th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for
Language Processing, Nijmegen, Netherlands: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 30
August - 1 September, 2006, 61.
Gilhooly, K.J. & Logie, R.H.(1980). Age-of-acquisition, imagery, concreteness, familiarity, and
ambiguity measures for 1,944 words. Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation, Vol. 12(4),
395-427.
Rodd, J. M., Gaskell, M. G., & Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (2002). Making sense of semantic ambiguity:
Semantic competition in lexical access. Journal of Memory and Language, 46, 245–266.
Notes
92

P40
Early visual compound constituent detection: Distinct roles for the right
and left hemisphere
Linnaea Stockall, Roberto de Almeida, Gina Cook, & Michael von Grunau
Concordia University, Canada
E-mail: linnaea.s@gmail.com
Zweig and Pylkkänen (in press) used MEG to find a significant effect of morphological complexity
peaking at ~170ms after the presentation of a visual letter string. Suffixed and prefixed words evoked
greater amplitudes than monomorphemic controls. Interestingly, Z&P found that this effect was
generated by the right hemisphere mid-fusiform gyrus for the suffixed words, and bilaterally for the
prefixed words. Z&P hypothesize that this surprising right lateralization of early lexical processing
my be due to the fact that the visual hemifield boundary roughly aligned with the stem-suffix
boundary, such that the stem would initially have been routed to right visual processing areas.
We more rigorously investigated the role of the right hemisphere in morphological constituency
detection by systematically manipulating the alignment of the visual hemifield boundary and possible
morpheme boundaries. We investigated the recognition of visual compounds by presenting them
briefly (74 ms) and centered on the screen, with the point of visual convergence falling either at the
constituent boundary (e.g., BATH+ROOM) or one character off the boundary (e.g., BATHR+OOM).
This technique allows for the early processing separation of modifier and head constituents of
bimorphemic compounds.
In Experiment 1, we compared transparent compounds (bathroom), pseudocompounds (scarcity) and
undecomposable monomorphs (straight) in a lexical decision task. We found a significant RT
advantage for transparent compounds presented with visual hemifield aligned morphological
boundaries, as compared to misaligned boundaries, a non-significant disadvantage for
pseudocompounds with aligned vs. misaligned boundaries, and a main effect of morphological
complexity. When the initial routing of visual information is supportive of the correct morphological
analysis of a word, subsequent lexical processing is facilitated, moreover, when the initial routing
encourages an incorrect parse, we observe a trend towards to a lexical garden path effect.
In Experiment 2, we used MEG to measure the neuromagnetic responses evoked by processing the
materials from exp 1. Results (N=18) show that participants exhibit a significant bilateral
M170/VWFA response, which varies in its strength in response to both the potential morphological
complexity and visual hemifield alignment of the stimuli as predicted. We thus confirm a role for the
right fusiform gyrus in early morphological constituent detection and provide support for a view in
which morphological decomposition is early and automatic(Taft & Forster, 1975).
Notes
93

P41
Implicit learning of second language structures
Anna Leonard Cook, Martin Corley, Mitsuhiko Ota, & Antonella Sorace
University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: s9901404@sms.ed.ac.uk
Contingencies between adjacent sequential elements can be used to segment continuous speech
streams, or to distinguish grammatical and ungrammatical letter strings (Reber, 1989; Saffran et al.,
1996). Introducing an intervening element reduces performance; two intervening elements prevent
learning (Cleeremans & McClelland, 1991; Newport & Aslin, 2004). Second language learners also
acquire local contingencies implicitly (Robinson, 2005; Williams, 1999), but the effect of intervening
elements has not been investigated systematically.
This paper investigates whether second language learners acquire contingencies between nonadjacent
elements. Participants were exposed to modified versions of Persian or Basque, with subjectverb
agreement as the target structure. In the Persian experiment, the subject and verb were separated
by one word. In the Basque materials there were two intervening words. Participants were exposed to
written and spoken representations of each item and written translations, followed by a sourceidentification
task where they identified the supposed speaker.
The measurement of implicit learning was based on Ellis (2005). Participants took part in a timed
grammaticality judgement task. Participants who had acquired explicit knowledge of the contingency
were eliminated from further consideration using a correction test in which they identified how to
make ungrammatical strings conform to the grammar. Two criteria were used to identify implicit
knowledge. First, as it is accessed more quickly than its explicit counterpart, it should be available
under time constraints (Bialystok, 1979). Second, it develops and is accessed as an automatic byproduct
of input processing (Cleeremans et al., 1998), so responses should become less accurate after
exposure to incorrect judgement test items making effects smaller in the second part of the test (c.f.
Don et al, 2003).
Consistent with these criteria, participants in the Persian experiment were sensitive to the test items'
grammaticality in the first part of the test but not thereafter. Thus, a subject-verb contingency could
be acquired when there was one intervening word. In contrast, when there were two intervening
words, the Basque participants showed no evidence of relevant implicit knowledge.
Participants acquired implicit knowledge of the shorter but not the longer contingency, as has been
found in the statistical learning and artificial grammar learning paradigms. This is consistent with the
interpretation that domain-general statistical mechanisms can acquire certain aspects of a second
language.
Notes
94

P42
Frontal mechanisms in language pragmatics: Evidence from older adults
processing implicitures
Dusana Dorjee Khenchen 1 , Merrill F Garrett 2 , & Elizabeth L Glisky 2
1 University of Bristol, UK, 2 University of Arizona, USA
E-mail: dusana.rybarova@bristol.ac.uk
In everyday communication, processes of language comprehension and production closely interact
with information about our intentions, world knowledge, and representations of situational context.
Integration of information from these different sources, likely mediated by frontal lobes, is important
for context-appropriate language use – language pragmatics. This study examined the role of frontal
lobes in context-free and context-dependent interpretation of standardized pragmatic inferences called
‘implicitures’ (Bach, 1994) in an aging population.
Decline in working memory and executive processes of the frontal lobes with age has been shown to
have negative impact on text comprehension abilities of older adults (Van der Linden et al., 1999;
DeBeni, Borella, & Carretti, 2007; Ferstl, 2006). There is also some evidence about age-specific
decline in comprehension of metaphors and humor (Zanini et al., 2005). But, studies investigating the
relationship between frontal function and age-related changes in processing of specific pragmatic
elements are scarce.
In this study, 27 normal older adults over the age of 65 were first tested on a battery of
neuropsychological tests assessing frontal function. Subsequently, their comprehension of
implicitures was tested in a two alternative forced choice task. Implicitures have preferred implied
interpretations - for example, presented context-free, the impliciture ‘I’ve had breakfast’ is usually
understood as referring to ‘today’s breakfast’ and not to some indefinite past event. The first
experiment tested performance of older adults on interpretation of implicitures without context. In the
second experiment, implicitures were presented in two counterbalanced context conditions, either
supporting the context free meaning or cancelling it. The relationship between participants’ frontal
scores and correct performance on impliciture comprehension was assessed in both experiments.
Results revealed a strong negative correlation between frontal scores and errors in cancelling
contexts. Neither context free nor supporting context conditions showed such effects. Based on results
of other studies using the same measures of frontal function (e.g. Glisky & Kong, 2008), we suggest
that a decline in the integration processes of working memory, rather than different executive
functions, might be responsible for the observed results. We speculate that processes of the episodic
buffer (Baddley, 2000) might play an important role in integration of information from different
sources in language pragmatics.
Notes
95

P43
The development of morphological processing in reading Chinese
Kai Yan Dustin Lau
University of Hong Kong
E-mail: dustin@graduate.hku.hk
Morphological awareness is important for the development of reading. Base on the studies of
morphological processing in reading, three processing models were proposed: the Interactive
Constituency Model (Tan & Perfetti, 1999), Taft, Liu, & Zhu’s (1999) Interactive-Activation Model
(hereafter referred to as the IAM model) and the processing model suggested by Zhou & Marslen-
Wilson (2000). The constructions of these three processing models are similar in that they all assume
a triangular relation between orthography, phonology and semantics, and that both whole-word and
decomposed processing are involved in decoding complex words. They also have similar predictions
in terms of the accuracy and latency of decoding morphologically complex words of different
frequency levels and morphological productivity. In contrast, the IAM model is the most distinctive
in (1) predicting that free morphemes facilitate word recognition, and (2) proposing a mechanism of
development based on print exposure. The aim of the current study is to verify these two distinctive
features of the IAM model. To achieve this, two steps were involved. The first step is the
establishment of a data corpus of primary school Chinese words with morphological analysis which
allows careful control of morphological properties, including word and morphemic frequencies,
boundness and productivity, of stimuli in a developmental perspective. The second step is that
children from Grade 2, 4 & 6 were recruited to read frequency-controlled bi-morphemic Chinese
words with different boundness and productivity. Results showed that significant boundness effect
and productivity effects were observed in Grade 6 which is comparable with the performance
predictions of the IAM model. Results from Grade 2 & 4 not only support the developmental
mechanism proposed by the model but also provide insightful information on the development of
boundness awareness. Theoretical and educational implications were discussed.
References
Taft, M., Liu, Y., & Zhu, X. (1999). Morphemic Processing in Reading Chinese. In J. Wang, A.
Inhoff & H.-C. Chen (Eds.), Reading Chinese Scripts: A cognitive analysis (pp. 91-114). N.J.:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Tan, L. H., & Perfetti, C. A. (1999). Phonological activation in visual identification of Chinese twocharacter
words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25(2),
382-393.
Zhou, X., & Marslen-Wilson, W. (2000). Lexical representation of compound words: Cross-linguistic
evidence. Psychologia, 43, 47-66.
Notes
96

P44
Perspective Priming in Spatial Descriptions
Elena Andonova 1 , & Kenny Coventry 2
1 University of Bremen, Germany, 2 Northumbria University UK
E-mail: eandonova@gmail.com
Variability in perspective is an important feature of spatial language. Previous findings point to the
role of a number of individual, environmental, and learning factors as a source of variability in
perspective choices and in perspective switching behavior. It remains unclear, however, to what
extent individuals’ choices can be affected by verbal perspective priming and perspective switching.
This was the goal of our study in which we used a confederate paradigm to prime choices of survey
vs. route/other perspective in descriptions of routes. A route and an environment are described from
an ‘external’ or allocentric view in a survey (S) perspective, and from an embedded, or egocentric
view in a route (R) perspective. In this study, 43 participants took turns with a confederate in
producing route directions in four blocks of four routes each in response to schematic maps. The 1st
and 3rd block were described by the confederate who followed one of four possible scripts while
participants produced responses on the 2nd and 4th block. The confederate scripts included route
directions in a spatial perspective that was either consistent (route or survey only) or inconsistent
across the two confederate blocks yielding four priming conditions based on confederates’
perspective in describing the 1st and 3rd block of stimuli (SS, RR, RS, SR). Participants’ responses
were transcribed and coded for spatial perspective as survey, route, or mixed, and the ratio of survey
perspective choices out of all valid responses was calculated. Route descriptions dominated overall
while survey descriptions averaged 28.67% on the early block and 32.74% on the later block.
Significantly, participants’ choices of spatial perspective were influenced by the perspective the
confederate used on the preceding trials – more responses in the survey perspective were produced on
the early block if the confederate had just used the survey than the route perspective (41.27% vs.
15.48%; t=2.26, p

P45
The effect of cohort competition and semantics in spoken word
recognition: An fMRI study
Jie Zhuang 1 , William D. Marslen-Wilson 2 , Billi Randall 1 , Michael A. Ford 1 ,
& Lorraine K. Tyler 1
1 University of Cambridge, UK, 2 MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK
E-mail: jzhuang@csl.psychol.cam.ac.uk
Spoken word recognition involves the activation of multiple word candidates based on the initial
speech input - the “cohort” - and selection amongst these competitors. Selection may be purely a
sensory process or it may be facilitated by other aspects of lexical representation, such as a word’s
meaning (Marslen-Wilson, 1987). Here we tested this latter hypothesis in an fMRI study by
presenting subjects with words and pseudo-words for lexical decision. In a factorial design we
manipulated (a) cohort competition (high/low competitive cohorts where there is high/low
competition amongst candidates), and (b) the word’s meaning (high/low imageability). In a previous
behavioural study (Tyler et al., 2000), we found that imageability facilitated word recognition but
only for words in high competitive cohorts. In the imaging study, we found greater activity in left
inferior parietal lobule with increased cohort competition, an imageability effect in right posterior
superior temporal gyrus (STG) and precentral gyrus, and a significant interaction between
imageability and cohort competition in left STG. In words with high competitive cohorts, high
imageability words generated stronger activity than low imageability words, whereas for words in
low competitive cohorts, there was no difference in the amount of activity generated by high or low
imageability words. These results support the behavioural data in showing that selection processes do
not rely solely on the sensory input but rather that the meaning of candidate words facilitates
discrimination between competitors.
References:
Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1987). Functional parallelism in spoken word-recognition. Cognition, 25,
71-102.
Tyler, L. K., Voice, J. K., & Moss, H. E. (2000). The interaction of meaning and sound in spoken
word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7(2), 320-326.
Notes
98

Structural priming of voice and the repetition of the phonological
verb form
P46
Andriy Myachykov 1 , Holly P. Branigan 1 , & Christoph Scheepers 2
1 University of Edinburgh, UK, 2 University of Glasgow, UK
E-mail: a.myachykov@ed.ac.uk
Research on syntactic priming in production has shown that speakers are more likely to produce a
passive rather than an active sentence after having produced a passive in a previous trial (e.g., Bock,
1986; Bock & Loebell, 1990). Priming materials in these and similar studies were either in active or
in passive voice and subsequent target responses (descriptions of transitive pictures) were accordingly
coded as active or passive. In reality target responses may show considerable additional variation. For
example, speakers may produce targets comprising the same structure as the prime, such as, (1) “The
clown is kicked by the boxer”, (2) “The clown is being kicked by the boxer” as well as sentences in
active voice: (3) “The boxer is kicking the clown” or (4) “The boxer kicked the clown”. Note that the
(finite, active) verb in target (4) does not share morphological features with the (non-finite, passive)
verb in the prime, yet it repeats the prime verb’s phonological form (“-ed”). Such phonological
repetition may be non-accidental, but independent of structural priming (cf. Cleland & Pickering,
2003).
We tested this prediction in a study that used the same design as Bock (1986). English speaking
participants read prime sentences in either active (e.g., “The student is chasing the lecturer”) or
passive (e.g., “The lecturer is being chased by the student”) voice and they later described
semantically unrelated pictures of transitive events. They were instructed to describe the target
pictures any way they wanted, using a single sentence. We coded responses for structure (active vs.
passive) and repetition of phonological verb form alone. A classical structural priming effect was
found. There was also repetition of phonological verb form, but crucially, it did not interact with
structural priming. Hence, repetition of phonological verb form occurs independently of the structural
priming effect. We conclude that active/passive priming is independent of repeated phonological
verb-features between prime and target.
Notes
99

P47
Avoiding processing cost: Differential strategies in the production of
restrictive relative clauses
Letícia M.S. Corrêa 1 , Marina A.R. Augusto 2 , Fernanda V. Miranda 1 , & Mercedes Marcilese 1
1 Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2 Estate University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
E-mail: lscorrea@puc-rio.br
This paper is concerned with the production of relative clauses (RCs). It aims at verifying the extent
to which production strategies reflect the demands of the internal processing of RCs as defined by
focus (the grammatical function of the relativized element in the RC, according to Keenan &
Comrie´s (1977) Accessibility Hierarchy) and planning condition. It relates to the connectivity
problem (Bianchi 2002) and to the depth-of-embedding theory (Ishizuka 2005). A model of RC online
computation is proposed, which takes into account two competing linguistic analyses: The Head
Raising (HRA) (Kayne 1994), which assumes that the relative head undergoes movement from inside
the RC - and the Matching Analysis (MA) (Sauerland 1998, 2003; Citko 2001), which proposes that
the head is based-generated in a CP external position. From the point of view of sentence production,
the first one would account for fully planned restrictive RCs, whereas the MA would also be
compatible with a planning situation in which the need for a restrictive modifier is noticed as the DP
is produced. Three possible RC formation strategies are considered: standard (S) (there is a gap in the
position of the relativized element in the RC and pied piping is required); gapped (G) (there is a gap
but neither pied piping nor preposition stranding) and resumptive (R) (a pronoun fills in the gap). A
production task elicited by preamble was performed by Portuguese speaking adults in two conditions
(fully planned (FP); planned on-line (OL)). They were presented to two pictures and a sentence
containing additional information about one of them in a screen. The preamble was a transitive
sentence with a missing object DP. Participants were requested to read it aloud and to continue it,
making reference to one of the pictures. 24 test trials and 56 distractors were randomly presented. In
the test trials, the two pictures were identical. Referring to the target would require creating an RC
with the additional information provided. In FP, the additional information was available from the
beginning; in OL, it was provided after the production of the preamble had started. 4 types of relatives
were elicited, varying as a function of focus – direct object, indirect object with functional
preposition; IO with lexical preposition and genitive. The dependent variables were the number of S,
G and R responses which were submitted to ANOVAs. The results are in accord to the predictions
showing that the demands of focus are enhanced in the OL condition giving rise to more non-standard
strategies.
Notes
100

P48
The grammatical class effect in the picture-word interference paradigm
Niels Janssen 1 , Alissa Melinger 2 , Bradford Z. Mahon 3 , Matthew Finkbeiner 4 ,
& Alfonso Caramazza 3
1 CNRS & Université de Provence, France, 2 Dundee University, UK,
3 Harvard University, USA, 4 Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Australia
E-mail: niels.janssen@univ-provence.fr
A common assumption in current models of language production is that lexical selection is
competitive and grammatically constrained (e.g., Levelt, 1989). Major support for this assumption
comes from the grammatical class effect in the picture-word interference paradigm reported by
Pechmann and Zerbst (2002): A distracter’s grammatical class affected picture naming latencies in a
sentence frame, but not in a bare noun naming condition. The absence of the effect in the bare noun
condition ruled out a simple semantic interpretation and suggests an effect of grammatical class per
se. However, the interpretation of this result is complicated by the fact that the manipulation of
grammatical class was confounded with distracter word imageability, and that distracter word
imageability has been shown to affect naming latencies the picture-word interference paradigm (e.g.,
Lupker, 1979). Thus, the question whether there is a grammatical class effect in the picture-word
interference paradigm remains unresolved. In order to further investigate this issue, in Experiment 1,
distracter grammatical class (nouns vs verbs) was crossed with distracter imageability (high versus
low), and pictures of common objects were named in bare noun and sentence frame contexts. Both
naming contexts revealed main effects of distracter imageability, but not of grammatical class, and no
interaction. To further investigate the discrepancy between our results and those of Pechmann and
colleagues, we attempted to replicate their main results. Surprisingly, in Experiment 2, we failed to
establish the reliability of their data. These results undermine the use of the grammatical class effect
in the PWI paradigm as supportive of the hypothesis of grammatically constrained lexical selection.
The results are consistent with the assumption that lexical selection is grammatically constrained but
not competitive (e.g., Dell, 1986).
Notes
101

P49
The effect of argument status of PP modifiers on subject-verb agreement
errors in Portuguese
Erica dos Santos Rodrigues
Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
E-mail: ericasr@puc-rio.br
It is well-established that agreement errors occur when there is a number mismatch between a head
noun and a local noun within a PP (cf. Bock & Eberhard, 1993; Harsuiker et al. 2003). Nevertheless,
the role of the argument status of PP modifiers on attraction errors is not clear. We investigated this
factor in Brazilian Portuguese speakers, by means of an error elicitation experiment in which the head
noun transitivity was manipulated. Two conditions were contrasted: (i) a condition in which the head
was a transitive deverbal noun and its modifier was an argument PP and (ii) a condition in which the
head was a non-transitive noun and its modifier was an adjunct PP. In order to increase errors
occurrence, we enlarged the modifier length by adding an adjective after the local noun. The
preposition “de” was used to link the NP and the PP modifier - see examples (A) e (B). The results
show an argumenthood effect, with more agreement errors after PP arguments than after PP adjuncts.
We explain the errors based on a language production model that incorporates a monitoring-parser
which works in parallel to the speech formulation. We analyze the plural interference of the local
noun as occurring after the NP subject has been produced. The NP subject representation would be
maintained in the working memory after its production and the verb number would be predicted based
on this representation. The predominance of errors for local nouns in PP arguments is explained as a
function of their markedness and of the way PP arguments and adjuncts are attached to the syntactic
tree. Adopting the adjunction analyses from Hornstein & Nunes (2006), arguments would necessarily
require being part of labeled structures and adjuncts may not invoke labeled structures and could be
attached to the structure simply through a concatenation procedure, being its output interpreted as a
conjunction at the Conceptual Intentional Interface. These differences could interfere in the local
noun accessibility. Assuming that elements would be more accessible in labeled structures than in
non-labeled ones, we suggest that local nouns within PP arguments would be more prone to interfere
in the verb morphophonological encoding. Therefore they would induce more agreement errors than
adjuncts, which would have a weaker accessibility.
(A) A restauração de quadros valiosos ... (PP argument)
pl. noun + adjective
“The restoration of valuable pictures …”
(B) O apartamento de cômodos pequenos... (PP adjunct)
pl. noun + adjective
“The small rooms’ apartment…”
Notes
102

P50
When hands convey the concreteness of words: Language production in
cued speech
Eva Smolka, Alberto Aviles, & Manuel Carreiras
University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
E-mail: esmolka@ull.es
Concrete words usually show a processing advantage when compared with abstract words. However,
this effect has been established only in the oral domain. This study examined whether the
concreteness of words is represented via the hand gestures that accompany the language production of
Cued Speech (CS). CS is a speechreading supplement for deaf people that represents the phonemes of
the spoken language in a visual mode. Similarly looking articulatory movements (e.g., /be/ and /pi/)
are assigned different hand shapes (consonants) and hand placements (vowels) to produce a visually
clear and unambiguous representation of the phoneme. The additional information via hands in CS
thus provides for unequivocal speechreading of phonemes.
Given that CS represents the phonemes of a spoken language, research so far has concentrated on the
phonological skills that are enhanced via CS. The present study examined whether the supplementary
hand gestures become part of the motor program in the production of CS. If the manual cues in CS do
not only represent phonemic information but also convey the semantic information of word concepts,
we may expect a concreteness effect similar to the one observed in oral languages.
We recorded the production of abstract and concrete words of high- and low-frequency in a CS
speaker. For each word, we measured both the onset of the first hand movement and the onset of the
hand shape signifying the first consonant. Results showed that the onset of the first consonant was
produced significantly faster in concrete words than in abstract words. However, word frequency did
not affect cue production. The finding of a concreteness effect in CS indicates that the motor program
of hand gestures becomes part of language representation. That is, the manual cues of CS do not only
supplement phonemic information but also convey the conceptual information of words. We discuss
the implications of these findings for models on the role of gestures in speech.
Notes
103

P51
Effects of phonological length in the processing of scrambling in Japanese
Mizuho Imada, Haruko Matsui, Edson T. Miyamoto, Inna P. Subacheva,
& Takumi Tagawa
University of Tsukuba, Japan
E-mail: etm@lingua.tsukuba.ac.jp
According to one model advocating the influence of syntactic complexity on comprehension, distance
should be measured taking into account structure (Hawkins, 1994, 2004). We argue that length effects
in OSV orders in Japanese are better captured by phonological length.
Most of Hawkins’ points can be made with a simpler metric based on phonological length (e.g.,
number of moras in Japanese) and there are various problems with his metric and the evidence
supporting it. First, the metric is not incremental as the ratio proposed can only be calculated when
the entire constituent has been read. Second, although data on an impressive range of languages are
reported, the sample for each language is small.
Third, Hawkins claims that his metric correctly predicts the word order for 95% of sentences in
Japanese collected from three novels. But it only does so when it overwhelmingly favors SOV over
OSV. An example of a counter-intuitive prediction is that SOV should be favored if the subject is
three (or more) words long regardless of the length of the object. But this does no better than ignoring
length and always predicting SOV over OSV. These points will be illustrated with counts from the
Kyoto Corpus (Kurohashi & Nagao, 1997).
We also conducted a self-paced reading experiment with native Japanese speakers using SOV and
OSV sentences where the subject is modified by constituents that are long or short phonologically,
such as soyana-tukurino isuno dezaina (‘designer of the chair with a rough built’, 10 moras) and
sensaina-kouzouno hondanano dezaina (‘designer of the bookcase with a delicate structure’, 14
moras; independent measures detected no differences in terms of plausibility, frequency or
familiarity; all Fs

Does bilingualism change native-language reading Cognate effects in
sentence context
P52
Eva Van Assche, Wouter Duyck, Robert J. Hartsuiker, & Kevin Diependaele
Ghent University, Belgium
E-mail: eva.vanassche@ugent.be
This study on bilingual language processing investigated how knowledge of a second language (L2)
influences native language (L1) sentence reading. In isolated (out-of-context) word recognition, Van
Hell and Dijkstra (2002) showed that Dutch-English cognates (words with identical meanings and
similar spellings across languages, e.g., the Dutch-English translation pair 'schip-ship') were
processed faster than noncognates by bilinguals performing a lexical decision task in their native
language. In Experiment 1 of the present study, we replicated this L1 cognate facilitation effect.
These results show that L2 lexical information influences processing in the first language and
therefore suggests language-nonselective activation of words in the bilingual lexicon. It is unclear
however, whether this finding generalizes to words in a sentence context. The language of the
sentence may be used as a cue to guide lexical access for upcoming words. This would indeed be a
very efficient strategy to speed up word recognition, because this would limit lexical search to lexical
entries of only one language.
We addressed this question by investigating for the first time cross-lingual activations in native
language sentence reading by bilinguals. The cognates and control words of Experiment 1 were
presented in the same low constraint sentence contexts (e.g. Zijn jongste zoontje wou zich al seen
PILOT/KONIJN verkleden voor carnival [His youngest son wanted to dress up as a PILOT/RABBIT
for carnival]). A sentence completion study made sure each cognate and control word was equally
(low) predictable on the basis of the sentence context. Subjects were instructed to silently read the
sentences appearing on the screen while eye movements were measured. This method allows for
normal reading and does not require intervening tasks that may disrupt the reading process. Results
show a cognate advantage on first fixation durations and gaze durations.
This study provides a very conservative test of a truly non-selective language system, because we
tested for an influence of the non-dominant L2 on the native L1. The presence of a cognate effect in
native sentence processing proves that representations of a non-dominant language get activated
strongly enough to affect word recognition in the mother tongue.
References
Van Hell, J.G., & Dijkstra, A. (2002). Foreign language knowledge can influence native language
performance in exclusively native contexts. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9, 780-789.
Notes
105

P53
Retrieval and use of components of lexical knowledge depend on
situational demands
Falk Huettig, & James M. McQueen
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
E-mail: falk.huettig@mpi.nl
Eye movements during language-mediated visual search depend on establishing matches between
information extracted from the visual display and the speech signal. Huettig and McQueen (2007)
found that these matches can be made at phonological, visual-feature and semantic levels.
Importantly, fixations were determined by the type of information in the display. When it contained
pictures, there was a tug of war among fixations determined by all three knowledge types. But when
the pictures were replaced with printed words (their names), preferential fixations were based only on
phonological matches. Eye movements thus appear to depend on situational demands: when
participants see print, they use only form-based lexical knowledge, but when they see pictures, they
also use conceptual (visual-feature and semantic) knowledge.
In two experiments we asked whether conceptual knowledge can ever be used to direct visual
attention to a printed word array. The materials in Experiment 1 were the same as in Huettig and
McQueen (2007), except that the phonological competitors were replaced with unrelated distractors.
The printed-word arrays therefore consisted of semantic and visual-feature competitors of critical
spoken words, and two unrelated distractors. We observed significant shifts in eye gaze towards the
semantic but not the visual-feature competitors. In Experiment 2 we replaced the semantic
competitors with a further set of unrelated distractors. The only match between the spoken word and
the printed words was now one involving the typical visual form of the spoken word's referent. There
was no hint of preferential fixations towards the visual competitors. This is surprising because
fixations in response to exactly the same spoken materials included looks to these visual competitors
when they were presented as pictures.
The task situation therefore appears to mediate visual-world behavior. Although participants
confronted with print arrays are encouraged to focus on form-based knowledge, they can use semantic
knowledge to direct attention when phonological matches are impossible. But they do not seem to be
able to use visual-feature knowledge to direct attention to arrays of printed words. Retrieval of
conceptual knowledge therefore appears not to be an automatic consequence of exposure to printed
words (Stolz & Besner, 1999; cf. Norris et al., 2006, with respect to spoken input). We argue that
both the retrieval of components of lexical knowledge and their use in directing visual attention
depend on the situation in which participants find themselves.
Notes
106

P54
Evidence for different processes underlying idiom comprehension in L1
and L2: An eye-tracking study
Anna Siyanova, Kathy Conklin, & Norbert Schmitt
University of Nottingham, UK
E-mail: aexas7@nottingham.ac.uk
This study investigates processing of frequently occurring idioms in a first and second language. The
meaning of an idiom is not usually literal and, therefore, cannot be understood from the meaning of
its constituent words (‘kick the bucket’ does not mean strike a pale with a foot). Because its meaning
cannot be computed, researchers have proposed that such expressions are stored holistically in the
mental lexicon. This study investigates whether there is a processing advantage for idioms over
control phrases and for idioms’ figurative uses over literal ones.
In the experiment, participants’ eye movements were monitored while reading short stories which
contained idioms used figuratively (‘a breath of fresh air’ – something new and refreshing), literally
(‘a breath of fresh air’ – breathe in some fresh air), or control phrases (‘a breath of clean air’). When
idioms were presented, the discourse context clearly biased the reader towards either the figurative or
literal meaning.
Most of the research on idiom comprehension to date has been carried out with native speakers. Very
little is known about the way nonnative speakers process idiomatic expressions on-line. Our results
showed that monolinguals made fewer and shorter fixations to idioms than to control phrases.
Monolinguals also read idioms used figuratively equally fast as idioms used literally. On the contrary,
bilingual fixation durations and fixation count for literal uses were found to be significantly shorter
and fewer than for their figurative counterparts. Further, neither of the two idiom senses was found to
be different from control phrases.
Monolingual results indicate a processing advantage for fixed expressions over novel language,
irrespectively of the intended meaning. They also suggest that literal idiom uses are not processed any
slower than figurative ones, as has been suggested in literature. Because the literal meaning, which is
completely compositional, was processed faster than the matched control, and at the same time it was
processed with the same speed as its figurative equivalent, it seems plausible to suggest that while the
figurative meaning is represented in the lexicon of a native speaker, the literal use also benefits from
this mental representation. Nonnative participants, on the other hand, appear to process idioms akin to
novel language (‘a breath of fresh air’ = ‘a breath of clean air’). Bilingual results further point to the
conclusion that, unlike native speakers, these participants may not have idioms’ figurative meanings
stored in their mental lexicon.
Notes
107

P55
Rapid effects of linguistic alignment on communication
Tanya Kraljic, Yanny Siu, & Victor S. Ferreira
University of California, San Diego, USA
E-mail: ferreira@psy.ucsd.edu
Recent research has vigorously investigated syntactic priming: The tendency for speakers to repeat
structures they previously produced or heard their interlocutors previously produce. Does syntactic
priming cause communicative benefits At least one theoretical framework suggests so: The
Interactive Alignment Model (Pickering & Garrod, 2004) claims that when a syntactic structure is
used to express features of meaning, that structure is automatically primed, facilitating re-access of
those features of meaning. This makes a simple prediction: If a conversational participant uses a
particular syntactic structure to express a meaning, they should understand a subsequent sentence
faster if it uses that same structure to express that meaning, compared to a sentence that uses a
different structure.
To test this prediction, we had subject-confederate pairs take turns describing pictures from a
computer screen so that their partners could select them from pairs shown on their own computer
screens. On prime trials, subjects described pictures to confederates; on subsequent target trials,
subjects selected pictures described by confederates. Interspersed among filler trials were two types
of critical trials: Lexical trials (to confirm procedural sensitivity), where described pictures admitted
two different labels (fishtank or aquarium), and syntactic trials, where described pictures admitted
two syntactic structures (The boxer gave [the hat] [to the boxer] or [the boxer] [the hat]). On lexical
trials, subjects heard from confederates descriptions for objects on target trials that were the same or
the opposite of a description they just gave for that same object on the preceding prime sentence. On
syntactic trials, subjects heard sentences from confederates on target trials that had the same or
different structure as they had just used for a different picture on the preceding prime sentence
(primes and targets shared verbs). Results revealed lexical priming: Subjects selected pictures 217 ms
faster when confederates used the same label subjects used compared to when confederates used
opposite labels. Critically, priming occurred on syntactic trials: Subjects selected pictures 118 ms
faster when confederates used the same structures as subjects compared to when they used opposite
structures. And so the Interactive Alignment Model prediction is confirmed: Conversational
participants comprehend sentences faster if they have the same structure as they have just used, even
when the two sentences describe different content (though with the same verb).
Notes
108

P56
Intensionality in sentence and discourse processing
Francesca Delogu 1 , & Anthony J. Sanford 2
1 University of Trento, Italy, 2 University of Glasgow, UK
E-mail: francesca.delogu@unitn.it
In this paper, we report three eyetracking experiments designed to investigate the processing of socalled
intensional transitive verbs and their role in anaphoric bridging processes. There is wide
agreement that intensional verbs like want and need take a proposition-denoting argument which is
realized in syntax through clausal complementation. However, they are natural and grammatical when
combined with a direct object, as in John wants a beer. In such cases, different analyses have been
proposed (e.g. Pustejovsky 1995; Larson 2002) that show a tendency to treat such strings as requiring
richer representations than the corresponding extensional ones. Consequently, we predicted a cost to
be elicited by strings like wanted a beer compared to drank a beer. This hypothesis was supported by
reading time patterns for the first sentence in (a), (b) and (c). In Experiments 1 and 2, first-pass and
total reading times demonstrated a cost in the verb region for intensional verbs (wanted) compared to
extensional ones (drank). In the object region (a beer), total reading times were significantly slower
following wanted than drank. In Experiment 3, first-pass times were significantly slower in the object
region following wanted than wanted to drink.
We also investigated the role of intensionality in anaphoric bridging processes. Previous work
(Haviland & Clark, 1974, Experiment 2) showed that reading times for the second sentence of (a)
were significantly slower following an intensional than an extensional context, since readers need to
draw a bridging inference in order to build a coherent text representation (e.g. “Ed got a beer!”). We
predicted that this processing cost should emerge in the regions following the definite NP, when it
becomes clear that the sentence is about the actual rather than a desire world. Surprisingly, we did not
find any clear evidence of bridging processes either in Experiment 1 or in Experiment 2 (where the
anaphoric accessibility of the indefinite NP was manipulated by introducing a relative clause).
Finally, Experiment 3 showed that the cost elicited by intensional transitive constructions did not
result from a general difficulty in integrating the second sentence, since it was independent of
whether the second sentence was an easy or a difficult continuation.
(a) Ed drank/wanted a beer after a walk. The beer was warm (Exp 1- Italian)
(b) Ed drank/wanted a beer after a walk/that was in his refrigerator. The beer was warm (Exp 2-
English)
(c) Ed wanted/wanted to drink a beer. The beer was warm./He was very thirsty. (Exp 3- Italian)
Notes
109

P57
Animacy effects in Chinese relative clauses processing
Fuyun Wu, & Elsi Kaiser
University of Southern California, USA
E-mail: fuyunwu@usc.edu
Recent corpus work on relative clauses (RC) found correlations between RC type and head noun
animacy: Subject-gapped (s-gap) RCs frequently occur with animate head nouns (1a), whereas objectgapped
(o-gap) RCs occur almost exclusively with inanimate heads (1b, e.g. Roland et al 2007, Mak
et al 2002, Pu 2007).
(1a) [the man]HEAD who _ read the book (s-gap, head=RC-subj)
(1b) [the book]HEAD that the man read _ (o-gap, head=RC-obj)
This pattern fits with the processing disadvantage observed for o-gap RCs with animate heads in
English (Traxler et al 2002, 2005) and German (Mak et al 2002, 2006).
In head-initial languages like English, s-gap RCs are easier to process than o-gaps (e.g. King & Just
1991, Traxler et al 2002, Frazier 1987). However, for Chinese head-final RCs some studies found s-
gap easier and others found o-gap easier (e.g. Hsiao & Gibson 2003, Lin & Bever 2005). We
investigated how animacy, which was not directly manipulated in previous psycholinguistic studies of
Chinese RCs, influences processing ease.
CORPUS. Our analysis of the animacy patterns in 364 transitive RCs (Chinese Treebank corpus)
corroborates findings from other languages: most s-gap RCs have animate heads (>70%); o-gap RCs
have inanimate heads (>90%). We also found an animacy distance effect: the animacy of the head
tends to contrast with the animacy of the embedded noun.
SELF-PACED READING. We conducted 3 self-paced reading studies to test whether animacy
influences processing of Chinese RCs in real-time.
Exp1 investigated s-gap RCs; Exp2 investigated o-gap RCs. In both, we manipulated the animacy
(animate/inanimate) of (i) head noun and (ii) embedded noun, resulting in 4 conditions. Exp1 shows
that in s-gap RCs (head=RCsubj, emb noun= RCobj), an animate head + an inanimate embedded
noun is processed faster than the other conditions. Exp2 shows that in o-gap RCs (head=RCobj,
embedded noun = RCsubj) inanimate head + animate embedded noun was processed fastest.
EXP.3 tested both s-gap and o-gap RCs. We manipulated (i) gap position, and (ii) animacy of head
noun and embedded noun. We focused on situations where the nouns differ in animacy (head=anim,
emb=inanim vs. head=inanim, emb=anim). RTs show effects of gap position (s-gap faster than o-
gap), animacy, and a gap position x animacy interaction.
Our findings show that animacy, as well as structural gap position, plays an important role in
influencing ease of processing of Chinese RCs and needs to be considered when assessing the
processing load imposed by s-gap vs. o-gap RCs.
Notes
110

P58
The processing of lexical and subcategorization information from newly
acquired verbs
Gunnar Jacob, & Roger P.G. van Gompel
University of Dundee, UK
E-mail: G.Jacob@dundee.ac.uk
Recent research has investigated both how people process newly acquired lexical items (e.g., Gaskell
& Dumay, 2003) and new syntactic structures (e.g., Kaschak & Glenberg, 2004). The present study
combined these approaches by investigating how readers process newly learnt verbs as well as
recently acquired subcategorization frames for those verbs, with the aim to establish whether there are
differences in how they process new words and their subcategorization frames. In a self-pacedreading
experiment, participants read learning trials such as (1a) or (1b), in which a new verb was
introduced with either a transitive (1a) or intransitive (1b) subcategorization frame.
(1a)
(1b)
The manager indushed the secretary again. Instructing people in such a pedantic way seemed
quite normal for him.
The manager indushed again. Instructing in such a pedantic way seemed quite normal for
him.
Each learning trial was immediately followed by a garden-path target sentence such as (2a) or (2b), in
which the artificial verb from the learning trial was either repeated (2a) or not repeated (2b).
(2a)
(2b)
When the teacher indushed the learners who were very motivated became furious and
confused.
When the teacher acceeded the learners who were very motivated became furious and
confused.
Research has shown that readers typically experience difficulty while reading such structures, because
they incorrectly analyse the intransitive subordinate clause (When the teacher indushed) as transitive
(e.g., Frazier & Rayner, 1982; Ferreira & Henderson, 1991). If readers make use of subcategorization
information from the newly acquired verb in the learning trial, this should affect reading difficulty for
the target sentences, making the target sentences easier after learning trial (1b) than after (1a).
Word-by-word self-paced reading results showed a main effect of verb repetition at the artificial verb,
with reading times being faster when the verb had previously been encountered in the learning trial.
However, we found no effects of transitivity or interactions between transitivity and verb repetition in
any segments.
Thus, the results suggest that single exposure to a new verb facilitates subsequent processing of that
verb, but that single exposure to subcategorization information associated with that verb is not
sufficient to facilitate subsequent processing. We conclude that lexical information from a new verb
can be acquired and used relatively quickly, whereas the acquisition of subcategorization information
of new verbs requires more exposure.
Notes
111

P59
Prosodic balance constrains argument structure interpretation in German
Petra Augurzky
Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart, Germany
E-mail: petra.augurzky@ims.uni-stuttgart.de
A central topic in prosodic research concerns the relation between prosodic phrasing and syntactic
disambiguation. Recently, prosodic phrasing has been shown to be sensitive to balancing demands
(Fodor, 2002). Until now, studies on the interplay between disambiguation and balance
predominantly focus on adjunct attachment. However, prosodic phrasing might be more tightly
related to the processing of sentential core elements (Schafer et al., 2000). Moreover, balance as an
experimental factor has often been rather vaguely defined (but see Shaked, 2007).
The present studies explored the interaction between balance and argument structure in German. First,
a sentence production experiment examined unambiguous sentences. Depending on verbal
transitivity, targets could be interpreted as two-argument- or as possessive constructions. For
satisfying balance, the accent stucture in (1) should give rise to an early boundary between the DPs in
(1), but to a late boundary following DP2 in (2) (cf. Selkirk, 2000).
(1) ... dass géstern der Fáhrer # der Ríchterin ✓gedróht / gególft hat.
... that yesterday the driver the judge threatened TR / golfed INTR has
... "that the driver threatened the judge yesterday." / "that the driver of the judge golfed
yesterday"
(2) ... dass der Fáhrer der Ríchterin # zum wiederhólten Mal gedróht / ✓gególft hat.
... that the driver the judge to-the repeated time threatened TR / golfed INTR has
... "that the driver has threatened the judge repeatedly" /"that the driver of the judge has
golfed repeatedly."
Whereas an early break is associated with a one-argument reading, a late break corresponds to a
possessive interpretation, leading to a potential tension between balance and argument structure.
Acoustic analyses revealed that, in accordance with the need to signal argument structure, a prosodic
boundary was realized early in the two-argument condition, but following DP2 in the possessive
condition. Thus, arguments seem to be planned together with their respective heads. Additionally,
balance affected phrasing: N2 duration and F0 were increased when accent structure biased toward a
late break, as in (2).
The second experiment, a reading study with globally ambiguous targets, revealed that, besides a
preference for an argument interpretation, balance affected ambiguity resolution: The number of
transitive choices was significantly decreased when accentual information biased toward an
intransitive reading.
The present results thus suggest that prosodic balance affects argument processing both in production
as well as in silent reading.
Notes
112

P60
Caught between the fields: Evidence for the neural reality of topological
distinctions in the comprehension of word order permutations
Tanja Grewe 1 , Matthias Schlesewsky 2 , & Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky 3
1 University of Applied Sciences, Idstein, Germany, 2 Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany,
3 Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
E-mail: grewe@fh-fresenius.de
Theoretical approaches to the structure of Germanic languages have long assumed a subdivision of
the clause into different “topological fields”, which correlate with distinct syntactic properties. In the
domain of sentence processing, the notion of topological fields can account for distinctions between
different types of word order permutations, e.g. the observation that object-initial orders are easier to
process when the initial object resides in the clause-initial prefield as opposed to the clause-medial
middlefield (cf. Bader & Meng, 1999). Moreover, topological fields play a central role in a recent
computational model of sentence processing (Vosse & Kempen, 2008). The aim of the present fMRI
study was to examine whether these theoretical distinctions are reflected in the functional
neuroanatomy of sentence processing. To this end, we compared object-initial and subject-initial
word orders in German in which the object was either in the prefield (OVS vs. SVO, “topicalisation”)
or the middlefield (OSV vs. SOV; “scrambling”). To ensure maximal comparability, all critical
sentences were realised as subordinate clauses embedded by “bridge verbs”, which allow both verbsecond
and verb-final complements. We observed two main results: (a) both object-initial word
orders engendered increased activation in a subregion (BA44) of the left inferior frontal gyrus
(LIFG); (b) object-initial orders involving the prefield engendered additional activation in a different
portion of the LIFG (BA45) and in left temporal regions. The first of these findings supports the
proposal that, in the domain of word order processing, BA44 is primarily responsible for the relative
ordering between arguments (e.g. Bornkessel et al., 2005; Grewe et al., 2006). More importantly for
present purposes, the second finding provides converging evidence for a neuroanatomically separable
role of the prefield and the middlefield in the processing of word order permutations. Strikingly, the
topicalised object-initial order, which is more acceptable (as supported by ratings collected in the
scanner), easier to comprehend behaviourally and more frequent, was the one to yield additional
activation. This may be due to the fact that verb-second orders are generally assumed to be derived
from an underlying verb-final order in German. The present results thus support the psychological
and neural reality of topological fields and their interaction with word order phenomena. They
thereby serve to underscore the importance of incorporating these distinctions into models of
language comprehension.
Notes
113

P61
Experiments on the role of focus triggered by different types of QUDs in
the computation of scalar implicatures
Andrea Gualmini, Luisa Meroni, & Arjen Zondervan
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
E-mail: gualmini@gmail.com
This paper provides experimental support for the claim that scalar implicatures (SIs, e.g. the inference
from some to some but not all and from or to or but not and) depend on the focus structure of the
sentence, which is in turn related to the Question Under Discussion (QUD) of the context. The
experiments show that this focus dependency of SIs extends encompasses both explicit and implicit
questions.
Recent work by Zondervan (2007) tested the predictions made by theoretical accounts by Van Rooij
(2002) and Van Kuppevelt (1996) (i.a.), that SIs only arise when the scalar term is (part of) the focus
of the sentence. Zondervan (2007) found that the percentage of SIs for or in sentences like (1), was
significantly higher when (1) followed the question (2a) than following (2b).
(1) Harry brought bread or chips.
(2a) What did Harry bring
(2b) Who brought bread or chips
This difference in SIs calculation was predicted because only in response to (2b) the scalar term (or)
was in the constituent that answered the question, and therefore had focus.
Zondervan et al. (2008) tested whether this generalization also holds for focus structures triggered by
yes/no questions. They found that for sentences like (3), containing the scalar term some, adult
speakers of English more often calculate the not all SI, when (3) is presented as an answer to (4a)
than when it follows (4b).
(3) I think some hotdogs were delivered.
(4a) Were all the hotdogs delivered
(4b) Were some hotdogs delivered
These results support the focus hypothesis, because only following (4a), some is focused. Following
(4b), the sentence as a whole is unfocused, as there is no part that provides no new information.
In the present study, we tested whether the observed results for the yes/no questions of Zondervan et
al. (2008), also emerges when the questions are implicit, though can be inferred on the basis of the
prosody. 31 adult speakers of English participated in a TVJT with sentences similar to (3), after a
story in which all the hotdogs were delivered. In one condition some was stressed (corresponding to
the focus structure (3) gets following (4b)), while in the other condition it was not stressed
(corresponding to the focus structure (3) gets following (4a)). We found that when some was not
stressed, subjects always accepted the target sentence, whereas when some was stressed the
acceptance rate dropped to 50% (32/64). These results complete the paradigm for focus dependency
of SIs: More SIs are calculated when a scalar term has focus, which can be triggered by both explicit
and implicit questions.
Notes
114

P62
The influence of conceptual structure in lexical and semantic decision on
spoken words
Barry J. Devereux, Kirsten I. Taylor, Billi Randall, Michael A. Ford, & Lorraine K. Tyler
University of Cambridge, UK
E-mail: barry@csl.psychol.cam.ac.uk
According to distributed theories of conceptual knowledge such as the Conceptual Structure Account
(CSA), concepts are represented across a network of units representing distinct semantic features,
with the processing of concepts involving patterns of activation across this distributed featural
network. Feature units differ in terms of how many concepts share that feature (i.e. sharedness) and in
terms of how likely they are to co-occur in concepts (i.e. correlation strength). Concepts also differ
with respect to these CSA variables (i.e., in the mean sharedness and correlation strength of their
features). In light of earlier studies (see Moss et al, 2007, for a review) we predicted that high mean
sharedness and high mean correlation strength would tend to facilitate conceptual processing. We
investigated this possibility in two experiments using auditorily-presented concrete concept words.
The first experiment involved lexical decision on the concept words and phonetically-valid non-word
fillers. The second task involved semantic decision; participants decided whether the concepts were
bigger than or smaller than a shoebox. We posited that the semantic task would involve deeper
conceptual processing and therefore illicit stronger effects of the CSA variables. Both experiments
utilized a correlational design, in order to use a large sample of 443 concepts (in a factorial design,
only a small subset of these could have been used). The data were analyzed with linear mixed effect
models. Predictor variables included 10 nuisance variables (phonological, lexical and semantic
variables not relevant to testing effects of conceptual structure), which were projected onto 5
orthogonal PCA components to reduce the dimensionality of the models. Mean sharedness and
correlation strength were residualized against these 10 nuisance variables, to control for potential
confounds with those variables. The results for the lexical decision experiment revealed a predicted
facilitatory effect of sharedness (p = 0.04), indicating that conceptual structure influences response
times in lexical decision, even when effects of other psycholinguistic variables are accounted for. In
semantic decision, as we predicted, there was a stronger, highly significant facilitatory effect of
sharedness (p < 0.01), indicating that concepts with relatively shared features are processed faster in
semantic decision than concepts with more distinctive features. Such findings are consistent with
evidence from previous studies and offer further support for distributed theories of conceptual
knowledge.
Notes
115

P63
Linked visual attention between speakers and listeners: Effects on the
comprehension of object descriptions
Helene Kreysa, Martin J. Pickering, Sarah L. Haywood, & John M. Henderson
University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: h.kreysa@sms.ed.ac.uk
In language production, eye movements precede object mention by about 800ms, so they contain
useful information about future speech content (cf. Griffin & Bock, 2000, PsycSci). For this reason,
gaze direction can act as a visual pointer to upcoming referents (Hanna & Brennan, 2007, JML). In
the gaze projection paradigm, we record speakers’ speech and eye-movements while they describe
objects in a photographic scene. Speech is played back to listeners along with a moving green dot
representing the speaker’s gaze; listeners mouse-click on the objects the speaker describes.
In Exp 1, listeners who saw the dot fixated objects 1880ms earlier than listeners who did not. They
were twice as likely to perform anticipatory gazes to upcoming objects (61% of trials vs. 33%), and
roughly 2 seconds faster to click on them (all p < .01). In Exp 2, we manipulated pre-task information
about what the dot represented (speaker’s gaze “during speaking” vs. “during a subsequent memory
task”), but found no top-down effect on listener eye-movements or clicks (all p > .3); mean latencies
replicated the dot condition of Exp 1. This suggests that the facilitation observed for comprehension
(click-times) is due to the visual salience of the dot, which attracts attention to the location of
upcoming objects.
We are currently conducting a stronger test of the integration of visual and auditory information by
shifting the dot forwards and backwards in time, relative to the speech stream. We expect that first
fixations will shift by the same amount, whereas click times may also be influenced by the
informativeness of the dot: the natural lag between a speaker’s gaze and mention may prove optimal
for predicting upcoming speech. On the other hand, a dot which is further ahead in time could be even
more useful, as long as the connection with the following speech can still be established. In contrast,
the informativity of a delayed dot should be reduced, leading to longer click-times.
Clearly, the dot can be used to artificially coordinate visual attention between speakers and listeners.
Following the Interactive Alignment account, this should increase coordination at other levels of
representation as well (Pickering & Garrod, 2004, BBS). Implications for language comprehension,
production, and memory will be discussed.
Notes
116

P64
ERPs study on lateralization of semantic repetition blindness
Angela K. Tzeng
Chung-Yuan Christian University, Taiwan
E-mail: angelat@cycu.edu.tw
Repetition Blindness (RB) refers to the failure to report the 2nd occurrence (C2) of a repeated item in
RSVP paradigm. RB at the perceptual level was very robust. RB was found if C1 and C2 shared
perceptual similarity (phonological or visual). On the other hand, semantic RB was not consistent in
the literature. In general, words showed very little semantic RB, whereas pictures yielded strong
semantic RB. Several hypotheses have been proposed to account for this effect, but none of them
seem to be sufficient yet. In current study, we would like to (1) include both behavioral and ERPs
data for investigation on semantic RB. (2) Both pictures and Chinese words were used as the stimuli
for comparison. And (3) split visual field paradigm (exp 3 and 4) was introduced to discuss the
possible reasons for the inconsistent result in pictures and words. Four experiments were conducted.
Exp 1 was a semantic repetition study. Both behavioral and N400 data confirmed semantic priming
effect. In Exp 2, semantic-related pictures (2A) and words (2B) were presented at the center of the
screen. The result was consistent with the literature: No RB was found in words and significant RB
was found in pictures. N400 data confirmed this finding. The N400 of C2 in pictures was not as
negative as C2 in words. In exp 3, pictures showed semantic RB in both visual fields. Semantic RB in
RVF was significantly stronger than LVF. N400 also confirmed this result with less negative
brainwave for C2 in RVF than in LVF. In exp 4, words were presented by RVF and LVF. No
semantic RB was found in either visual fields. However, N400 for C2 in RVF was more negative than
in LVF. Three main conclusions were then drawn. First of all, Semantic RB did exist with pictures.
Secondly, behavioral and N400 data were consistent. Finally, the lateralization paradigm provides the
base for the discussion of the difference in semantic RB of words and pictures.
Notes
117

P65
Processing of noncanonical sentences in German agrammatic aphasia:
Evidence from eye movements
Sandra Hanne 1 , Irina A. Sekerina 2 , Shravan Vasishth 1 , Frank Burchert 1 , & Ria De Bleser 1
1 University of Potsdam, Germany, 2 City University of New York, USA
E-mail: hanne@uni-potsdam.de
Broca aphasics are often at chance at comprehension of reversible noncanonical sentences
(Grodzinsky 1995, Burchert et al. 2003). The Trace-Deletion-Hypothesis (Grodzinsky 1995) argues
that patients erroneously assign thematic roles based on an agent-first heuristic. In an eye-tracking
study, Dickey et al. (2007) observed a mismatch between aphasics’ online sentence processing and
their offline responses: While patients exhibit normal-like online processing, they often do not
succeed in offline comprehension.
We conducted a sentence-picture-matching experiment with 8 controls and 7 German Broca aphasics.
We used German canonical SVO sentences (1) and noncanonical OVS sentences (2).
(1) Der Sohn fängt den Vater.
(2) Den Sohn fängt der Vater.
Two pictures were presented side-by-side simultaneously with the spoken sentence: the target (agent
and patient acting according to the sentence) and the foil picture (semantically reversed action).
Accuracy, reaction times and eye-movements were recorded.
For accuracy, controls were at ceiling for both conditions (SVO: 98%, OVS: 95%) while patients
were impaired for SVO (80%) and at chance for OVS (46%). Patients were twice as slow as controls
but SVO was processed faster than OVS in both groups. Controls’ eye movements reflected a
preference for the target picture from the der/den-NP region onwards in both conditions. Patients’
fixation patterns in the canonical SVO condition were very similar. When we analyzed all trials
(correct and wrong ones) for the noncanonical OVS condition, we observed a persistent preference
for the foil picture. This might suggest the application of an agent-first heuristic. Following Dickey et
al. (2007), we looked at correct trials separately and found that patients, just like controls, showed an
early preference for the target picture. This is new evidence for a dissociation between patients’
online processing and their offline performance, similar to what was recently claimed for children
(Sekerina et al. 2004).
References
Burchert, F, De Bleser, R & Sonntag, K (2003) Does morphology make the difference Agrammatic
sentence comprehension in German. Brain and Language 87, 323-342.
Dickey, MW, Choy, JJ & Thompson, CK (2007) Real-time comprehension of wh-movement in
aphasia: Evidence from eyetracking while listening. Brain and Language 100, 1-22.
Grodzinsky, Y (1995) A Restrictive Theory of Agrammatic Comprehension. Brain and Language 50,
27-51.
Sekerina, IA, Stromswold, K & Hestvik, A (2004) How do adults and children process differentially
ambiguous pronouns J. Child Lang. 31, 123-152.
Notes
118

Identifying and using function words: An eye-tracking study with
17-month-olds
P66
Jean-Remy Hochmann, & Jacques Mehler
SISSA, Trieste, Italy
E-mail: hochmann@sissa.it
In this study, we shortly exposed infants to a foreign language and assessed how they behave when
two words from that language, one frequent and one infrequent, are later associated to an object. If
frequency helps infant discover function words, we predict that they should preferentially associate
the object to the infrequent word rather than to the frequent one.
Our experiment consisted of three phases: a familiarization phase, a word-object pairing phase, and a
test phase. During familiarization we presented Italian17-month old infants with short sentences in
French, a language that they never heard. All sentences contained two frequent French determiners,
"ce" and "vos", and several infrequent content words. The stimuli were recorded by a natural speaker.
The 3 minutes of familiarization were followed by the word-object pairing phase. In this phase, a
visual object (hereafter referred as the familiar object) was presented together with a bisyllabic phrase
consisting of a determiner and a noun (e.g., "ce chat"), both taken from the familiarization corpus.
Finally, in the test, we assessed which of the two words (e.g., “ce” or “chat”) the infants associated
more strongly with the object. To this end, we simultaneously presented the familiar object and a
novel object on the computer screen and, using a Tobii eye-tracker, we observed the infants’ looking
behavior in two different conditions: the determiner condition and the noun condition.
In the determiner condition, infants heard the determiner used during the word-object pairing
associated to a novel noun (e.g., “ce met”).
In the noun condition, infants heard the noun used during the word-object pairing associated to a
novel determiner (e.g., "vos chat”).
Results show that infants attended to the familiar object in the noun condition (see Figure 2 (a) in
red), and to the novel object in the determiner condition (see Figure 2 (a) in green).
Importantly, in a control group, we removed the familiarization phase and found no preference for
either object in any of the two conditions (see Figure 2 (b)).
Our findings suggest that 17-month-old infants successfully used the available cues, i.e. high
frequency, possibly interacting with acoustical properties, to extract the two determiners in the
familiarization and were unlikely to later assign a referent object to them. This fits well with the fact
that function words (in contrast to content words) typically carry little meaning. This phenomenon,
uncovered for the first time, may form the basis of function word acquisition and use in later infancy.
Notes
119

P67
Self-monitoring in speech: Where do we stop our erroneous utterances
Ilse Tydgat 1 , Robert J. Hartsuiker 1 , & Martin J. Pickering 2
1 Ghent University, Belgium, 2 University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: Ilse.Tydgat@UGent.be
Speech self-monitoring is the set of processes by which we detect errors, stop speaking, and adjust
our speech when things go wrong. This study investigated where we stop our erroneous utterances.
One possibility is that we do this as a function of the moment of error detection (Nooteboom, 1980).
However, Levelt (1989) suggested that the interruption is rather meant to be a message from the
speaker to the listener, signalling that an internally interrupted word was an error, while a completed
word was correctly delivered. To study this issue experimentally, a similar paradigm as that of
Hartsuiker, Pickering, and de Jong (2005) was used, and 35 participants each named 1200 pictures of
coloured shapes – such as brown cube. In about 13% of the cases, a picture was rapidly replaced by a
new picture that had changed in colour (yellow cube) or shape (brown disc). Then participants were to
try to stop naming the first picture and make the repair as quickly as possible. The time interval
between both pictures was also varied, in four steps, from 400 ms to 850 ms. We found that wordinternal
interruptions – such as bro… or cu… – depended on the time of error detection, χ²=71.26,
df=3, p

P68
Learning morphemes: Insights from skilled readers
Marjolein M. Merkx 1 , Kathleen Rastle 1 , & Matthew H. Davis 2
1 Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, 2 MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK
E-mail: marjolein.merkx@rhul.ac.uk
Affix knowledge plays an important role in visual word recognition and word comprehension (e.g.
the word darkness is interpreted by splitting it into the units dark and ness). But how are orthographic
and semantic representations of affixes learned We examined this question by teaching participants
novel affixes in combination with a number of existing word stems. These novel words (e.g.
sleepnule) were presented to the participants visually and aurally before they typed each word. As no
further indication of morphological structure was given, only the use of each affix in several different
contexts and participants’ knowledge of the stems promoted the idea that these letter groups were
morphological units. Form learning was compared with semantic learning in which participants were
given definitions for the novel words. These definitions were based on a consistent meaning for each
novel affix combined with a familiar stem (e.g. sleepnule relates to ‘a participant in a study about the
effects of napping’ where the novel affix nule is defined by ‘a person that does [stem]’). Tests of
recognition memory performed two days after learning showed that participants had good explicit
knowledge of the novel words with semantic learning resulting in better stem and stem plus affix
knowledge. A segmentation task revealed that participants in both learning conditions used
knowledge of the novel affixes to segment untrained ambiguous letter strings (e.g. segmenting
barnule into bar+nule, rather than barn+ule). Furthermore, participants in the semantic learning
condition were able to generalise their affix knowledge to choose the correct meaning for new stem
plus trained novel affix words (e.g. for sailnule participants would choose ‘a person who excels in
open sea catamaran racing’ over ‘the hourly cost of learning how to navigate a yacht’) showing that
participants have acquired abstract knowledge of the meaning of these affixes. However, a speeded
lexical decision task attempting to assess online use of the novel affixes did not show strong effects of
learning. Comparing responses to nonwords containing untrained novel affixes (e.g. famlabe) with
those to nonwords containing trained novel affixes (e.g. yealnule), form learning yielded no
significant differences and semantic learning yielded only a marginal effect in error rates. This study
shows that after simple form and semantic learning, novel affixes are treated as independent
orthographic and semantic units in offline tasks, though evidence for rapid, online-segmentation is
limited.
Notes
121

P69
Syntactic category conversion causes processing costs: Evidence from
adjectival passives
Britta Stolterfoht, Helga Gese, & Claudia Maienborn
University of Tuebingen, Germany
E-mail: britta.stolterfoht@uni-tuebingen.de
In a self-paced reading study, we investigated syntactic category conversion, a very productive
grammatical process which converts a word of category A in one of category B. If you look at the
famous ambiguous sentences in (1), this kind of process has clear consequences for sentence
interpretation.
(1) Flying planes can be dangerous.
(2a) If you walk too near the runway, landing planes ...
(2b) If you’ve been trained as a pilot, landing planes ...
Tyler & Marslen-Wilson (1977) looked at the processing of sentences like (2) and found that context
triggers the conversion of the verb 'to land' to either an adjective in (2a) or a noun in (2b). But it is
still an open question whether the category conversion itself causes processing costs.
To answer this question, we investigated the processing of adjectival passives in German. It is widely
assumed that the participle (verschüttet ‘spilled’) in (3a) is converted into an adjective resulting in a
copula-adjective construction (e.g., Kratzer, 2000). No such conversion is necessary for the eventive
passive in (3b).
(3a) Die Milch war verschüttet und ...
The milk was(COPULA) spilled and
(3b) Die Milch wurde verschüttet und ...
The milk was(AUX) spilled and
(4a) Die Milch war sauer und ...
The milk was(COPULA) sour and
(4b) Die Milch wurde sauer und ...
The milk became sour and
If conversion causes processing cost, longer reading times should be found on the participle
'verschüttet' (spilled) in (3a) in comparison to (3b). To avoid wrap-up effects, the sentences continued
with a sentence coordination after the critical word. To control for effects of different lexical material
preceding the critical word, we also tested sentences with genuine adjectives like in (4), for which no
additional process is predicted. Thus we shouldn’t find any reading time difference on the adjective in
these sentences.
Our results revealed significantly longer reading times for the participle in (3a) compared to (3b). By
contrast, we found no significant difference for the sentences with adjectives.
To exclude an alternative explanation of the reading time difference in terms of frequency, we
conducted a corpus search which revealed clear frequency differences between the two syntactic
environments for both participles and genuine adjectives.
Our results demonstrate that adjectival conversion is a costly process. Furthermore this is, as far as we
know, the first psycholinguistic study that found evidence for such a conversion in processing
adjectival passives.
122

P70
Direct and indirect speech modulates depth of processing
Jason Bohan 1 , Anthony J. Sanford 1 , Sally Cochrane 1 , & Alison J.S. Sanford 2
1 University of Glasgow, UK, 2 University of Strathclyde, UK
E-mail: j.bohan@psy.gla.ac.uk
Two quite different ways in which speech may be conveyed in written discourse is through Direct (1)
and Indirect (2) Speech:
John said “I needed some nine-inch nails so I went to B&Q”.
John said he needed some nine-inch nails so he went to B&Q.
In studies of narrative style, it is considered that that direct speech is somehow more faithful to the
“facts” (Leech & Short, 2007; Semino & Short, 2004), and is more vivid and immediate, somehow
involving the reader more closely (Buhler, 1982). Despite its prominence in stylistics, there has been
little if any attempt to relate these ideas to information processing. We report a text-change detection
study in which examples like (1) and (2) were compared. Participants saw two presentations of
materials containing a sentence with direct or indirect speech. On the second presentation, 50% of the
time the verb was changed (e.g., went to B&Q walked to B&Q). Detection of changes was much
higher for the direct speech case, indicating deeper semantic processing of the verbs under this
condition.
Two explanations are considered. First, that first-person pronouns provide a lower processing load
than third person pronouns (e.g., AJS Sanford et al., 2006). This is deemed unlikely since the
sentences used here are active declarative. The second (speculative) view is based on the idea that
first person pronouns invoke a personal perspective that facilitates comprehension. Such a view fits
well with recent developments in the understanding of empathy (e.g., Decety & Lamm, 2006). Like
other aspects of style, variants of direct and indirect presentation, so central in stylistics, are ripe for
study in psycholinguistics.
References
Buhler, K. (1982). The deictic field of language and deictic words. In R. Jarvella & W. Klein (Eds.)
Speech, Place and Action: Studies in Deixis and related topics. NewYork: Wiley.
Decety, J., & Lamm, C. (2006). Human empathy through the lens of social neuroscience. The
Scientific World Journal, 6, 1146–1163.
Leech, G. & Short, M. H. (2007). Style in Fiction. London: Longman
Sanford, A J S, Sanford, A J, Filik, R. & Molle, J. (2005). Depth of lexical-semantic processing and
sentential load. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 378-396.
Semino, E. & Short, M. (2004). Corpus stylistics: Writing and thought presentation in a corpus of
English writing. Routledge: London.
Notes
123

P71
Are past-tense verbs special Evidence from a mismatch negativity study
Rachel Holland, Lisa Brindley, Kambiz Tavabi, Friedemann Pulvermüller,
Karalyn Patterson, & Yury Shtyrov
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK
E-mail: rachel.holland@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
The processing of regular and irregular past-tense verbs, by both normal and aphasic speakers, has
attracted substantial attention in recent years. Some patients with nonfluent aphasia following stroke
are especially impaired on regular past-tense forms like “played”, whether the task requires
production (e.g. Ullman et al., 1997), comprehension (e.g. Tyler et al., 2002) or even the judgement
that “played” sounds different from “play” (Bird et al., 2003). Within a dual-mechanism account of
inflectional morphology, these deficits reflect disruption to knowledge/implementation of the regular
+ed rule; but the fact that the patients are also impaired at detecting the difference in phonologically
similar but morphological unrelated pairs like “tray” and “trade” suggests an important role for the
phonological as well as the morphological characteristics of the regular past tense.
We used the MEG correlate of the mismatch negativity (MMN) to investigate the spatio-temporal
patterns of neural memory trace activation for the spoken deviant word “played” in the context of the
standard word “play”. Additional critical contrasts included phonologically matched pairs of
monomorphemic words (“tray” – “trade”), pseudowords (“kway” – “kwade”) and signal correlated
noise. This experimental design allows for full control of acoustic factors, while systematically
modulating linguistic variables.
Initial results (N=13) from young healthy controls reveal a large-amplitude MMN response to all of
the deviants listed above. This response, measured at sensors over the temporal lobe, was bilateral but
larger in the left hemisphere. There was no overall difference between the activations elicited by
“trade” relative to “tray” vs. “played” relative to “play”, although there was a tendency for the
inflected form to produce stronger laterality.
References
Bird, H.,et al. (2003). Deficits in phonology and past-tense morphology: What's the connection
Journal of Memory and Language, 48(3), 502-526.
Tyler, L. K. et al.. (2002). Dissociations in processing past tense morphology: Neuropathology and
behavioral studies. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14(1), 79-94.
Ullman, M. T. et al. (1997). A neural dissociation within language: Evidence that the mental
dictionary is part of declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the
procedural system. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9(2), 266-276.
Notes
124

P72
Processing of determiners: Task differences in the ‘visual world’ paradigm
Jelena Mirkovic, Danijela Trenkic, & Gerry T.M. Altmann
University of York UK
E-mail: j.mirkovic@psych.york.ac.uk
In a typical visual world study (VW) participants view a scene and listen to speech containing
reference to it, while their eye movements are monitored. There are 3 task variants within the
paradigm: participants are instructed to either a) manipulate physical objects they are presented with
(Tanenhaus et al. 1995); or b) interact with objects presented on a computer screen using a mouse
(Allopenna et al. 1998); or c) listen to descriptions of pictures presented on a computer screen and
answer questions about them (Altmann & Kamide, 1999). Each of the tasks has contributed major
insights into the time-course of spoken language processing, from isolated words to discourse.
However, there has been little systematic research into how these different tasks influence the
findings. Are all VW tasks equally suited to address all time-course questions, about all linguistic
variables
We compared the 3 tasks in a study investigating how linguistic and pragmatic affordances interact in
reference resolution. In Experiment 1 participants heard sentences that manipulated the definiteness
of the target noun phrase, e.g. “The pirate will put the cube inside the/a can”. Definite noun phrases
require their referents to be uniquely identifiable, while referential indefinites are used when more
than one referents of the same description are available. Participants saw pictures containing, among
other objects, 2 open cans (2 referent condition) or 2 cans only one of which was open (1 referent
condition). They were instructed to click on the place where the theme object was going to end
(“clicking task”). Interaction between grammatical information (the definiteness of the noun phrase)
and pragmatic affordances (the number of compatible referents) was found: in the 1 referent
condition, reference resolution occurred sooner when the NP was definite and in the 2 referent
condition when the NP was indefinite. These findings replicated the findings originally obtained
using the object manipulation task by Chambers et al. (2002), which served as the starting point for
our study.
In Experiment 2 participants viewed the same scene and heard the same sentences as in Experiment 1,
but were instructed just to listen to the sentences and relate them to the pictures (“look’n’listen task”).
The findings were replicated for the 1 referent condition but not for the 2 referent condition.
The implications of the task differences for the time-course of processing of linguistic information at
different granularities will be discussed.
Notes
125

P73
Integrating statistics from the world and from language to learn semantic
representations
Mark W. Andrews, Gabriella Vigliocco, & David P. Vinson
University College London, UK
E-mail: m.andrews@ucl.ac.uk
Statistical data from the world, perceived as sensory-motor data, and the distributional statistics of
language represent two distinct data-types from which we can learn semantic representations. In
previous literature, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that semantic representations can be learned
from either sensory-motor based statistics alone, e.g. McRae, deSa and Seidenberg (1997), Vigliocco,
Vinson, Lewis and Garrett (2004), McClelland and Rogers (2003), or from language based statistics
alone, e.g. Lund and Burgess (1996), Landauer and Dumais (1997), Griffiths, Steyvers and
Tenenbaum (2007). However, for the most part throughout this literature, the contribution of any one
of these data types had been considered independently and to the exclusion of the other. The objective
of this work is to describe the extent to which the information available from these two sources
represent two complementary data-types and how semantic representations can be formed from their
combination. Using a data-set of speaker-generated feature norms to represent sensory-motor
statistical data, and using the British National Corpus as a sample of text, we provide a set of
Bayesian probabilistic models that learn semantic representations from either sensory-motor data
alone, language data alone, or from both in combination. From this, we demonstrate how the semantic
representations that are learned from sensory-motor data and language data are of a qualitatively
distinct nature. Moreover, we also demonstrate that the semantic representations learned from both
data-types in combination are richer and more comprehensive than could be learned from either
source alone. We show that this result is not simply from summing, or averaging, together two datasets.
Nor is it simply the result of using a quantitatively larger training data-set. By comparing the
semantic-representations learned by these models to human-based data (e.g. word-association norms,
lexical-substitution errors, semantic priming and picture-word interference data) we show that
representations learned by combining sensory-motor and language based statistical data most
accurately reflect human semantic representations. Finally, we conclude by showing that combining
these two complementary data-sets permits better generalization of the semantic knowledge acquired
from statistical data, that it facilitates the acquisition of new lexical items and that its grounds in the
sensory-motor realm otherwise abstract or encyclopedic knowledge.
Notes
126

P74
Bridging the gap between linguistics and psycholinguistics: The case of
anaphora
Arnout W. Koornneef, Frank Wijnen, & Eric Reuland
UIL-OTS Institute, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
E-mail: Arnout.Koornneef@let.uu.nl
Syntactic restrictions on the use of different anaphoric expressions have traditionally been described
through Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981). However, the Primitives of Binding (POB) model
(Reuland, 2001) is a better linguistic descriptor of grammaticality patterns of anaphoric dependencies.
The main feature of the POB model is an economy hierarchy that governs the division of labor
between syntax, semantics and discourse: syntactic processes are more economic than semantic
processes and, similarly, semantic processes are more economic than discourse process.
We will present the results of three eye-tracking experiments that are consistent with this economy
hierarchy. In Experiment 1, the Dutch reflexive zich (himself/herself) was placed in two different
syntactic structures. In one condition zich was a ‘coargument reflexive’ and could only be resolved in
the syntactic module, whereas in the other condition zich was a ‘logophor’ and could only be
interpreted extra-syntactically. The results showed that readers spent more time reading a logophor
(i.e. syntax < semantics/discourse).
In Experiment 2, we compared semantic and discourse anaphoric dependencies. The results showed a
processing advantage for pronouns that depended on c-commanding antecedents for their
interpretation. Since semantic dependencies can only emerge if an antecedent c-commands the
anaphoric element, this finding suggests that semantic dependencies are indeed more economic than
discourse dependencies.
In Experiment 3, we examined whether there is a preference for a semantic dependency when a
sentence is ambiguous between a semantic or discourse interpretation. For example, in (1) Oscar is
either thinking about his own abilities as a cook (semantic), or about Alfred’s abilities as a cook
(discourse).
(1) Alfred thinks that he is good cook, but Oscar doesn’t.
Dutch versions of (1) were placed within a context that was highly biased towards either a semantic
or a discourse interpretation. As predicted by the economy hierarchy, various first and second pass
reading times suggested a strong preference for semantic dependencies: readers initially construct a
semantic interpretation, independent of the context.
Our results show that the POB model presents a promising new way to look at the structural
constraints underlying anaphora resolution and, moreover, we deem the attempts to incorporate
Chomsky’s Principles into a real-time processing architecture obsolete.
References
Chomsky (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris
Reuland (2001). Primitives of binding. Linguistic Inquiry, 32, 439-492
Notes
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P75
Diurnal variations in language performance
Jessica Rosenberg 1 , Kathrin Pusch 1 , Rainer Dietrich 1 , & Christian Cajochen 2
1 Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, 2 Centre for Chronobiology, Basel, Switzerland
E-mail: jessica.rosenberg@charite.de
Although circadian rhythms are well characterized on a physiological level, little is known about the
circadian oscillation of higher cognitive activities. Especially, the present study investigated circadian
modulations of language performance.
The circadian master oscillator emits signals that trigger organ-specific oscillators and therefore
constitutes a basic biological process which enables organisms to anticipate to daily environmental
changes by adjusting behaviour, physiology and gene regulation. A small number of studies,
investigating the idea of an diurnal variation in language performance, reported contradictory results.
Importantly, the “time-of-day design” these few studies have been using is flawed because it cannot
eliminate masking effects on an internally generated circadian variation in language performance. A
constant-routine design on the other is better suited to control external and internal factors (Blatter &
Cajochen, 2007).
Therefore, the present study was conducted under constant routine conditions. We addressed the
question of circadian variation in language performance at the level of minimal syntactic processing
with a focus on gender agreement. Participants performed syntactic decisions on German noun
phrases.
The results replicated the expected Gender Congruency Effect (Friederici & Jacobsen, 1999), namely
that an incongruent gender marking of a determiner slows down the processing of the following noun
relative to a congruent marking. Concerning diurnal variations of this task, language performance
displays an internally generated circadian rhythm. In particular, language processing was slower
during the night with a nadir in the early morning. Furthermore, language accuracy was more errorprone
during the night.
Additionally, tests of general attention and sensori-motor performance were embedded in the constant
routine protocol. Here, participant’s performance slowed down during the night as well but
interestingly, language performance featured some distinct modulations. Importantly, the results
cannot just be explained by an increase of sleepiness or a decrease of general attention.
References
Blatter, K., & Cajochen, C. (2007). Circadian rhythms in cognitive performance: methodological
constraints, protocols, theoretical underpinnings. Physiology & Behaviour, 90, 196-208.
Friederici, A. D., & Jacobsen, T. (1999). Processing grammatical gender during language
comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 28, 467-484.
Notes
128

P76
Higher order inference in verb argument structure acquisition
Elizabeth Wonnacott 1 , Amy Perfors 2 , & Joshua B. Tenenhaum 2
1 University of Oxford, UK, 2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
E-mail: elizabeth.wonnacott@psy.ox.ac.uk
Successful language learning combines generalization and the acquisition of lexical constraints. The
conflict is particularly clear for verb argument structures, as certain verbs resist generalization (*he
carried her the ball). Wonnacott, Newport & Tanenhaus (WNT) 2008 demonstrated that learners
could acquire verb-based constraints in artificial languages with no semantic (or other) cues.
Participants showed signature statistical learning effects in real-time processing and frequency-based
entrenchment. However the tendency to generalize a verb to an alternative structure was also affected
by higher level distributional information: the extent to which verbs across the language alternated
between structures. Although this level of learning has not previously been considered, abstracting
inferences about feature variability has proved important in other domains, and is the focus of recent
computational research (Kemp, Perfors & Tenebaum (KPT) 2007). The current work explores the
learning of constraints on structure variability both experimentally and computationally.
Two new artificial languages were created in order to replicate and extend a critical WNT
experiment. Both had two synonymous argument structures (VSO and VOS-Particle) and 8 verbs. In
Language1 4 verbs occurred only in VSO and 4 occurred only in VOS-Particle. In Language2 all
verbs occurred in both constructions. A 2 day learning procedure was used, with production tests after
both sessions. In one test, learners produced sentences with ‘new’ verbs which had been introduced in
sentences presented just prior to the test. Within these pre-test sentences, each verb had been heard 4
times, and always in the same sentence structure. Replicating WNT, learners with different linguistic
backgrounds differed greatly in their use of this small amount of lexically consistent information:
Language1 learners produced the verbs in structure in which they had occurred in the 4 sentences;
Language2 learners generalized across both structures. In this experiment we also examined
individual patterns of production with *entirely* novel verbs. Again, we saw an influence of higher
level learning: Language1 learners tended to randomly assign a structure to a particular verb and use
it consistently (across both days) while Language 2 learners showed variable usage. This is strong
evidence that learners made the correct higher-order inferences. We demonstrate that these data are
consistent with a hierarchical Bayesian model, originally developed by KPT to capture the emergence
of feature biases in word learning.
Notes
129

P77
Of blue bottles and blue flowers: Phonological representations of L1 are
active when producing words in L2
Katharina Spalek 1 , & Markus F. Damian 2
1 Humboldt University Berlin, Germany, 2 University of Bristol, UK
E-mail: katharina.spalek@staff.hu-berlin.de
Studies of monolingual speakers show phonological priming within an adjective noun phrase when
both constituents start with the same phoneme (e.g., Damian & Dumay, 2007), that is, “blue bottle”
and “green glass” are produced faster than “green bottle” and “blue glass”. In the present study, the
paradigm was used to investigate the extent to which speakers’ native language is active when they
speak a foreign language. In this bilingual version, a group of L2 speakers of English whose native
language was German named coloured line drawings with adjective and noun. Two types of adjective
noun phrases were used: 1. adjective and noun were related in the target language (e.g., “blue
bottle”); 2. adjective and noun were related in the speakers’ native language (e.g., “blue flower” =
“blaue Blume”). We replicated the monolingual priming effect, that is, faster reaction times for
overlapping noun and adjective onset. This 20-ms effect was slightly less reliable than for native
speakers and it correlated negatively with the age at which L2 was learnt.
More interestingly, we found a reverse effect for phrases like “blue flower”: Participants were
significantly slower (by 26 ms) to produce phrases like “blue flower” than “green flower”. A
phonological effect of the language that is not spoken, shows that the phonological representation of
the native language translation is always co-activated. This finding is in line with earlier studies like
Colomé (2001). We assume that the effect is inhibitory, because, in the case of “blaue Blume”,
phonological overlap primes the underlying German representation, making it harder to reject in
favour of the target language than the unprimed phrase “grüne Blume” (“green flower”). Further
experiments currently explore whether phonological overlap in both language will reduce the priming
in the target language (caused by an interaction of target language priming and native language
inhibition) or whether it will lead to “hyper”-priming of the target phrase.
We argue that the present paradigm is a welcome extension to existing paradigms in the field of
bilingual speech production.
References
Colomé, À. (2001). Lexical activation in bilinguals’ speech production: Language-specific or
language-independent Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 721-736.
Damian, M. F. & Dumay, N. (2007). Time pressure and phonological advance planning in spoken
production. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 195-209.
Notes
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P78
Processing overt and zero pronouns in Mandarin Chinese
Georgina Allured, Kathy Conklin, & Walter J.B. van Heuven
University of Nottingham, UK
E-mail: kathy.conklin@nottingham.ac.uk
Most work in the area of anaphor resolution has been done on English. Recent work indicates that
despite linguistic differences between English and Mandarin, order of mention and ambiguity show a
similar processing pattern. Mandarin also makes use of zero pronouns. Using a measure of whole
sentence reading time, Yang et al. (1999) found that in ambiguous sentences there was no effect of
zero vs. overt pronouns in either the first or second mention conditions.
Two experiments further explored these basic findings using a region-by-region moving window
paradigm to give a more fine grained measure of the processing effort required in pronoun resolution.
We presented sentences from Yang et al. using simplified Chinese characters in regions, indicated by
slash marks below. The first sentence introduced two characters having the same gender (ambiguous
condition) or different genders (unambiguous condition). The second sentence began with a pronoun
in the overt condition or verb in the zero pronoun condition. The zero and overt pronouns either
referred to the first or second mentioned entity from the previous sentence.
Similar to Yang et al. and the literature on English, Exp. 1 indicates that overt pronouns, in
unambiguous contexts where they provide a gender agreement cue, are processed quickly in both first
and second mention conditions. However, processing is significantly slower in ambiguous contexts in
regions |2-3| when referring to a second rather than a first mentioned entity. Exp. 2 looked at the
processing of zero and overt pronouns referring to first and second mentioned entities in ambiguous
contexts. In contrast to Yang et al.'s Exp. 3, our results indicate that when referring to a first
mentioned entity contexts with zero pronouns require significantly more processing time at region |2|.
When referring to a second mentioned entity, contexts with zero pronouns require significantly more
processing time in regions |2-3|. These findings indicate that in ambiguous sentences in both the first
and second mention conditions overt pronouns provide a better cue than zero pronouns for
determining an antecedent. The results will be discussed in terms of a model of anaphoric reference in
discourse processing.
| 大 雄 | 见 到 | 宋 华 在 百 货 公 司 旁 边 摆 地 摊 .
DaXiong (male) saw SongHua (male) selling things on the street in front of a store.
|1| 她 /Ø |2| 没 想 到 会 有 |3| 同 学 去 摆 地 摊 .
He didn't realize that his classmate sells things on the street.
References
Yang, Gordon, Hendrick, & Wu. (1999). Comprehension of referring expressions in Chinese.
Language and Cognitive processes, 14, 715-7
Notes
131

P79
Lexical and sublexical morphological influences in visual word recognition
Kevin Diependaele 1 , Dominiek Sandra 2 , & Jonathan Grainger 3
1 Ghent University, Belgium, 2 University of Antwerp, Belgium, 3 CNRS & Université de Provence, France
E-mail: kevin.diependaele@ugent.be
Several recent priming studies propound that morphemic representations are activated early on during
visual processing, regardless of lexical variables such as semantic transparency and familiarity. They
show that with sufficiently short prime durations, lexical decision latencies for free stems are
facilitated to an equal extent following transparent, opaque as well as unfamiliar suffixed primes (e.g.,
Longtin & Meunier, 2005). The presence of a suffix appears to be critical in this, since non-suffixed
form primes induce less facilitation.
In order to gain further insight in these effects, we compared lexical decisions for stems following
transparent prefixed primes (rename-name), opaque prefixed primes (remain-main) and non-prefixed
primes (entail-tail) in Dutch. Primes were masked and presented for 67ms. We consistently observed
larger facilitation with opaque primes than with non-prefixed primes, indicating that affixes in general
mediate sublexical stem processing, regardless of their relative position. With mixed visual and
auditory lexical decision we found no effects of semantic transparency. However, transparent primes
did induce larger priming effects in pure visual lexical decision. Since this difference is likely due to
enhanced visual attention in a pure visual context, lexical influences on morpheme processing seem to
require more extensive processing. Furthermore, our data question the strict interdependence between
lexical and sublexical influences, since sublexical stem processing even became more evident in the
presence of a transparency effect.
Our second series of experiments (with 40 and 50ms primes) showed that familiar Dutch bimorphemic
compounds facilitated lexical decisions for their constituents to the same degree as
unfamiliar compounds (bookshop-book vs. bookroad-book and bookshop-shop vs. barnshop-shop).
We nevertheless found a small but reliable advantage with familiar compounds when we removed the
bigram at the morpheme boundary (boo__hop-book vs. boo__oad-book and boo__hop-shop vs.
bar__hop-shop). We propose that in visual masked priming lexical influences only require a wholeword
form representation of the prime to become sufficiently active relative to other lexical form
activations. With degraded primes like boo__hop this relative activation level can be attained more
rapidly since the competing lexical form representations will be activated to a lesser degree.
References
Longtin, C.-M. & Meunier, F. (2005). Morphological decomposition in early visual word processing.
Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 26–41.
Notes
132

P80
Shared syntactic information in German-English bilinguals: An fMRI
repetition suppression study
Kirsten M. Weber, & Peter Indefrey
F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
E-mail: Kirsten.Weber@fcdonders.ru.nl
A longstanding question in bilingualism is whether syntactic information is shared between the two
language processing systems. We used an fMRI repetition suppression paradigm (Noppeney & Price,
2004) to investigate syntactic priming (Bock, 1986: Schoonbaert, Hartsuiker, Pickering, 2007) in
reading comprehension in German-English late-acquisition bilinguals. In comparison to conventional
subtraction analyses in bilingual experiments, repetition suppression has the advantage of being able
to detect neuronal populations that are sensitive to properties that are shared by consecutive stimuli.
In this case, we manipulated the syntactic structure between prime and target sentences. A sentence
with a passive sentence structure in English was preceded either by a passive or by an active sentence
in English or German. We looked for repetition suppression effects in left inferior frontal and left
middle temporal regions of interest. These regions were defined by a contrast of all non-target
sentences in German and English versus the baseline of sentence-format consonant strings. We found
decreases in activity (repetition suppression effects) in these regions of interest following the
repetition of syntactic structure from the first to the second language and within the second language.
Moreover, a separate behavioural experiment using a word-by-word reading paradigm similar to the
fMRI experiment showed faster reading times for primed compared to unprimed English target
sentences regardless of whether they were preceded by an English or a German sentence of the same
structure.
We conclude that there is some interaction between the language processing systems and that at least
some syntactic information is shared between a bilingual’s languages.
References
Bock, K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production Cognitive Psychology, 18(3), 355-387.
Noppeney, U., & Price, C. J. (2004). An fMRI study of syntactic adaptation. Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience, 16(4), 702-713.
Schoonbaert, S., Hartsuiker, R. J., & Pickering, M. J. (2007). The representation of lexical and
syntactic information in bilinguals: Evidence from syntactic priming. Journal of Memory and
Language, 56(2), 153-171.
Notes
133

P81
When cat competes with dog but not with perro: Evidence from the
semantic competitor paradigm
Yolanda Garcia Castro 1 , Kristof Strijkers 1 , Albert M. Costa 1 , & Xavier Alario 2
1 Universidad de Barcelona, Spain, 2 Université de Provence, France
E-mail: Kristof_Strijkers@hotmail.com
Bilinguals are quite efficient in keeping their two languages separate during speech. This raises the
question whether words between the two languages compete for selection or whether only words in
the target language are considered for production. In the present study we investigated this issue
making use of an interesting and new paradigm, the semantic competitor paradigm. With this
paradigm it is found that subjects’ naming latencies are slowed down (25 ms) every time they name a
picture which belongs to the same semantic category as a previously named picture (Howard, 2006).
In experiments 1 and 2 high-proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals performed a picture naming task in
their L1 (experiment 1) and L2 (experiment 2) making use of this semantic competitor paradigm. The
results replicate prior data of semantic accumulation, and show that lexical interference is of similar
magnitude in L1 and L2. For experiments 3 and 4 we combined this semantic competitor paradigm
with a predictable switch task, in which target items (items of the same semantic category) alternated
between L1 responses and L2 responses. Results seem to indicate the presence of the semantic
competition effect within each language, but not between languages. Implications of these
experiments are discussed in light of different bilingual language control models.
Notes
134

P82
The vocalic tier constrains statistical computations over the
consonantal tier
Mohinish Shukla 1 , & Marina Nespor 2
1 University of Rochester, USA,
2 University of Milano Bicocca and Centro Beniamino Segre Accademia dei Lincei, Italy
E-mail: mohinish.s@gmail.com
Sensitivity to the distributional properties of speech sounds provides cues to word boundaries in an
unfamiliar language. Infants and adults have been shown to segment artificial, fluent speech in which
the statistical structure (transition probabilities, TPs) between syllables is the sole cue to word
boundaries (Saffran, Aslin & Newport, 1996, Saffran, Newport & Aslin, 1996, Aslin, Saffran &
Newport, 1998, Peña, Bonatti, Nespor & Mehler, 2002). More recently, it has been demonstrated that
such statistical mechanisms are constrained. For example, high-TP sequences that straddle boundaries
of large prosodic constituents (Intonational Phrases, IPs) are not efficiently extracted, when compared
to high-TP sequences that are IP-internal (Shukla, Nespor & Mehler, 2007). In addition, it has been
shown that, while TPs can be computed over non-adjacent syllables, they are readily computed over
(phonetically) non-adjacent consonants but not vowels (Peña, Bonatti, Nespor & Mehler, 2002,
Newport & Aslin, 2004, Bonatti, Peña, Nespor & Mehler, 2005).
In this study, we show that the computation of TPs over the consonantal tier can itself be constrained
by information in the vocalic tier. The vocalic tier is intimately linked to prosody. Inside prosodic
constituents that are most closely related to words, phonological processes like vowel harmony
diminish the qualitative distinctions between the vowels. As a result, similar vowels might group
syllables into prosodic units. Here, we ask if a sequence in which all vowels are identical is perceived
as a single ‘prosodic’ unit.
In a series of experiments, we expose adult participants to artificial speech streams, and in subsequent
(2-alternative forced choice) tests, we pit trisyllabic sequences that share the same vowel (V-words)
against trisyllabic sequences that are statistically coherent at the consonantal level (C-words) – the
latter having higher TPs over their constituent syllables and consonants than the former. First, we
show that V-words are preferred over C-words. In a subsequent experiment we demonstrate that
participants do not simply acquire a preference for sequences with identical vowels. Finally, we show
that these TP computations are restricted to syllable sequences that share the same vowel.
Our results provide further empirical evidence that, in adults, TP computations are constrained by
regularities that signal constituency. This raises the possibility that infants too can use information in
the vocalic tier to constrain segmentation of words from fluent speech.
Notes
135

P83
The statistical properties of semantic features influence spoken word
recognition: Evidence from neuroimaging
Kirsten I. Taylor, Billi Randall, Michael A. Ford, Barry J. Devereux, & Lorraine K. Tyler
University of Cambridge, UK
E-mail: ktaylor@csl.psychol.cam.ac.uk
How are the meanings of concepts neurally represented and processed Distributed theories of
conceptual representations posit that concepts are represented in a distributed system composed of
units representing semantic properties, and where the processing of a concept corresponds to
overlapping patterns of activation across units representing the concept. The Conceptual Structure
Account makes specific claims about how the statistical properties of features (e.g., the degree to
which features are distinctive to a particular concept or shared by many concepts and the degree to
which two features co-occur (correlational strength)) determine the representational structure of
concepts and how these are processed. We tested the neural implications of these claims by
determining whether conceptual structure variables modulate functional brain activity associated with
spoken word recognition. In a sparse event-related fMRI imaging study, participants performed
lexical decisions to spoken concrete words and phonotactically legal non-words, and high/low tone
decisions in a baseline task. A principal components analysis of a large number of psycholinguistic
variables and target conceptual structure variables produced eight orthogonalized principal
components (phonology, cohort size, lexical, production frequency of features, distinctiveness,
sharedness, correlational strength, and a variable representing the relationship between correlational
strength and distinctiveness). The residualized length of the auditory words, nuisance factors, then
conceptual structure factors were entered into fMRI models as parametric modulators of activity
associated with lexical decisions to auditory words to assess the influence of conceptual structure
factors independent of lower-level processes. Lexical decisions to words compared to the baseline
task generated activity in the left-lateralized fronto-temporal language network, as predicted.
Critically, after the effects of lower-level acoustic and psycholinguistic factors had been accounted
for, conceptual structure variables still significantly modulated functional activity both within the
frontotemporal language network (inferior frontal gyrus, middle and superior temporal gyri) and by
engaging the attentional system (anterior cingulate/middle frontal gyrus). These findings demonstrate
that conceptual structure variables, derived from cognitive models, significantly affect how concepts
are neurally processed, consistent with a distributed model of conceptual representation and
processing.
Notes
136

P84
Priming local syntactic structure in speech production: An online study
Kristine Uzule, Linda R. Wheeldon, & Antje S. Meyer
University of Birmingham, UK
E-mail: kxu578@bham.ac.uk
In two sentence production experiments, we examined whether the processor can reuse structurally
identical local information while encoding the next sentence when the two sentences have different
global syntactic frames (Examples 1-3).
1. Target: [The tap and the kite] move together
2. Related prime: [The frog and the book] move above the sock.
3. Unrelated prime: [The cup] moves below the saw.
In Experiment 1, participants read prime sentences and produced target utterances as descriptions of
moving objects. In Experiment 2, all utterances were produced in response to moving objects. In each
experiment, 32 target utterances and 24 undergraduate participants were tested. Error rates and speech
onset latencies (SOL) for correct utterances were measured.
The results of the two experiments were strikingly different. In Experiment 1 (written primes), related
primes significantly facilitated the production of targets relative to unrelated primes (Means: Table.
SOL: F 1 (1, 23)=8.23, MSError=1867, p

P85
Delays in the use of discourse information in syntactic ambiguity resolution
Amit Dubey 1 , Patrick Sturt 2 , & Frank Keller 2
1 University of Dundee, UK, 2 University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: adubey@inf.ed.ac.uk
Studies investigating the interaction between referential context and syntactic ambiguity resolution in
reading often find differing degrees of interaction: some show modifier supporting contexts can
prevent garden pathing (Spivey and Tanenhaus, 1998 JEP), while others show weak or delayed
effects of context (Binder et al, 2001 JML). One possible reason for this variability is that contextual
information may sometimes simply be unavailable in early stages of processing. Another possibility
is that contextual information is available, but syntactic processing sometimes fails to make use of it,
e.g., due to resource demands.
Here, we investigate two issues: (a) the time-course of the interaction between context and ambiguity,
and (b) the influence exerted by the difficulty of the contextual inference on this interaction. We
investigate (a) by comparing early and late eye-tracking measures in reading, and (b) by using (across
experiments) different degrees of lexical overlap between context and target.
We present two experiments using a reduced relative ambiguity. In Exp 1, the relative-supporting
(RS) context involved both noun and verb repetition, while the neutral context did not (1a-c). Exp 2
used a RS context (2) where neither the noun nor verb were repeated (RS/NV).
Reduced relative conditions were compared with unreduced baselines. Both experiments showed a
garden path (GP) cost on the critical region "carried by", in first-pass measures, and, independently of
this, both showed an early (first fixation) facilitation for RS contexts, even where integration requires
inference (Exp 2). However, despite the early availability of contextual information, it was only in
later measures that context led to a reduction in GP cost, and only when there was lexical repetition
from the context (Exp 1).
These findings support the view that contextual information is available at the earliest stages of
processing, even when contextual inference is required. However, the use of contextual information
for syntactic ambiguity resolution can be delayed and depends on the difficulty of the contextual
inference.
(1) a. RS context:
Several reporters had applied for the vacancy, but the management only interviewed one reporter.
b. Neutral context:
The newspaper was doing quite well, and was looking for additional staff to cover local news.
c. Target sentence:
The reporter (who was)/ interviewed by/ the editor was unfit for the job, though.
(2) RS/NV context:
The editor had received several applications, but only decided to speak with one of the applicants.
Notes
138

P86
Grammatical person controls perspective taking in embodied simulation
semantics
Sarah Schwarzkopf, Daniel Müller, Helmut Weldle, & Lars Konieczny
Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Freiburg, Germany
E-mail: sarah.schwarzkopf@cognition.uni-freiburg.de
Embodied language processing theories assume comprehension as simulation of perceptual and motor
interactions. Glenberg & Kaschak (2002) found empirical support with the action-sentence
compatibility effect (ACE): Sentences describing directed action influence the execution of
corresponding real actions. Bergen & Wheeler (2005) argued that motor processes are even engaged
when the reader is not addressed in the sentence. Zwaan (2004) integrated such findings in a model
that describes language comprehension as situation simulation from the perspective of a joining
observer.
In this study we addressed the question, which linguistic features control perspective taking, by using
German sentences describing directed actions with different possible perspective simulations. Factor
1 (sentence type) varied interacting grammatical persons and roles: Third to third person (1), first to
third person (2), third to first person (3). Factor 2 (compatibility) relates the described action verb to
the actually executed action, being either compatible or incompatible. Stimuli were presented on a
computer screen using rapid serial visual presentation. After a complete sentence, participants had to
judge its acceptability as fast as possible by pushing buttons that were placed along the requested
action axis.
(1) The drunkard attacks the card player.
(2) I attack the card player.
(3) The drunkard attacks me.
We found a highly significant interaction of reaction times between sentence type and compatibility.
Pairwise comparisons revealed that participants reacted reliably faster on sentence type 2 for
compatible action. On the contrary, participants showed significantly slower reactions in the
compatible case for sentence type 3 where the first person is the sentence object. We did not find a
compatibility effect for sentences with only third person agents. The results suggest that an observer
centered perspective is induced by grammatical person in the first or the second person, independent
of thematic role or sentence focus. Third person situations possibly only work with just one agent, as
in the study by Bergen & Wheeler (2005).
References
Bergen, B. & Wheeler, K. (2005). Sentence understanding engages motor processes. CogSci 05.
Glenberg, A. & Kaschak, M. (2002). Grounding language in action. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review,
9, 558-565.
Zwaan, R. (2004). The immersed experiencer: toward an embodied theory of language
comprehension. In B. Ross (ed.). The psychology of learning and motivation. New York:
Academic Press, 35-62.
Notes
139

P87
Extra complementizers increase syntactic predictability
Laura Staum Casasanto, Richard Futrell, & Ivan A. Sag
Stanford University, USA
E-mail: laura.staum@gmail.com
Staum Casasanto and Sag (2008) report that repeating the complementizer ‘that’ can help
comprehenders understand the complement clause in verb-complement structures, when the subject
of the embedded clause is displaced from the first complementizer by a long adverbial. They propose
that rather than being generated by the grammar, repeated complementizers are a production strategy
for reducing processing difficulty by reactivating syntactic expectations for a complement clause and
its constituents immediately before the embedded subject appears. However, extra ‘that’ also appears
before the subjects of clauses that were not originally introduced by ‘that’:
(1) It seems like, theoretically, that it would be possible to travel along in the middle of a tornado and
survive. (Google)
In these cases, the extra ‘that’ is also ungrammatical, but it cannot be interpreted as a repetition – it
must be independently generated. Is this extra complementizer also motivated by reducing processing
difficulty in the embedded clause
A moving-window self-paced reading experiment investigated whether an extra that would help
comprehenders read the embedded clause even when it did not match the original clause-introducer.
Participants read sentences like (2), in which the clause was originally introduced by either 'because'
or 'like'; each sentence appeared either with or without an extra 'that' (in parens):
(2) She lived in mortal terror because after undergoing the experimental surgical procedure after her
fourteenth birthday party celebration (that) she became paranoid of massive medical conspiracies.
The extra complementizer helped participants read the embedded clause, resulting in faster reading
times on the embedded subject compared to the standard, single-complementizer version of the
sentence (t(1,45)=1.73, p

When are two characters a set Using scenario-mapping as a guide to
equivalence
P88
Linda M. Moxey, & Anthony J. Sanford
University of Glasgow, UK
E-mail: linda@psy.gla.ac.uk
When two individual characters are introduced in discourse it is often, but not always possible to refer
to them using a plural pronoun (e.g. they). In some contexts such as (1), plural reference is clearly
preferred, while other contexts such as (2) make plural reference awkward.
(1) Paul and Carol went into the city centre.
(2) Paul went into the city centre with Carol.
Semantic and pragmatic factors also influence the ease with which a plural pronoun successfully
refers to two characters mentioned individually in previous text.
According to Kamp & Reyle’s Equivalence hypothesis the circumstances under which plural
pronominal reference is possible depends on the equivalence of the characters (Kamp & Reyle, 1993).
Various factors have been suggested as contributing towards equivalence (Carreiras, 1997; Koh &
Clifton, 2002). Our aim is to use Scenario-mapping theory (Sanford & Garrod, 1981; 1998) to guide
our search for what might be considered “equivalent”. In this paper we present two sentence
completion experiments which show that the roles played by the characters within a scenario are key
in determining character equivalence. In Experiment 1 we manipulate the status of the character with
respect to the scenario associated with the verb phrase, and show that if the status of the characters
differs participants are less likely to use a plural pronoun in continuations. In the Experiment 2 we
manipulate both physical location and action performed by the character, and show that while
physical proximity is a predictor of plural reference, performing the same action (regardless of
location) is a much stronger predictor of plural pronominal reference. We conclude that scenariomapping
theory provides a basis for equivalence.
References
Carreiras, M. (1997). Plural pronouns and the representation of their antecedents. European Journal of
Cognitive Psychology 9(1):53-87
Kamp, H. & Reyle, U. (1993) From discourse to logic. Dordrecht, Kluwer.
Koh, S. & Clifton, C. (2002). Resolution of the antecedent of a plural pronoun: Ontological categories
and predicate symmetry. Journal of Memory and Language 46, 830-844.
Sanford, A. J. & Garrod, S. C. (1981) Understanding written language. John Wiley & sons.
Sanford, A. J. & Garrod, S. C. (1998) The role of scenario mapping in text comprehension. Discourse
Processes, 26, 159-190.
Notes
141

P89
The role of event knowledge in verb interpretation
David S. Race 1 , Natalie M. Klein 1 , Mary L. Hare 2 , & Michael K. Tanenhaus 1
1 University of Rochester, USA, 2 Bowling Green State University, USA
E-mail: drace@bcs.rochester.edu
We propose that the fit of an argument to a verb’s thematic roles is based on the event the verb
describes in context. Bicknell et al. (2008) found that comprehenders showed more processing
difficulty in sentences where an otherwise good patient for the verb was made less plausible by the
combination of verb and agent noun (The boss fired the rifle). We argue that such results are due to
expectations about the underlying event, rather than agent-specific lexical knowledge about the verb.
The agent can strongly influence the interpretation of the verb (and thus the event) in single
sentences, but is integrated with prior context when available. Context should thus override
expectancies that the agent might elicit in isolation. We conducted two self-paced reading
experiments to test this claim.
In Expt. 1, we created 20 sentences with sense-ambiguous verbs and with agents biasing toward
different senses, but continuing identically (one lifeguard/shopper saved a woman...). RTs at the
patient were faster in the Agent Consistent condition, replicating Bicknell et al. In Expt. 2, the same
items were preceded by short discourse contexts that were either consistent or inconsistent with the
continuation. If the agent always activates a specific verb sense, then RTs should be faster in the
Agent Consistent conditions, as they were in isolated sentences. However, if the event structure is
key, then RTs should be faster in the Context Consistent conditions, regardless of agent.
Results support this account: RTs at the patient were faster after consistent than inconsistent contexts,
with no effect of agent consistency and no interaction. We conclude that context at various levels
influences comprehenders’ interpretation of the event being described and the roles that event
participants will play.
Context Consistent
Yesterday, a fire broke out inside Swami's Surf Shop, near Malibu Beach. Everyone was scrambling
to get out of the building.
Context Inconsistent
Swami's Surf Shop held its famous yearly sale down at the beach yesterday. Everyone looks forward
to it, because the prices are so good.
Agent Consistent – One lifeguard saved a woman who was almost trampled by the crowd in the rush
to escape/when the doors opened.
Agent Inconsistent – One shopper saved a woman who was almost trampled by…
References
Bicknell, K., Elman, J. L., Hare, M., McRae, K., & Kutas, M. (2008). Online expectations for verbal
arguments conditional on event knowledge. To appear in the Proceedings of the Cognitive
Science Society, Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.
Notes
142

Resumptive pronouns in relative clauses: A last resource processing
strategy in sentence production
P90
Fernanda V. Miranda, & Leticia M.S. Corrêa
Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
E-mail: lscorrea@puc-rio.br
Resumptive pronouns have been presented in the linguistic literature as the result of a last resort
strategy. The gap in the relative clause (RC) would be filled in by a pronoun in order to rescue a
derivation otherwise fated to crash (Engdahl 1985; Rizzi 1990; Shlonsky 1992; Grolla, 2005). This
paper investigates whether this last resource strategy can be taken to correspond to a last resource
processing strategy in sentence production. In this case, resumptive pronouns would be more likely to
occur in those RCs whose internal processing is more demanding. Processing demand was defined as
a function of focus (the position of the gap in the RC), following the Accessibility Hierarchy (AH)
(Keenan & Comrie, 1977). And an incremental model of on-line computation allowing the production
of a complement DP before the syntactic formulation of the RC attached to it is completed defines the
processing condition that would facilitate an eventual crash in the sentence computation. As elicited
production task was created. Participants had to report a message expressed by a sentence with a
standard RC (visually presented for 500ms), introduced to them as something that had been told by
“John”. They would recover that message from memory when answering to the question such as
What has John told orally presented in a female voice. The answer should contain a completive
sentence with a RC. Focus (subject (S), direct object (DO), indirect object (IO), genitive (GEN)) and
embedding (center-embedded (CE) and right-branching (RB)) were manipulated in the visually
presented sentence. More responses showing the recasting of the original sentence by means of a
resumptive pronoun were predicted to occur in the RB condition and in the focus conditions lower in
the AH. The test was conducted with 22 adult native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, a language
requiring pied-piping, no preposition stranding and allowing null objects. Significant main effects of
focus and embedding were obtained in the predicted direction. The results suggest that resumptive
pronouns in RCs are due to a last resource strategy in the most demanding production conditions (OI
and GEN). The extent to which linguistic (minimalist) hypotheses can be transferred to the
psycholinguistic domain in discussed.
Notes
143

P91
Syntactic category ambiguity in sentence production
Robert Thornton, & Jeffrey Bye
Pomona College, USA
E-mail: rt004747@pomona.edu
Many words are syntactically ambiguous, appearing as either a noun or a verb (e.g., plant, fly, drink).
In English, plural nouns are marked with an –s affix, whereas for verbs, the –s is added for singulars.
Thus, plants is not only category ambiguous, but number ambiguous as well (plural noun or singular
verb). We exploited this number ambiguity to examine how the time-course of lexical ambiguity
affects higher level sentence production.
In (1a), plants could be either a plural noun or a singular verb, although in the context it can only be a
noun. In (1b), trees is unambiguous as a plural noun.
(1a) The soil around the plants
(1b) The soil around the trees
In two experiments, we examined how this difference affected agreement error rates by having
participants produce complete sentences from such fragments (e.g., Bock & Miller, 1991). Agreement
studies have shown that when the number of the local noun mismatched the head, participants
produced more agreement errors than when both nouns matched in number. If the verb interpretation
of the local noun in (1a) becomes active during production, the singular verb meaning might compete
with the plural noun meaning, reducing the interference of the mismatching number, which would
result in lower agreement error rates relative to (1b). In Experiment 1, although there were
significantly more agreement errors when the local noun mismatched in number, this effect was not
modulated by syntactic ambiguity, with exactly the same agreement error rate regardless of
ambiguity.
Experiment 2 provided a more stringent test by using collective head nouns. Haskell & MacDonald
(2003) demonstrated that subtle constraints on agreement can be obscured by stronger number
constraints. Whereas most count nouns strongly constrain agreement patterns, collective head nouns
(e.g., family, group) are more variable in agreement. Thus, having count nouns in Experiment 1 may
have obscured the effect of ambiguity. Experiment 2 used collective heads, which less strongly
constrain agreement:
(2a) The family of plants
(2b) The family of trees
With collective heads, we saw a significant effect of ambiguity in the predicted direction: participants
made fewer agreement errors when the local noun was category ambiguous than when it was not.
These results indicate that the semantics of the verb meaning become active during sentence
production even though the word is being produced unambiguously as a noun. The results will be
discussed in terms of the theoretical importance for models of agreement and production more
generally.
Notes
144

P92
The effect of lexical ambiguity on spoken word recognition: Homographs
versus homophones
Jack C. Rogers, William D. Marslen-Wilson, & Matthew H. Davis
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK
E-mail: jack.rogers@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
A number of reports have shown faster visual lexical decisions for semantically ambiguous words
versus unambiguous controls, a result of feedback from multiple semantic representations. However,
more recent lexical decision experiments have suggested two opposite effects of lexical ambiguity:
polysemous words (twist) with multiple related meanings show an ambiguity advantage whereas
homographs with multiple unrelated meanings (bark) delay word recognition, due to semantic
competition¹. This remains controversial due to inconsistent results across studies, and the subjective
nature of the distinction between related and unrelated meanings of ambiguous words.
Testing for effects of ambiguity on responses to spoken words allows us to use homophones
(knight/night) for which two separate lexical representations exist. In a speeded auditory lexical
decision task, 21 subjects responded to 72 homographs, 72 homophones and 72 single-meaning
controls matched for the number of senses, as well as overall frequency, number of phonemes and
number of syntactic classes. We also computed a semantic entropy measure for the homographs and
homophones as a way of quantifying the degree of competition between different word meanings. If
ambiguity results from competition between meanings then responses for items with higher semantic
entropy will be slower.
Results show significantly slowed response times (RTs) for both groups of ambiguous words versus
matched controls (F1 (2, 40)=24.03, p

P93
Verb phrase ellipsis: Discourse effects in syntax and syntactic effects in
discourse
Christina S. Kim, & Jeffrey T. Runner
University of Rochester, USA
E-mail: ckim@bcs.rochester.edu
Recent work on verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) have shown sentence acceptability (1) depends on the
extent of syntactic mismatch between the antecedent and the elided material [1,2,3]. Comparing VPE
where strict syntactic identity is violated reveals that acceptability varies among cases that are
uniformly ungrammatical on previous accounts. E.g. 1b contains a Voice mismatch, but using the
connective so can improve acceptability [5]. The current study asks to what extent discourse
structural relations between the antecedent and ellipsis clauses can account for patterns of
acceptability in coordinate structures (1), and at the discourse level (2).
Exp1 compared the effect of syntactic mismatch on VPE acceptability where antecedent and ellipsis
were related by Resemblance (‘and’) or Cause-Effect (‘so’). According to Kehler [4], Resemblance
depends on alignment of syntactic arguments and should be sensitive to mismatch; in contrast, Cause-
Effect relates sentences at the propositional level and should be insensitive to mismatch. Ellipsis-
Mismatch cases (1b-c) were compared to both Matched (1a) and NoEllipsis controls (1d). There was
an Ellipsis-Mismatch interaction: Mismatch was judged worse than Match only with Ellipsis
(F(1,23)=103,p

P94
Unsupervised learning of conceptual representations – a computational
neural model
Michael Klein 1 , Stefan Frank 2 , Henk van Jaarsveld 1 , Louis F.M. ten Bosch 1 , & Lou Boves 1
1 CLST, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands,
2 ILLC, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
E-mail: M.Klein@nici.ru.nl
Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999) argue that concepts cannot be represented as feature clusters, but
need to be represented as non-decompositional conceptual units. One major reason for this is the
hypernym/hyponym problem: if concepts are represented as feature clusters, the conceptual
representation of any word has at least all the features of its hypernym. It would therefore be
impossible to activate, e.g., the word “mother” without triggering the word “parent” at the same time.
However, if concepts are indeed represented as non-decompositional units, at least two other
problems remain to be solved (given that the input to the semantic system are perceptual features): (i)
explaining the emergence of such units during the acquisition of conceptual knowledge and (ii)
preventing the analogue to the hypernym/hyponym problem to occur at the conceptual level, i.e., the
problem that the input features leading to the activation of conceptual unit [[mother]] would also
trigger the activation of [[parent]].
We present a computational neural model that solves both problems using a competitive-layer
architecture. We ran a number of simulations using 77 different (binary) semantic features as input to
the model during training and testing. Over 4900 training episodes, the features were presented in
combinations that allowed the model to learn 49 concepts. These concepts could be grouped into 7
semantically related families. The maximum depth of the conceptual hierarchy was 3 (e.g., [[animal]],
[[bird]], [[robin]]). We show that the model develops 49 conceptual units, each of which activates the
strongest when the feature set that defines the concept is presented to the model. Therefore, our model
can be regarded as a potential computational neural theory of how non-decompositional conceptual
units emerge in the brain.
During the phase of concept acquisition, the model displays overgeneralizations (e.g., the use of the
[[dog]] concept for everything with four legs) and undergeneralizations (e.g., the use the of [[dog]]
concept for only the dog of the neighbours), which are in accord with data reported in the literature
(e.g., Clark, 1973). After training, the presentation of an input vector of perceptual features always
maximally activates the most precise concept: when the features of [[mother]] are presented, the
[[mother]] concept is activated more strongly than the [[parent]] concept, and vice versa, despite the
strong overlap in features. This shows that the conceptual analogue of the hypernym/hyponym
problem does not occur.
Notes
147

P95
Joint effects of knowledge overlap (bias) and strength of memory
representations
Daphna Heller, Kirsten Skovbroten, & Michael K. Tanenhaus
University of Rochester, USA
E-mail: daphna.heller@gmail.com
The felicity of referring expressions depends on interlocutors’ knowledge states and how they differ
from each other. For example, speakers are expected to use a name (and not a longer description) to
refer to an entity whenever one is available, in accordance with Grice’s cooperative principle.
Crucially, a name can only be used felicitously if it is shared by both interlocutors. How interlocutors
keep track of what information is shared and what is privileged remains an open question. On one
extreme, interlocutors might have complete knowledge about shared vs. privileged information. The
other extreme assumes that assigning each piece of information a shared vs. privileged status is
computationally intensive, and instead interlocutors employ a global strategy, estimating the overall
information overlap. We show that while overall bias plays a role in speakers’ assessment of their
addressee’s knowledge state, speakers also keep track of the status of specific pieces of information
as shared or privileged when these categories are structured similar to real-world information.
Pairs of naïve participants performed a referential communication task adapted from Wu & Keysar
(2007, Cognitive Science). Participants learned names for 24 novel shapes. Two factors were
manipulated in training. Overlap manipulated whether the participants learned eighteen (high) or six
(low) names together. The speaker then learned the names for the rest of the shapes alone, while the
addressee was playing a computer game. Structure manipulated whether or not the last six shapes
constituted a category. In the structured condition, names started with [fl]. After training, participants
communicated across a network, sitting in front of different computers. The speaker was presented
with one shape (shared, privileged or new), and instructed the addressee, who saw three shapes,
which to click on.
Speaker’s instructions were coded as to whether or not they used a name in referring to the shape.
Structure increased sensitivity (the ratio of hits/false alarms), indicating that structuring the
information enabled speakers to keep better track of the shared vs. privileged status of particular
pieces of information. Overlap affected bias to use a name: the greater the overlap, the greater the bias
for speakers to use names for both shared (hits) and privileged (false alarms) shapes. Speakers
combine a global estimate of the amount of shared information with a local estimate of the evidence
about shared vs. privileged status when deciding whether to use a name or a description.
Notes
148

Testing the alignment model: Syntax-lexicon & syntax-phonology
P96
Marie Nilsenová, & Marije A.A. van Amelsvoort
Tilburg University, The Netherlands
E-mail: m.nilsenova@uvt.nl
According to the interactive alignment model of Pickering & Garrod (2004), dialogue partners who
align on a syntactic level also align at the level of phonology (and vice versa) and the link between
the syntactic and the phonological representation is assumed to be direct, sidestepping the lexical
entry. We tested the prediction in an experimental task similar to the confederate priming task of
Branigan et al. (2000), but involving non-existing verbs, with Dutch native speakers. Participants
were asked to create new verbs to describe activities depicted on a picture and use them in a
grammatical sentence; they took turns with a confederate who alternatively primed them with
PO/DO-constructions and non-existing verbs with a systematically varied phonological structure
(mono- vs. disyllabic items; varied in terms of the manner of articulation for the consonants in the
onset of the initial syllable + the complex coda of the monosyllabic verbs or the onset of the second
syllable in the disyllabic primes). The collected data were also compared to a task involving the
construction of new verbs in the absence of confederate primes. The results of the experiment support
the prediction of the alignment model (Pickering & Garrod 2004).
In a related experiment, we tested the link between the lexicon and syntax, established for English by
Branigan and colleagues but, to our knowledge, not yet tested in other languages. In the experiment,
we compared the level of local syntactic alignment (involving PO/DO verbal constructions in
immediately following turns) between participants who had to align lexically (e.g., they were
instructed to use the verb ‘GIVE’ after being primed with a construction involving the verb ‘GIVE’)
and participants who had to use a different verb (e.g., they were instructed to use the verb ‘SELL’
after being primed with the verb ‘GIVE’). The results of the experiment are similar to the results for
English, again offering support for the alignment model. In addition, we compared the level of
between-speaker alignment with “self-alignment”, i.e., the natural tendency to use the same
construction over several of speaker’s own turns, disregarding the production (prime) uttered by the
other interlocutor. The data support the conclusion that between-speaker alignment is stronger than
the tendency to reuse own constructions.
References
Branigan, H., Pickering, M.J., Cleland, A.A. (2000) Syntactic co-ordination in dialogue, Cognition
75, B13-25.
Pickering, M.J. & Garrod, S. (2004) Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue, Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 27.
Notes
149

P97
Acquiring novel words and their tenses: Evidence from lexical effects on
phonetic categorisation with undegraded and degraded stimuli
Shane Lindsay, Leanne Sedin, & Gareth Gaskell
University of York, UK
E-mail: sl574@york.ac.uk
This research addresses the question of how novel words come to be represented in the auditory input
lexicon, and how the novel inflected forms of such words are recognised. This was investigated in
four experiments using the lexical effects on phonetic categorisation paradigm, the “Ganong Effect”
(Ganong, 1980). Participants were exposed to novel phonological forms in phoneme monitoring and
tense generation tasks. Ambiguous phonemes were categorised consistent with learnt items (whole
word condition) or past tense inflected forms of learnt items (stem condition). Lexical effects on
categorisation were present after a week (Experiment 1) and immediately (Experiment 2) following
exposure to the novel words. In a further two studies which attempted to replicate and extend these
findings, stimuli were degraded in the categorisation task, in order examine the emergence of lexical
effects on phonetic categorisation in the presence of noise.
These findings are taken as evidence for an account of lexicalisation in which novel form information
is stored very quickly, as novel phonological forms were able to influence the categorisation of word
final ambiguous phonemes in those novel phonological forms. The effects immediate after exposure
present a challenge to the model of lexicalisation of Gaskell and Dumay (2003), suggesting that some
aspects of lexicalisation are completed almost immediately following exposure to novel phonological
forms, and that lexicalisation is not dependent on sleep. Implications for theories of the representation
of inflectional forms and the time course of lexicalisation are discussed.
References
Ganong, W. F. (1980). Phonetic categorization in auditory word perception. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 6, 110-125.
Gaskell, M. G., & Dumay, N. (2003). Lexical competition and the acquisition of novel words.
Cognition, 89, 105-132.
Notes
150

P98
On-line orthographic influences on spoken language in a semantic task
Chotiga Pattamadilok 1 , Laetitia Perre 2 , Stephane Dufau 2 , & Johannes Ziegler 2
1 Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, 2 Aix-Marseille Université, France
E-mail: cpattama@ulb.ac.be
Literacy changes the way the brain processes spoken language. Most psycholinguists believe that
orthographic effects on spoken language are either strategic or restricted to meta-phonological tasks.
We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the locus and the time course of
orthographic effects on spoken word recognition in a semantic task. Participants were asked to decide
whether a given word belonged to a semantic category (body parts). On Nogo-trials, words were
presented that were either orthographically consistent or inconsistent. Orthographic inconsistency
(i.e., multiple spellings of the same phonology) could occur either in the first or the second syllable.
The ERP data showed a clear orthographic consistency effect that preceded lexical access and
semantic effects. Moreover, the onset of the orthographic consistency effect was time-locked to the
arrival of the inconsistency in a spoken word, which suggests that orthography influences spoken
language in a time-dependent manner. The present data join recent evidence from brain imaging
showing orthographic activation in spoken language tasks. Our results extend those findings by
showing that orthographic activation occurs early and affects spoken word recognition in a semantic
task that does not require the explicit processing of orthographic or phonological structure.
Notes
151

P99
Priming pronoun interpretation without using pronouns: Eye-tracking
evidence for coherence
Elsi Kaiser
University of Southern California, USA
E-mail: emkaiser@usc.edu
The cognitive underpinnings of pronoun resolution are not fully understood. Kehler02 claims it is a
by-product of general inferencing about inter-clause coherence relations. A SUBJECT interpretation
of 'him' (ex1) is more likely with a CAUSE-EFFECT relation (a) than with RESEMBLANCE (b)
(cf.Miltsakaki03, Wolf etal04, Rohde etal07).
1 Phil tickled Stan and Tom poked him.
a…and (as a result) Tom poked him[Phil=SUBJ]
b…and (similarly) Tom poked him[Stan=OBJ]
Coherence-based inferences exist independently of pronouns. Crucially, Kehler's approach predicts
that pronoun resolution and coherence inferences involve overlapping cognitive representations. We
tested this:
With priming and visual-world eye-tracking, we tested if coherence relations prime pronoun
resolution. We used LINGUISTIC (Exp1, 14Ss) and NONLINGUISTIC PRIMES (Exp2, 14Ss) of 3
types: cause-effect, resemblance, neutral/neither. Ling primes were 2-clause sentences (eg.The
children left toys scattered all over the room and the babysitter tripped, cause-effect). Non-ling primes
were silent videos (eg. square bumps circle which falls off ledge). Primes (normed for coherence) had
no subj/obj pronouns. The 15 TARGETS (same in Exp1&2) were scenes with 3 same-sex characters;
participants heard sentences with ambiguous obj pronouns (ex2). Nonce verbs eliminated verb
effects. The task was to click on the last-mentioned person.
2 Peter skrilled Mike and Greg mericked him.
If pronoun resolution and coherence-based inferences share abstract representations, we predict that
activation from primes can influence interpretation of 'him' and lead to more consideration of SUBJ
after CAUSE than after RESEMB/NEUT. We used ling and non-ling primes to see if effects go
beyond ling input.
CLICKS
Off-line clicks show a strong obj preference in all conditions.
EYE-MOVEMENTS/TARGETS
Ling and non-ling RESEMB primes resulted in an early and persistent obj preference (p's

Is a whisker some one who whisks Tests of route-emphasis in
morphological processing
P100
Matthew H. Davis 1 , Catherine-Marie Longtin 1 , & Kathleen Rastle 2
1 MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK, 2 Royal Holloway University of London, UK
E-mail: matt.davis@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
Word recognition can be characterised by two systems: (1) a lexicon that stores whole words and (2)
sub-lexical processes that combine smaller units. During reading aloud these can be dissociated since
test settings that emphasize lexical processing makes for slower reading of pseudowords like jult,
whereas emphasizing sub-lexical processing leads participants to read pint so it rhymes with hint
(Zevin & Balota, 2000). In the present study, we tested whether analogous lexical and sub-lexical
processes can be dissociated in accessing the meaning of morphologically-complex words.
We conducted a series of behavioural experiments in which participants make speeded responses to
visually-presented, complex words that are: (1) semantically-opaque e.g. corner, (2) semanticallytransparent
e.g. darkness, or (3) interpretable pseudowords e.g. quickify which can be understood but
are not attested in corpora. Items in these three categories were presented in blocks to emphasize
whole-word recognition (by including a majority of opaque items) or morphemic combination
processes (including a large proportion of pseudowords). Blocking of opaque items should enhance
whole word processing and suppress morphemic combination since a corner is not someone who
corns. Conversely, blocks of pseudowords like quickify should enhance morphemic combination and
suppress whole-word recognition since participants lack pre-existing word representations for these
items. We used a variety of speeded tasks (sensicality judgement, lexical decision and semantic
relatedness judgment) to assess changes in processing strategies due to blocked presentation of these
groups of items.
Across four experiments we failed to see differences in the speed or accuracy of word recognition and
semantic access under conditions in which whole-word or morpheme-based processes should be
emphasised. These results suggest that lexical and sub-lexical processing of complex words are not
functionally separate processes under the strategic control of participants. Such results challenge
conventional dual-route accounts of morphological processing in which whole-word and
decompositional processing are distinct and independent mechanisms and favour distributed
connectionist models in which whole word and morphemic processes arise from the operation of a
single, unified system.
References
Zevin, J.D. & Balota, D.A. (2000) Priming and attentional control of lexical and sublexical processes
during naming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 26, 121-
135.
Notes
153

P101
Neurocomputational and neurophysiological investigations of brain
interactions of language and attention
Max Garagnani 1 , Yury Shtyrov 1 , Teija Kujala 2 , Thomas Wennekers 3 ,
& Friedemann Pulvermüller 1
1 MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK, 2 University of Helsinki, Finland,
3 University of Plymouth, UK
E-mail: Max.Garagnani@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
Recent EEG/MEG studies revealed that brain responses to the same speech sounds differ if the
stimuli are presented in different task contexts. When subjects are not paying attention to the auditory
input, their mismatch negativity (MMN) brain response is greater for the words than for matched
meaningless pseudowords. In contrast, greater late N400 responses to pseudowords than to words
emerge in tasks where subjects have to attend to the language stimuli. Current cognitive or neural
models are unable to explain these data using a single, unifying account. We investigated the neural
mechanisms underlying these opposite effects through neurocomputational and neurophysiological
studies.
Firstly, we built a neuroanatomically-grounded neural network model of the left perisylvian cortex,
and used it to simulate early word acquisition processes by means of synaptic-weight adaptation
based on a neurobiologically-realistic (Hebbian) learning rule. The trained networks were able to
replicate both the MMN and N400 brain responses. In particular, variation of one of the model’s
parameters (the area-specific inhibition, mediating the strength of competition between coactive
representations) differently modulated the network response to words and pseudowords: strong
inhibition (simulating passive, inattentive listening) produced larger responses to words than to
pseudowords, whereas weak inhibition (simulating attentive conditions) produced the opposite result.
Thus, the model explains the divergence between MMN and N400 results, providing a first unifying
account, at the cortical-circuit level, of these data. In addition, it makes strong predictions on how
attention processes modulate event-related brain responses to speech stimuli.
Secondly, in order to experimentally test the validity of this model, we recorded neurophysiological
responses to words and pseudowords when the subjects were asked to attend to the spoken input or
ignore it. The brain responses (peaking at around 120-140ms after critical stimulus onset) were
significantly larger to pseudowords than to words when subjects were attending to the stimuli; the
opposite pattern (words ≥ pseudowords) emerged (within the same time window) in the ignore
condition. In addition, words responses were not significantly modulated by attention, indicating a
robust activation of word-specific memory traces. These data confirm the predictions of the model
and provide further evidence supporting earlier suggestions that initial stages of lexical processing are
not affected by attentional demands and may thus be automatic.
Notes
154

P102
On the flexibility of advance planning during sentence production: Effects
of task demands on multiple lexical access
Valentin Wagner, & Jörg D. Jescheniak
University of Leipzig, Germany
E-mail: vwagner@uni-leipzig.de
There is some discussion in the area of sentence production whether the scope of advance planning
during grammatical encoding and lexical access is of phrasal or of clausal size, and corresponding
studies have yielded conflicting results. In a series of picture-word interference experiments we tested
the hypothesis that this scope of advance planning is flexible, depending on the cognitive load
currently imposed on the system. When participants produced simple sentences of the form “the frog
is next to the mug” in response to two-object displays, both nouns were found to be lexicalsemantically
activated to similar degrees at speech onset, as indexed by similarly sized interference
effects from semantic distractors related to either the first or the second noun, in line with the clausal
view (and replicating Meyer, 1996). When task demands were enhanced, by introducing an additional
conceptual decision task and variable utterance formats (with / without color adjective), the
interference effect for the noun in position 2 was strongly attenuated and eventually disappeared, in
line with a phrasal view. Interestingly, if task demands were increased by introducing a secondary
working memory task to be performed during speech planning, the relative interference pattern for the
first and second noun remained unchanged, suggesting that cognitive load induced by processes
outside the speech planning process proper has a different effect as cognitive load related to some
composite subprocess of the speech planning process. In all, the data suggest that the scope of
advance planning during grammatical encoding in sentence production is flexible, rather than
structurally fixed.
Notes
155

P103
How do you find it: An analysis of speech production in the context of a
deteriorating semantic system
Lotte Meteyard, & Karalyn Patterson
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK
E-mail: meteyard@gmail.com
Naturally occuring speech errors have a long history in research into language production (e.g.
Garrett, 1980), and the errors produced by populations with particular deficits has proven a fruitful
way to explore the architecture of the language production system (e.g. Rapp & Goldrick, 2000).
Here we present an analysis of errors that occurred in the connected speech (taken from
autobiographical interviews) of 8 patients with Semantic Dementia, a progressive neurological
condition characterised by a fairly selective deterioration of semantic information across all
modalities, both verbal and non-verbal (Hodges & Patterson, 2007). The errors are compared to those
found in similar interviews with 8 controls, allowing the abnormal error patterns to be defined against
a baseline.
Patients show more omissions of closed class items, as well as more semantically related substitution
errors of open class words, and related substitution errors of closed class words (i.e. preposition for
preposition, pronoun for pronoun etc.). Patients also substitute more inappropriate complex
morphological forms than controls (e.g. 'cried' for 'cry' and 'closely' for 'close'). An analysis of
sentence level errors shows that patients have problems in initiating and maintaining sentence level
structures, with misordering of items, simplification of event descriptions, unreferenced pronouns,
and semantically and syntactically anomolous utterances. Phonological errors, exchange errors and
morpheme stranding errors are notably rare in the corpus.
Whilst some of the errors can be attributed to the expected problems patients have in
retrieving/selecting the intended item (anomia), the errors also demonstrate the necessary role that the
semantic system plays in supporting an intermediate stage in which both open and closed class words
are retrieved and organised into the correct heirarchical strucutres (syntactic planning) before
phonological information is retrieved and the utterance is serialised for production. Semantic
Dementia thus provides a unique window onto the early stages of production.
References
Garrett, M.F. (1980) Levels of processing in sentence production. In B. Butterworth (Ed.) Language
production (Vo1. 1): Speech and talk (pp. 177-220). New York: Academic Press.
Hodges, J.R. & Patterson, K. (2007) Semantic dementia: a unique clinicopathological syndrome.
Lancet Neurology, 6, 1004-14
Rapp, B. & Goldrick, M. (2000) Discreteness and interactivity in spoken word production.
Psychological Review, 107, 460-99.
Notes
156

Spatial meaning congruity effect with abstract and concrete words
P104
Michele Burigo, & Maria Luisa Lorusso
IRCSS. “E. Medea”, Bosisio Parini, Italy
E-mail: michele.burigo@bp.lnf.it
There is a growing body of evidence showing that people process abstract concepts through
conceptual metaphors (Lakoff, 1993; Boroditsky, 2001). Most of these are grounded on embodied
experience derived from sensorimotor activity, and are used as a substrate to represent abstract
concepts. Casasanto & Lozano (2007) have recently shown that abstract concepts with a spatial
denotation such as temperature, grades, price, etc., showed a motor-meaning congruity effect that
influences the gestures related to the concept. Similar interactions were found between the
horizontal/vertical nature of verb-related image schemas and the position of visual stimuli, providing
support for the perceptual-motor character of abstract concept representation (Richardson, Spivey,
Barsalou, McRae, 2003). The current study explores whether abstract entities that have no spatial
instantiation in the world, but which are associated with vertical spatial metaphors (e.g., angry, hero,
surprise, offence, etc.), convey information about the embodied knowledge independently of motor
activity. A semantic priming experiment showed a word as a prime and a black arrow as target. The
prime was a concrete/abstract word with a covert directional denotation: up (i.e., hero, eagle) down
(i.e., sadness, chute) or neutral (i.e., nature, dust). Participants were instructed to judge whether the
arrow was pointing up or down as quick as possible. It was expected that congruent trials, i.e. trials
where the direction of the prime matches the direction of the arrow, would be processed faster than
incongruent trials (trials showing a word with a direction neutral or opposite to the target). More
important, this experiment aims to test the hypothesis that abstract concepts are mediated by
embodied knowledge, similarly to concrete concepts. The results show that only concrete words
generated a significant priming effect (spatial meaning congruity effect), suggesting that the
directional information contained in the abstract words cannot be acquired only through embodied
experience (Gibbs, 2006).
Notes
157

P105
Event-related spectral changes associated with morphosyntactic processing
Douglas J. Davidson
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics & F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging,
Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
E-mail: D.Davidson@fcdonders.ru.nl
The recognition of morphosyntactic features during sentence processing has been linked to a left
anterior negative (LAN) effect using electrophysiology. This LAN effect has been explained in terms
of either a violation-detection or a working-memory related process [1].
In addition to ERP effects like the LAN, EEG can also be analyzed to measure event-related changes
in spectral power using time-frequency analysis. Working memory tasks have been associated with
theta band (4-7 Hz) amplitude changes using this type of measure.
Previous work has shown that both theta and alpha (8-13 Hz) band amplitude changes can be
observed in sentence processing under the same conditions that lead to an N400 effect during
semantic integration, or a P600 effect during the reanalysis or revision of a grammatical violation.
However, event-related power changes have not been reported is association with the LAN effect, so
it is not clear which frequency band will be responsive.
If the LAN effect is linked to working memory processes, then there should be some relationship
between the magnitude of the LAN ERP effect and the magnitude of theta-band power on individual
trials. If there is no association, this would weaken the hypothesis that the LAN effect is linked to
general working memory.
In the present study, a violation-control paradigm involving German declension was used to
investigate this issue. Native German speakers (n=20) read short prepositional phrases (1) presented
serially as text and classified them as grammatically correct or not.
(1) ohne das kleine/*kleines Kind
without the small child
The critical adjective within the phrase was either correctly inflected for the case and gender
constraints within the phrase, or it was incorrectly inflected for the strong declension.
The violations were associated with a larger negative potential 300 to 500 ms after the onset of the
adjective over left frontal electrodes, consistent with a LAN effect. A wavelet analysis indicated
greater amplitude power to the violations compared to the controls at a wavelet scale within the theta
band. A quartile analysis showed that theta band power variability in single trials was not associated
with the magnitude of the LAN effect. These results suggest that the LAN effect is not intrinsically
linked to working memory mechanisms.
References
1 Kutas, M., Van Petten, C. K. & Kluender, R. (2006). Psycholinguistics electrified II (1994-2005).
M.A. Gernsbacher & M. Traxler (Eds.) Handbook of Psycholinguistics, 2nd edition. New York:
Elsevier.
Notes
158

P106
Language control in bilingual speech production: A blocked naming study
Kristof Strijkers, & Albert M. Costa
Universidad de Barcelona, Spain
E-mail: Kristof_Strijkers@hotmail.com
An important question in bilingualism is how bilingual speakers are able to control for intrusions
from one language while speaking in the other language. In the this study we investigated how
bilinguals are able to control their language production by looking at the impact of naming a picture
in one language which previously (previous block) has been named in the other language. In
experiment 1 22 high-proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals first named pictures in their L1 and
afterwards named pictures in their L2 (blocked naming). Crucially when participants changed to
blocked naming in L2, half of the pictures were the same and half of the pictures were different then
the blocked naming part in L1. In experiment 2 22 high-proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals
performed the same experiment as in experiment 1, but started with naming in L2. In both
experiments an interaction between old-new (previously named picture or not) and cognate status was
found: For non-cognates old pictures were named slower than new ones. For cognates the opposite
result was found: New pictures were named slower than old ones. Results are discussed in function of
the distinct bilingual production models.
Notes
159

P107
The origin of pausing and speech rate in second language speech
production
Nivja H. De Jong, Rob Schoonen, & Jan H. Hulstijn
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
E-mail: n.h.dejong@uva.nl
In this study, we investigated the origin of fluency in terms of pausing and speech rate for second
language speech compared to first language speech. Based on previous research (e.g., DeWaele &
Furnham, 2000), we expect that the personality characteristic Extraversion will predict L2 fluency.
Furthermore, we predict that individual differences in fluency may originate from individual
differences in ease of processing in the conceptualizer, formulator and/or articulator (e.g., Levelt,
1989). If we assume that conceptualizing a message is preverbal, we may also expect that some of the
characteristics of L1 fluency will transfer to L2 fluency.
In Experiment 1, we investigated the relationship between fluency and ease of processing in the
formulator (and articulator). Non-native speakers (n = 195) and native speakers (n = 50) of Dutch
performed 8 speaking tasks and we computed measures for pausing and speech rate. Participants also
performed language knowledge (vocabulary and grammar) and language processing (lexical retrieval,
articulatory speed, sentence production) tasks, tapping processes in the formulator (and articulator).
Also, participants filled out the Eysenck’s personality questionnaire. Regression analyses revealed
that (1) pausing and speech rate are predicted differently by the linguistic variables and Extraversion
and that (2) these predictions differ qualitatively between L1 and L2 speakers.
In Experiment 2, we further investigated the relation between L1 and L2 fluency, i.e., whether
individual differences in L2 fluency can be predicted by individual differences in L1 fluency. Fortyfive
Turkish and English speakers who performed the 8 speaking tasks in their L2 (Dutch) came back
to our lab to perform 8 similar speaking tasks in their L1 (i.e., in Turkish or English). Regression
analyses revealed that pausing in L2 speech is related to pausing in L1 speech, which may reflect
individual differences in ease of processing in the preverbal conceptualizer.
The results show that L2 fluency is a result of individual linguistic knowledge and skills of the second
language together with individual characteristics in speech that are transferred from first-language to
second-language speech. We will discuss implications of these results with respect to theories of
speech production.
References
Dewaele, J.-M., & Furnham, A. (2000). Personality and speech production: a pilot study of second
language learners. Personality and individual differences, 28(2), 355 - 365.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: from intention to articulation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Notes
160

Evidence for priming on the level of referential dependencies
P108
Elsi Kaiser
University of Southern California, USA
E-mail: emkaiser@usc.edu
Priming is a valuable tool for investigating abstract representations in syntactic processing. We report
3 experiments that test for the existence of priming in another domain, pronoun interpretation, to see
whether priming can shed light on the representations used in processing referential dependencies.
Exp1: 24 Ss saw sentences on a computer screen. In PRIMES, gender forced a subj (1a) or obj
interpretation (1b) of the pronoun. Neutral primes ended in intransitives (1c). Interpretation of
ambiguous obj pronouns in TARGETS (2) was probed by questions. (Questions followed all
targets/primes/fillers.) Nonce verbs eliminated verb effects.
1 William swooked Betty and Kevin…
a) brucked him. [S]
b) brucked her. [O]
c) brucked. [N]
2 Stephen tulvered Peter and Diane churbited him. [QUEST: Diane churbited _ ]
An obj-preference is expected due to parallelism. If REFERENTIAL PRIMING exists, the objpreference
is predicted to be WEAKER after S primes than O primes. If only SYNTACTIC
PRIMING is at play, no difference is predicted (S and O primes have the same syntactic structure).
Primes had an effect: There were roughly twice as many subj-responses after S primes as after O or N
primes (p's2000ms).
Exp2 used two cues (GENDER+CONNECTIVES) to prime subj (3a) or obj (3b) (see Wolf etal04).
Neutrals were included (3c). Targets and method were the same as Exp1, 24 new participants.
3 William swooked Betty and…
a) AS A RESULT Kevin brucked him. [S]
b) SIMILARLY Kevin brucked her. [O]
c) Kevin brucked. [N]
Primes had a weaker effect on subj-response rate in Exp2 than Exp1–but RTs were influenced by
primes: Subj-responses were drastically faster after S primes (~800ms) than O primes (>1200ms), inbetween
after N.
If these effects are due to activation of abstract referential dependency representations, they are
predicted to be general, not specific to obj pronouns. Exp3 tested pronouns in SUBJ position, with
gender priming subj or obj (ex4). Subj-responses were faster (p

P109
Morphological decomposition and selection of word meaning
Nina Kazanina
University of Bristol, UK
E-mail: nina.kazanina@bristol.ac.uk
At an early stage of processing morphologically complex words are decomposed into morphemes,
e.g. teacher is split into teach + -er (Longtin et al. 2003; Rastle et al., 2004). Decomposition also
affects forms that only seemingly are polymorphemic such as brother (≠ broth + -er, yet is
decomposed into these morphemes). The question is what this ‘spurious’ decomposition of pseudo
morphologically-complex words entails for a later stage of lexical processing at which the meaning of
the word brother is accessed.
This issue was examined using a visual-visual masked-priming task in Russian with three conditions:
- morpho-semantically related condition: the target was derived from the prime via prefixation
(e.g., beg ‘running’ – zabeg ‘race’, zabeg = prefix za- + beg);
- pseudo-morphologically related condition: the target and the prime seemed to be
morphologically related via prefixation but in fact were not (pas ‘pass’ – zapas ‘supply’,
zapas ≠ prefix za- + pas)
- orthographically-related condition: the prime again was contained inside the target but could
not possibly be related to it morphologically (bar ‘bar’ – ambar ‘grain storage’; am is not a
prefix in Russian).
Each target was also paired with an unrelated prime that matched the related prime in length and
frequency. 42 Russian speakers performed a lexical decision task to the target (the prime was 48 ms
long and not consciously perceivable). For each condition we calculated an effect of the related prime
on target processing relative to the unrelated prime.
We found no effect of the related prime in the orthographically related condition. A highly
statistically robust facilitation was found in the morpho-semantically related conditions (28 ms). In
the pseudo morphologically-related condition a significant facilitatory effect of 18 ms was found.
These results suggest that the output of early morphological decompositional affect a later stage of
processing at which the word meaning is determined (even in cases where the output morphemes are
not semantically related to the whole word). The results are most readily compatible with a singleroute
decomposition model whereby real and pseudo morphologically-complex words alike are
represented in the lexicon as morpheme combinations (they differ in whether the meaning is
compositionally derivable from constituent morphemes or stored idiosyncratically). We also discuss
repercussions of our findings for the process of meaning selection in dual route models where the
parser follows a decompositional and a whole-word route in parallel.
Notes
162

P110
The activation of multiple phonological codes during the naming of an
object in context
Frank Oppermann 1 , Frauke Görges 1 , Jörg D. Jescheniak 1 , & Herbert Schriefers 2
1 University of Leipzig, Germany, 2 Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
E-mail: oppermann@uni-leipzig.de
Recent studies explored whether visually presented context objects are phonologically activated when
participants name a target object. While some studies presented evidence in favour of such a view,
other studies failed to do so. But which factors affect the lexical activation of context objects In two
picture-word interference experiments the authors demonstrate that a semantic-categorical relation
between a target object and a context object (e.g., target: flute, context object: harp) promotes the
phonological activation of the to-be-ignored context object (as indexed by interference from a
distractor phonologically related to the context object, e.g., heart). No such activation is observed if
the objects are semantically unrelated. In contrast to recent picture-picture interference experiments,
the results provide direct evidence that the amount of phonological activation, which a context object
receives, is dependent on its semantic processing. At a more general level, this observation further
supports the notion that the possibility to establish a coherent representation among multiple objects
affects the information flow in the conceptual-lexical system during speech planning (cf., Oppermann
et al., 2008).
Notes
163

P111
Modality vs. typology effects: Investigating the divide
Pamela Perniss 1 , David P. Vinson 1 , Gabriella Vigliocco 1 , & Frank Seifart 2
1 DCAL, University College London, UK, 2 University of Regensburg, Germany
E-mail: p.perniss@ucl.ac.uk
There is evidence that the difference in language modality between signed and spoken languages
leads to differences in language processing, especially related to the involvement of imagery and
visuospatial cognition (e.g. Vigliocco et al. 2005). These differences are attributed to the differential
treatment of spatial semantic domains across language modalities, under the assumption that the
modality of signed, but not spoken, languages affords and even requires the encoding of spatial
information about referents. Although this assumption may be true for English (where most research
on this topic has been conducted), some spoken languages do systematically encode spatial
information about referents. For example, in Bora, a Witotoan language spoken in parts of Columbia
and Peru (cf. Seifart 2005), visuospatial properties of size and dimension are obligatorily marked on
nominal and pronominal forms to encode meanings like flat/square and long/thin. These distinctions
are comparable to those typically reflected in handshape in sign languages like British Sign Language
(BSL) (e.g. a flat hand used to represent a table). This suggests that spoken languages that encode
visuospatial dimensions (like Bora) may be more similar to signed languages (like BSL) than to
spoken languages (like English) despite the modality difference. We investigate this question by
means of a meaning similarity judgment task. Speakers of Bora and English listened to triads of
words (in their own language) and were asked to decide which two words were most similar to each
other in meaning. Triads were created such that only one of the three possible word pairs shared
spatial properties. Bora speakers picked the word pair that preserved spatial information significantly
more often than English speakers (t(32)=2.24, p

Syllables are chunks in Mandarin, not in Spanish or English
P112
Padraig G. O’Seaghdha 1 , Julio Santiago 2 , Jenn-Yeu Chen 3 , Antonio Roman 2 ,
& Jordan Knicely 1
1 Lehigh University, USA, 2 University of Granada, Spain, 3 National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
E-mail: pat.oseaghdha@Lehigh.EDU
Uncertainty still characterizes the role of syllables in language production within and across
languages. We examined the hypotheses that syllables channel phonological encoding in European
languages, perhaps more strongly in Romance than in Germanic languages, and that syllables are
themselves primary encoding units in Chinese. We report parallel disyllable word-pair recitation
experiments in three languages using variants of a classic design in which first syllable alignment is
crossed with phonological overlap (e.g., aligned CVC: ham.let ham.per; unaligned CV ma.lice
mag.net). We coded number of correct word pair productions in a fixed interval (output) as well as
errors. We examined three issues:
1. No overlap conditions: Are speakers sensitive to syllable structure In English, only
number of segments regardless of structural congruence affected output, contrary to the well
known syllable congruence result of Sevald, Dell & Cole (1995). In Spanish, we found an
unexpected reverse preference for structural alternation (different first syllables better than
same first syllables). In Mandarin, speakers were oblivious to syllable internal structure.
2. Aligned overlap: Does sharing a first syllable have an overall cost Yes, there was a
“tongue twister” cost in output for all three languages. However, given 1) and 3), the effect is
clearly mediated by syllable units only in Mandarin.
3. Unaligned overlap: Is difficulty modulated when first syllables share segments but are
not aligned Surprisingly, alignment did not matter in English or Spanish, and in Mandarin,
the difficulty of production was greater with misaligned (e.g., sha.jun shan.zhuang) than
aligned syllables, despite the absence of a structural effect in 1).
Our findings provisionally speak against the hypothesis that syllable structure guides word encoding
in European languages. We will assess this conclusion in light of other evidence in the literature and
qualitative error analysis. For Mandarin, we present an explicit model in which syllables are primary
phonological encoding units. We explain the indifference to syllable internal structure in Mandarin by
the fact that syllables are whole units, the difficulty engendered by repeating first syllables as due to
difficulty in selecting competing second syllable units, and the unexpected greater difficulty with
unaligned overlap as due to competition between the first syllables themselves. Selection of syllable
tokens emerges as a key cross-linguistic difference between Chinese and Indo-European languages.
Notes
165

P113
Simulating perceptual features during language comprehension
Gerrit Hirschfeld, Christian Dobel & Pienie Zwitserlood
University of Münster, Germany
E-mail: gerrit.hirschfeld@uni-muenster.de
The ultimate goal of language is to "shape events in each others brains" (Pinker, 1994). The research
reported here investigates what kind of information these events entail and their neurobiological
correlates.
The N400 (Kutas & Hilyard, 1980) is often used as a tool to investigate (amodal) semantic
representations in language processing. Recent theories suggest a perceptual basis of these
representations (Barsalou, 1999). In line with this idea, recent ERP studies show earlier (< 200 ms)
effects of language processing on perceptual processes (Hirschfeld, Jansma, Bölte, & Zwitserlood, in
press). We report a behavioral and an MEG experiment investigating how specific these effects are.
Participants read/listened (behavioral experiment/MEG experiment) sentences and had to verify if a
following picture depicted an object mentioned in the sentence or not. We used 84 pictures of 42
different objects each photographed in two shapes (e.g. a flying duck vs. a sitting duck) as targets.
Target pictures (e.g. the flying duck) appeared in three contexts; (1) a match sentence about a duck in
the air, (2) a mismatch sentence about a swimming duck, and (3) an unrelated sentence without any
ducks.
Our behavioral study replicated previous results (Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002), showing
significantly faster reactions when the sentence matched the picture, as compared to the mismatch
condition.
As the MEG experiment is the first of its kind into this effect, our analysis targeted several ERF
components related to object processing. Our analysis so far shows that both the unrelated and the
mismatch condition reliably differ from the match condition. ERFs differed in the standard N400 time
window and at earlier latencies, indicating that not only post-lexical semantic integration is affected
but also perceptual processes.
Taken together our results further validate and detail models of how language is grounded in
perceptual processes.
References
Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. BEHAVIOR BRAIN SCIENCES, 22, 577-660.
Hirschfeld, G., Jansma, B., Boelte, J., & Zwitserlood, P. (in press). Interference and facilitation in
overt speech production investigated with erps. NEUROREPORT.
Kutas, M., & Hillyard, S. a. (1980). Reading senseless sentences - brain potentials reflect semantic
incongruity. Science, 207(4427), 203-205.
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. NY: HarperCollins.
Zwaan, R., Stanfield, R., & Yaxley, R. (2002). Do language comprehenders mentally represent the
shapes of objects PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Notes
166

Integrating simulation and experiment: A study of Japanese second
language acquistion
P114
Lu Gram, & Paula Buttery
University of Cambridge, UK
E-mail: pjb48@cam.ac.uk
Previous work has used a connectionist approach to model the incidental learning of a Japanese-like
language by native English speakers [1]. We show that a computationalist (symbol-manipulating)
approach is also able to model this data. We represent the target language as a Combinatory
Categorial Grammar which we analyse with a probabilistic shift-reduce parser [2]. This models the
performance of the participants. The original experiment considered grammaticality judgements from
two groups. The first group performed a semantic plausibility test on a set of sentances from the
target language prior to making grammaticality judgements. Whereas the second (control) group
performed the judgements without previous exposure. Our parser accounts for the performance of
both groups using the rules of function application, function composition and generalised weakpermutation.
Imperfect learning (such as inattention to the input) is modelled by introducing random
failure during acquisition and parsing. We provide a rationale for this modelling approach through a
discussion of its benefits and its applicability to other data sets.
References
[1] Williams, N.; Kuribara, C., "Comparing a nativist and emergentist approach to the initial stage of
SLA: An investigation of Japanese scrambling", LINGUA, 2007.
[2] Briscoe, T.; Buttery. P., "Linguistic Adaptions for Resolving Ambiguity" in Smith, A. D. M.,
Smith, K., & Ferrer i Cancho, R. (eds). The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 7th
International Conference (EVOLANG7), Barcelona, 2008. Singapore: World Scientific Press.
Notes
167

P115
The classifier-noun agreement in Mandarin Chinese is both semantic and
syntactic: An event-related-potential (ERP) study
Shu-Hua Tsai 1 , Chun-Chieh Hsu 1 , Chin-Lung Yang 2 , Jenn-Yeu Chen 1
1 National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, 2 University of Hong Kong
E-mail: psyjyc@mail.ncku.edu.tw
The semantic nature of the classifier-noun agreement in Mandarin Chinese has been demonstrated in
several linguistic and psycholinguistic studies (e.g., Tai & Wang, 1990; Chen & Wang, 2003). In the
present study, we re-examined the classifier-noun agreement with brain event-related potentials
(ERPs) using a 128-channel EGI system. Experiment 1 used simple noun phrases. Chinese
participants had to determine if a given classifier-noun pairing was adequate (e.g., a zhang chair vs. a
zhi chair). They also judged, in a category task, whether a member and a category went together (e.g.,
furniture-chair vs. animal-chair), and, in a part-of-speech task, whether a modifier-noun pair (e.g.,
new-chair or very-chair) was grammatical. A N400 component with a central focus was elicited in all
three tasks. The magnitude of the effect was in the order of mention. No LAN or P600 component
was elicited in either task. Experiment 2 used complex noun phrases, in which an object-gapped
relative clause was inserted between the classifier and the head noun. The classifier either (1)
matched the long-distance head noun but not the adjacent noun in the relative clause (Match-
LongDistance), or (2) matched neither the long-distance head noun nor the adjacent noun (Mismatch).
In the third (3) condition, the subject noun in the relative clause included a matching classifier, which
was not associated with the head noun (Match-ShortDistance). Each noun phrase was embedded in a
sentence, which was presented one word at at time. Participants judged the grammaticality of the
sentence. The ERPs to the head noun were analyzed. A N4-P6 complex was elicited in the Mismatch
condition relative to the Match-LongDistance and the Match-ShortDistance conditions, which elicited
a P600 component and a N400 component, respectively. The results of the two experiments suggest
that processing of the classifier-noun agreement is both semantic and syntactic, the latter being
engaged later and only when long-distance dependency is involved.
Examples from Experiment 2:
(1) Match-LongDistance
Yi-ke
[ linju zhongzhi de ] guoshu…
one-CL(tree) neighbor planted DE fruit-tree “a fruit-tree which the neighbor planted’
(2) Mismatch
Yi-duo [ linju zhongzhi de ] guoshu ...
one-CL(flower) neighbor planted DE fruit-tree
(3) Match-ShortDistance
Yi-wei [ linju zhongzhi de ] guoshu ...
one-CL(person) neighbor planted DE fruit-tree
Notes
168

P116
Correctly used rule-governed morphemes elicit left anterior negativities
Riadh Lebib, & Andrea Krott
University of Birmingham, UK
E-mail: r.lebib@bham.ac.uk
The storage and processing of morphologically complex words in the mental lexicon is still a matter
of controversial discussion in psycholinguistics. One important issue is whether morphologically
complex words are processed via parsing or via retrieval from memory (parsing for regular forms and
storage for irregular forms), and whether these processes are supported by a single or by a dual
mechanism.
In behavioural studies, effects of full-form frequency on response times for both irregular and regular
wordforms have been taken as evidence for the storage of both irregular and regular wordforms and
therefore for the existence of a single processing mechanism. In contrast, findings of event-related
brain potential (ERP) studies rather support dual-route models. Using violation paradigms, they have
demonstrated a left anterior negativity (LAN) response in a 300-700ms range when morpho-syntactic
rules were misapplied to irregular stems (i.e. attaching a regular suffix), but not when regular stems
were “irregularized” (i.e. attaching an irregular suffix). This effect argues for the storage of irregular
(but not regular) verb forms as full-forms.
Yet ERP studies have mainly focused on low-frequency wordforms. Like irregular wordforms, which
are believed to be stored irrespectively of their frequency, high-frequency regular wordforms are
assumed to be also stored and might therefore be processed like irregular wordforms.
Using both behavioural and ERP techniques, the present study examined whether frequency interacts
with regularity. Participants read German verb participles embedded in sentences. Correctness
judgements on the verbs revealed only an effect of frequency, not regularity, with less frequent forms
being responded to slower and less accurately. Yet electrophysiological data were distinct for the two
verb categories, with correct regular verbs eliciting a LAN when compared to correct irregular verbs.
While low frequency led to an N400 effect, it did not modulate the LAN.
In contrast to the behavioural results, the ERP data suggest processing differences for regular and
irregular German participles. If high-frequency regular forms are indeed stored, their storage does not
affect the occurrence of a LAN. Moreover, LANs appear not only to be a cerebral index for the
misapplication of rules, but can also be elicited by the processing of correctly used rule-governed
morphemes. More generally, these results stress the importance of techniques that provide more
detailed information about morphologically processes, such as electrophysiological measurements.
Notes
169

P117
Role of phonology in the generation of handwritten responses
Xingjia Shen, & Markus F. Damian
University of Bristol, UK
E-mail: r.x.shen@bris.ac.uk
Three accounts of written production have been proposed: 1) a phonological code has to be retrieved
before a word can be written (phonological mediation; e.g., Luria, 1970), 2) graphemic
representations can be directly accessed from conceptual codes (orthographic autonomy; e.g., Rapp et
al., 1997), 3) handwriting is supported both by a direct semantic-graphemic route and an indirect
route via phonology (e.g., Bonin et al., 2001). Two experiments tackled this issue using the implicit
priming task adopted from the spoken production literature (e.g., Meyer, 1991) in which
speakers/writers generate responses based on small sets of prompt-response pairs (“match-candle”)
which they memorise prior to an experimental block. The basic finding with spoken responses is that
if all response words within a block share word-initial phonological content, responses are facilitated
compared to when one or more of the responses begin with a different sound. We adopted the task to
the written domain: participants wrote responses on a graphic tablet which measured response onset
times (i.e., first contact of the stylus with the pad). Experiment 1 included 3 conditions: homogeneous
(cobra, climate, candle), heterogeneous (cobra, giant, candle), and inconsistent such that while the
initial grapheme was homogeneous, the initial phoneme was not (cobra, city, candle). The results
showed significant priming in the homogeneous (603ms (SD167)) relative to the heterogeneous
(642ms (SD143)), and crucially, a similar priming in the inconsistent (594ms (SD142)). Experiment 2
included in the inconsistent condition words for which the initial grapheme was heterogeneous while
the initial phoneme was not (cobra, kayak, candle). Again, significant priming was found between the
homogeneous (697ms (SD120)) and the heterogeneous (730ms (SD135)), but the inconsistent (722ms
(SD116)) showed no such priming. The results indicate a limited role of phonology in the generation
of written responses, and are in line with the predictions from the orthographic autonomy view.
References
Bonin, P., Peereman, R., & Fayol, M. (2001). Do phonological codes constrain the selection of
orthographic codes in written picture naming Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 688-720.
Luria, A. R. (1970). Traumatic aphasia. The Hague: Mouton.
Meyer, A. S. (1991). The time course of phonological encoding in language production: phonological
encoding inside a syllable. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 69-89.
Rapp, B., Benzing, L., & Caramazza, A. (1997). The autonomy of lexical orthography. Cognitive
Neuropsychology, 14, 71-104.
Notes
170

P118
How do we get from print to meaning: SMS shortcuts are not so gr8 at fstr
lexical access
Jane L. Morgan, & Anna R. Weighall
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
E-mail: j.l.morgan@shu.ac.uk
A series of exploratory experiments were run which investigated whether SMS shortcuts are
processed in the same way as real words. These stimuli are of interest because they subvert the usual
psycholinguistic rules yet in many cases seem to access the lexicon effectively. SMS shortcut stimuli
can be constructed such that single graphemes or numbers are used to replace phonological segments
(e.g., L8, nta – for late and enter); or are straightforward abbreviations of the base word (e.g., msg,
fwd for message and forward). Theoretically they provide an interesting tool to investigate the
relative contribution of orthography and phonology to visual word recognition. Given the shortcuts do
not directly correspond to existing orthographic representations the questions of how one gets from
print to sound and the extent to which position coding of individual letters is important in word
recognition arise. Such issues have divided current theories (e.g., Coltheart et al., 2001; Frost, 1998;
Whitney, 2001). These issues were explored using masked priming with a lexical decision task.
Initially, an identity priming experiment was conducted to establish whether the SMS shortcut L8
primes LATE to the same extent as the real word late, compared to an unrelated SMS shortcut or real
word prime ne1, anyone. We found that the SMS shortcut primes behaved differently to the real word
primes as indicated by a significant interaction between prime type and relatedness. The interaction
reflected a negative difference between the means in the related and unrelated conditions when the
SMS shortcut primes were presented (-9 ms) versus a positive 16 ms priming effect for the real
words. Therefore, we found the classic identity priming effect for real words primes but not when
SMS shortcut primes were used. We concluded that the orthographic irregularity of the SMS
shortcuts disrupted any priming effect. Surprisingly, when we explored phonological and semantic
relationships we did not observe the classic priming effects even for real words. However, our stimuli
set were constrained by the everyday vocabulary used in SMS communication. Our data suggest that
factors such as frequency have an important effect upon whether classic priming effects can be
observed and furthermore highlight the difficulties in extending pure psycholinguistic paradigms to
everyday language use.
Notes
171

P119
SRNs and the learning of grammatical agreement: The effect of
target-source order and class overlap
Robert Frank, & William Badecker
Johns Hopkins University, USA
E-mail: rfrank@jhu.edu
As a structurally mediated relation, agreement provides an important test for models of language
learning, such as Simple Recurrent Networks (SRNs), that eschew explicit representations of
syntactic structure and morphosyntactic class (MC). Learning agreement requires identifying which
classes of lexical items co-vary in which contexts. Elman (1993) showed that SRNs learn to predict
properly agreeing verbs following complex subjects when trained to perform word prediction. Since
MCs may be constant (or overlap) across different agreement relations, learners must be able to
generalize a word’s MC from one agreement relation to another. We tested the ability of SRNs to
generalize MC across different agreement relations by training on a corpus of transitive sentences
with English word order that included two MCs of nouns (singular and plural) each inducing subjectverb
agreement (SVA) and determiner-noun agreement (DNA). The corpus included three
determiners: two number-agreeing indefinite determiners (a/some), and a number-invariant definite
determiner. During training, we withheld one singular noun from subject position (though
information about its number was available from its occurrence as an object with the determiner a).
When tested on examples with the held-out noun in subject position with a definite determiner, the
trained networks failed to consistently predict the correct class of verbs, indicating that MC
information in determiner-noun agreement was not used to guide SVA. This failure derives from the
split between the progressive relation in SVA between the subject noun and its target verb versus the
regressive relation in DNA. In the prediction task, progressive agreement yields similar weights from
input units to hidden units for inputs of the same MC, whereas regressive agreement is encoded in
weights between hidden units and output units. The SRN architecture imposes no linkage between
these weights, so it cannot generalize from one agreement type to the other. (The analysis was
verified by inverting the order of the determiner and noun to yield two progressive agreement
relations, which yielded generalization from DNA to SVA as expected.) We obtained similar results
when the MCs relevant in DNA and SVA were overlapping rather than identical. Our results from
these and related studies raise basic questions about the parallelism between progressive and
regressive agreement relations and the ability of SRNs to model our capacity to abstract identical and
overlapping MCs from different agreement relations.
Notes
172

P120
The Visual World paradigm in a complex world
Richard Andersson 1 , Fernanda Ferreira 2 , & John M. Henderson 2
1 Lund University, Sweden, 2 University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: richard.andersson@sol.lu.se
The Visual World Paradigm is probably the most powerful method today to explore the integration of
language, vision and real-world knowledge. Using this paradigm, researchers have found evidence for
tightly time-locked language-driven gaze (Tanenhaus et al 1995), antifipatory eye-movements
(Altmann & Kamide 1999), integration of real-world knowledge (Altmann & Kamide 2007), and
more. However, all experimental setups up until today have used relatively simple stimuli involving a
limited number of objects coupled with fairly simple sentences. In order for these results to generalize
into the real world, they must be tested under conditions more similar to the real-world.
We present the results of an experiment which explored the capacity of the human cognitive system
to integrate language and vision during high information load. Subjects were told to look at the
images, listen to the utterances and afterwards answer the questions. The images presented were
complex real-world scenes with many objects, and the utterances consisted of three sentences of
which the middle sentence mentioned four objects. The main question for the experiment was
whether participants, given complex scenes and heavy sentences, would still show a strong drive to
gaze at all the objects mentioned, which is the corner-stone of the Visual World Paradigm.
To the relief of visual world psycholinguists, the results show that the participants were very
determined to integrate the visual information with the utterance by fixating the mentioned objects.
This drive to integrate the information was so strong that probabilities of fixation peaked as late as
around three seconds after the onset of the object (c.f. 250 ms in Tanenhaus et al 1995). Results also
show that when the processing demands become too great, the integration is down-prioritized and the
probability of fixation drops.
References
Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., Sedivy, J. C. 1995. Integration of visual
and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science (268) pp. 1632.
Altmann, G. T. M., Kamide, Y. 1999. Incremental interpretation at verbs: restricting the domain of
subsequent reference. Cognition (73) pp. 247-264.
Altmann, G. T. M., Kamide, Y. 2007. The real-time mediation of visual attention by language and
world knowledge: Linking anticipatory (and other) eye movements to linguistic processing.
Journal of Memory and Language (57) pp. 502-518.
Notes
173

P121
Selecting and producing names to common nouns: The role of the LIFG in
the ageing brain
Zanna Szlachta, Billi Randall, & Lorraine K. Tyler
University of Cambridge, UK
E-mail: billi@csl.psychol.cam.ac.uk
The processes involved in selecting between competing alternatives have been closely associated with
the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) (Thompson-Schill et al, 1997). Evidence from neuroimaging
studies suggests that this part of the brain becomes more engaged when selection demands are high –
when competing or prepotent responses must be overcome (Moss et al, 2005). Similarly,
neuropsychological studies link damage in the LIFG with poorer performance when selection
demands are high (Thompson-Schill et al, 1998).
Across the normal lifespan, frontal cortex begins to atrophy earlier than many other parts of the brain
(Sowell et al, 2003). This leads to the hypothesis that selection demands will be less successfully met
with increasing age. An alternative view is that cognitive performance across the life span may be
preserved through the process of functional reorganization - with the recruitment of additional brain
regions, possibly in homologous regions in the right hemisphere, or regions surrounding LIFG.
We tested the hypothesis that the LIFG is involved in selection demands by measuring performance
in a speeded naming task to pictures denoting 72 common nouns for 35 adults aged 20-86 years. We
measured the difficulty in selecting an appropriate response for each picture using the H-statistic
(Snodgrass & Vanderwart, 1980), which reflects variation in name agreement and can be taken as an
index of selection difficulty. For each participant we obtained naming latencies for the pictures which
we correlated with their respective HStat statistics. This correlation served as our measure of
sensitivity to competition in the imaging analyses – the higher the correlation, the greater the
sensitivity to competition. We then related this selection performance to age-related neural changes
by correlating it with signal intensity derived from voxel based morphometry of MR scans for each
subject. This method has been previously used to correlate brain and behaviour (Tyler et al)
We found that neural atrophy across the brain increased with age, as has been reported previously.
Naming latencies also increased with age (r(32)=0.37; p

P122
ERP signatures of auxiliary selection in German
Dietmar Roehm 1 , & Antonella Sorace 2
1 Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany,
2 University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: roehm@cbs.mpg.de
The selection of perfective auxiliaries haben ‘have’ and sein ’be’ with intransitive verbs in German
depends on a combination of syntactic, lexical, and semantic factors (Levin & Rappaport Hovav
1995, 2005; van Valin 1990). Recent research has shown that preferences for one auxiliary or the
other systematically vary in strength depending on the semantic type of main verb and the context in
which the auxiliary-verb combination appears (Sorace 2000; Keller & Sorace 2003). Sorace (2000,
2003) has proposed that intransitive verbs are organized in a Split Intransitivity Hierarchy, defined by
two key factors (telicity and agentivity) whose interaction affects the syntax of split intransitivity and
creates gradient auxiliary preferences, ranging from categorical to highly variable.
In two ERP experiments we investigated this hypothesis. Exp. 1 focused on the role of telicity and
addressed the difference between lexically telic verbs ("core unaccusative", e.g. abreisen) and atelic
agentive verbs ("core unergative", e.g. arbeiten), and between telicity inherently encoded in the verb’s
argument structure (e.g. ankommen) and telicity morphologically induced by the presence of a prefix
(e.g. verwelken). Auxiliary selection violations showed a biphasic N400/P600 pattern which was
most pronounced for core verbs. The violations induced a longer positivity for core unergative than
for core unaccusative verbs, indicating a stronger link between BE and telicity than between HAVE
and atelicity. Unprefixed change of state verbs showed no effect, consistent with the interpretation of
these verbs as indeterminate with respect to telicity. Moreover, the N400 was smaller for prefixed
change of state verbs than for change of location verbs, suggesting a difference between inherent and
compositional telicity. Exp. 2 focused on the role of volitional control (subject animacy) and also
investigated the difference between verbs denoting a telic change (e.g. abreisen) and those denoting a
state (e.g. liegen). Stative verbs and verbs of uncontrolled process elicited a N400/P600 for sein.
Verbs of controlled motion only elicited a N400 for haben indicating that both auxiliaries are
acceptable with this verb class but with associated interpretive differences. Animacy effects were
obtained only for stative verbs and verbs of uncontrolled process.
The results are consistent with previous behavioural evidence of gradient variation in auxiliary
selection (Keller & Sorace, 2003) and provide a first picture of the neurocognitive correlates of
auxiliary selection during real-time processing.
Notes
175

P123
Integrating the spatial semantics of verbs and prepositions during
sentence processing
Robert Thornton 1 , Natalie Klein 2 , Elspeth Llewellyn 3 , Martin Hackl 1
1 Pomona College, USA, 2 University of Rochester, USA, 3 Scripps College
E-mail: rt004747@pomona.edu
Psycholinguistic studies of semantic processing often focus on how semantics influences syntactic
processing, but we know little about how comprehenders build a componential semantic
representation in real time. Several recent studies have addressed this issue by examining enriched
semantic composition, a process in which the meaning of a word is coerced to meet the semantic
restrictions of other words in the sentence (e.g., McElree et al., 2001; Piñango et al., 1999). We built
on that work by examining how spatial information from verbs and prepositions is integrated,
enriched, and interpreted in real time. We focused specifically on how one source of spatial
information, directionality, determines spatial interpretation.
In English, two main classes of locative PPs can be distinguished: PATH PPs, which provide
directional meaning by specifying a path along which an event unfolds, and PLACE PPs, which
simply specify a location. Similarly, motion VPs can either be directional, requiring a PATH to be
specified, or non-directional, without that requirement. In a self-paced reading experiment, we
examined how spatial information is integrated by manipulating VP and PP directionality.
(1) Directional VPs:
a. PATH PP: To protect her nest, the bird darted to the hunter just now.
b. PLACE PP: To protect her nest, the bird darted at the hunter just now.
(2) Non-directional VPs:
a. PATH PP: Because he woke up early, the child wandered to the school last Tuesday.
b. PLACE PP: Because he woke up early, the child wandered at the school last Tuesday.
Of particular interest is what happens when the spatial type of the PP and VP mismatch, as in 1b and
2a. For example, "at" is typically non-directional, specifying a PLACE. However, in the phrase
"darted at," the VP is inherently directional and requires a PATH. On a coercion account, "darted"
coerces the meaning of "at" into specifying a bounded path along which the agent traveled, resulting
in a processing cost. An alternative is that "at" is ambiguous and can accommodate either
interpretation easily with no cost.
We found significantly longer RTs at the preposition for both mismatch conditions. We ruled out a
number of frequency-based explanations of our data leaving semantic coercion (e.g., Jackendoff,
1997; Pustejovsky, 1995) as the only explanation for the RT increase. The fact that a mismatch in
directionality causes semantic coercion suggests that in cases of mismatch directionality always wins,
supporting the idea that directionality is built from simpler spatial representations.
Notes
176

An EPG investigation of auditory interference on speech execution
P124
Ivan Yuen, Kathleen Rastle, & Marc Brysbaert
Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
E-mail: ivan.yuen@rhul.ac.uk
Evidence regarding the relationship between phonological encoding and motor execution in speech
production is conflicting. Damian (2003) argued for a staged model of speech production, whereas
Goldrick & Blumstein (2006) and Kello, Plaut & MacWhinney (2000) favoured a cascaded view. Our
study contributed to this debate by using electropalatography to examine the effect of unselected
auditory distractors (e.g., /tup/) on the production of visually-presented nonword targets (e.g.,
KOOP).
On each trial of our experiment, participants heard a sequence of five 50ms beeps at regular intervals
of 500 ms. They were presented with a target nonword on the fourth beep and were instructed to
produce it on the fifth beep. This target was preceded immediately by a congruent or incongruent
auditory distractor. Targets always began with a /k/ or /s/. Incongruent distractors began with /t/ and
shared the rime of the target stimuli, while congruent distractors comprised a perfect match to the
target. Tongue-palate contact for target productions was measured during the closure of /k/ and during
the frication of /s/. Results showed a statistically significant effect of the auditory distractors on the
degree of tongue-palate contact for both targets, with the incongruent /t/ distractors inducing greater
contact in the alveolar region for productions of /k/ and /s/. This effect was restricted to early portions
of the annotated regions.
These findings support the cascaded view because they show that information about unselected
auditory distractors can ‘leak’ to the motor system during the execution of a planned speech target.
Further, the findings suggest that the interference effect occurred fairly early in the planned
movement, and was possibly corrected by some ‘control’ mechanism later on.
References
Damian, M. (2003). Articulatory duration in single-word speech production. Journal of Experimental
Psychology, 29, 416-431.
Goldrick, M., & Blumstein, S. (2006). Cascading activation from phonological planning to
articulatory processes: Evidence from tongue twisters. Language and Cognitive Processes, 21,
649-683.
Kello, C., Plaut, D., & MacWhinney, B. (2000). The task dependence of staged versus cascaded
processing: an empirical and computational study of Stroop interference in speech production.
Journal of Experimental Psychology, 129, 340-360.
Notes
177

P125
Prosody and attachment in a double-PP construction in Hebrew
Ronit Webman, Janet D. Fodor, & Eva M. Fernández
The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA
E-mail: rwebman@gc.cuny.edu
Experimental studies have begun to map out regularities at the syntax-prosody interface. Our research
contributes data from Hebrew on a construction rarely studied from this perspective. It has a sequence
of two prepositional phrases in which PP1 must attach low, inside the preceding NP, but PP2
attachment is ambiguous.
1. Dana VP[teara et ha-kšayim PP1[be-nisue-ha PP2[la-šadran (ha-mefursam)
Dana described the difficulties in marriage her to the broadcaster (the famous)
PP2 can attach maximally high to VP (as an argument of “described”) or maximally low to the NP
inside PP1 (modifying “marriage”). For the high attachment reading, alignment principles (Selkirk
2000) predict an intermediate prosodic phrase boundary at the left of PP2 due to syntactic right edges
there (closure of direct object and the PP1 and NP inside it). For the low attachment reading, no
boundary is predicted at the left of PP2 unless it is induced by other factors (e.g., constituent length).
We examined this hypothesis in a combined production-comprehension study, with target sentences
like (1)—whose two meanings were judged equi-plausible in pre-tests—with PP2 either short (1
prosodic word) or long (2-3 prosodic words). Items (24 targets, 48 fillers) were presented on a single
line of a computer screen. Native speakers (N=40) read each sentence aloud, then saw two phrases
(“described to broadcaster”; “marriage to broadcaster”), and chose the one most closely related to the
meaning of the sentence. Two trained listeners assessed the location of prosodic breaks using ToBIlike
coding.
PP2 length had a strong effect on the produced prosody. Of the target sentences uttered with a
prosodic break anywhere in the sentence (N=635, 66% of all recordings), short-PP2 materials favored
a break before PP1 (68.0%), while long-PP2 materials favored a break before PP2 (88.7%).
PP2 length affected comprehension as well. High attachment of PP2 was more likely for long-PP2
(56.4%) than short-PP2 materials (46.4%), replicating length effects observed with other
constructions and in other languages.
But comprehension was also closely related to produced prosody, even more strongly than to PP2-
length. Utterances produced with a break only before PP1 had a substantially smaller high attachment
rate (39.7%) than utterances produced with a break only before PP2 (60.3%).
Subsequent investigation will confirm cause and effect in this relationship, but the current data
suggest that attachee-length affects prosodic phrasing, and prosodic phrasing affects attachment
preference.
Notes
178

P126
The role of prosody in on- and off-line sentence processing: The case of
subject- and object-control verbs
Sara Bögels 1 , Herbert Schriefers 1 , Wietske Vonk 2 , Dorothee J. Chwilla 1 , & Roel Kerkhofs 3
1 NICI, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 2 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics,
Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 3 CLS, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
E-mail: S.bogels@nici.ru.nl
Locally ambiguous sentences, containing two different types of control verbs, were presented
auditorily in an off-line fragment completion (up to*) and an on-line ERP study:
1. a) De leerling bekende de leraar te hebben*gespiekt.
The pupil confessed to the teacher to have cheated.
b) De leerling bekende de leraar te hebben*opgesloten.
The pupil confessed to have locked the teacher up.
2. a) De chirurg adviseerde de vrouw te*slapen.
The surgeon advised the woman to sleep
b) De chirurg adviseerde de vrouw te*ondersteunen.
The surgeon advised to support the woman.
A subject-control (SC) verb (as in (1), confess) has a subject (the pupil) that is also the understood
subject of the disambiguating infinitival verb. An object-control (OC) verb (as in (2), advise) has an
object (the woman in (2a) or implicit in (2b)) that is the understood subject of the disambiguating
verb. All sentences either contained a prosodic break (PB) after the control verb or not. In (a), a PB
suggests that the teacher or the woman is NOT the indirect object of the control verb, but this
syntactic expectation is eventually contradicted by the fact that the verbs cheat and sleep are
intransitive. By contrast, in (b), a PB agrees with the eventual syntactic analysis, because the verbs
lock up and support are obligatorily transitive.
The fragment completion study revealed a large preference for intransitive completions in OC
sentences and a smaller preference for transitive completions in SC sentences. Moreover, the PB
shifted the preference slightly to more transitive completions in both cases.
The ERP study showed a Closure Positive Shift in response to the PB. Furthermore, SC sentences
yielded an N400 effect for intransitive as compared to transitive disambiguating verbs, both for
sentences with and without a PB. This result suggests that the default preference for subject-control
verbs goes in the same direction as the effect of the PB. In contrast, OC sentences also yielded an
N400 effect for intransitive as compared to transitive disambiguating verbs, however, only when a PB
was present. This indicates that a PB can be sufficient to determine the syntactic analysis of a
sentence. These results show that SC and OC verbs are processed differently, and thus extend
previous work by Steinhauer et al. (1999) who studied similar sentences in German, but implicitly
assumed that SC and OC verbs are processed in the same way.
References
Steinhauer, K., Alter, K., & Friederici, A. D. (1999). Brain potentials indicate immediate use of
prosodic cues in natural speech processing. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 191-196.
Notes
179

P127
Processing differences between anaphora and cataphora: Evidence from
oscillatory brain activity
Sibylle Mohr, Hamutal Kreiner, Klaus Kessler, & Simon Garrod
University of Glasgow, UK
E-mail: s.mohr@psy.gla.ac.uk
Both anaphora [a] and cataphora [b] establish a relationship between a pronoun and a noun. However,
they obviously differ regarding the order in which pronoun and co-referential noun appear, entailing
an important difference in discourse alignment (Kazanina et al., 2007). This difference may restrict
the referential search mechanisms for an optimal antecedent in cataphoric vs. anaphoric contexts.
Kazanina et al. (2007) suggests that the parser initiates an active search for an optimal antecedent
when processing intra-sentential cataphora, similar to the Active Filler Strategy proposed for fillergap
dependencies (Frazier and Clifton, 1989). In two EEG-experiments, we investigated processing
differences between anaphora and cataphora using a gender mismatch manipulation ([a], [b]),
previously shown to illuminate the processes underlying reference resolution (e.g. van Gompel &
Liversedge, 2003; Osterhout et al.,1997).
[a] Yesterday the ‘king’ left London after reminding ‘himself/herself’ about the letter.
[b] After reminding ‘himself/herself’ about the letter, the ‘king’ immediately went to the
meeting at the office.
Stimulus-specific modulations of EEG oscillations in certain frequency bands have been shown to
reflect cognitive parameters in language processing (van Berkum et al., 2005; Hagoort et al., 2004).
We examined brain responses to gender mismatches (‘king’-‘herself’ compared with ‘king’-
‘himself’) by means of Time-Frequency-Representations (TFRs) to determine whether distinctive
oscillatory modulations are linked to context-dependent resolution strategies in anaphora vs.
cataphora. Experiment 1 used anaphora sentences [a] and showed increased oscillatory activity in
frontal electrodes in the gamma (30-80 Hz) range for the mismatching compared to the matching
condition. Experiment 2 used cataphora sentences [b] and showed a comparable increase in the same
band, but here the mismatch effect was much stronger and was confined to central electrodes.
Analyses of power spectrum and TFR therefore reveal distinctive patterns for anaphora and cataphora
sentences associated with distinct amplitudes and electrode locations. Induced gamma-band activity
may reflect underlying feature-binding processes (‘binding’ gamma rhythm; Engel & Singer, 2001)
and has been related to arousal, perceptual integration, working memory, and language processing.
Our findings suggest a qualitative difference in feature-binding between cataphora and anaphora.
Notes
180

P128
The filler may be a gentleman: Local coherence effect in long-distance
dependency processing
Zhenguang Cai, Martin J. Pickering, & Patrick Sturt
University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: s0782345@sms.ed.ac.uk
In the literature of long-distance dependency processing, it is relatively uncontroversial that the parser
integrates a filler into the string as soon as possible1, 2. Also, it has been demonstrated that the parser
is reluctant to reanalyze3. However, a recent study4 shows that the parser tends to reanalyze its initial
analysis when there is a locally coherent, though globally incompatible, structure, e.g., reanalyze the
object the player in “The coach smiled at the player tossed a frisbee” as the subject of tossed. The
present study presents a similar local coherence effect in long-distance dependency processing. We
examined sentences like (1a), where the filler John is the object of the verb threatened, and the NP the
neighbour is the subject of the main clause. According to current theories, the filler John would be
integrated as the object as soon as the verb threatened is encountered, and the neighbour would be
treated as the subject of a new clause and would not be considered as the object of the preceding verb.
We conducted a self-paced reading experiment (48 subjects, 24 items) with a 2 (construction: the
ambiguous object cleft (1a,b) vs the unambiguous subject cleft (1c,d)) * 2 (comma) design. We
predicted that if the parser considers the neighour as the object of threatened, there will be a filled-gap
effect at the region the neighbour in (1a) but not in the other conditions. ANOVAs show that at the
neighbour there is an interaction between construction and comma (p1=.077, p2=.009). The
interaction is driven by longer RTs in (1a) (849 ms) than in (1c) (755 ms) (p1=.04, p2=.013); there is
no significant difference between (1b) (709 ms) and (1d) ) (725 ms) (Fs

P129
(Ir)regularity of verbs revisited: Evidence for a lexical entry complexity
based account
Denisa Bordag 1 , Helena Trompelt 2 , & Thomas Pechmann 1
1 University of Leipzig, Germany, 2 University of Potsdam, Germany
E-mail: trompelt@uni.leipzig.de
According to the Dual-Route Model (Pinker, 1998; Clahsen, 1999), regular forms are composed of a
stem and suffixes whereas irregular forms are stored as ready-made entries. We investigated three
groups of German verbs in past and present to test whether (ir)regularity effects are bound to
individual forms or whole inflectional paradigms.
German regular verbs (spielen [play], spielt, spielte) have only one stem and completely regular
conjugation. Irregular verbs have several stems and irregular forms in both tenses (brechen [break],
bricht, brach). Mixed verbs also have several stems, but their present conjugation is completely
regular, while their past forms are irregular (singen [sing], singt, sang).
In Experiment 1, participants produced the 3rd person singular of regular, mixed, and irregular verbs
(in a sentential context) in the tense that was triggered by the colour of the presented infinitive.
The analyses revealed that regular verbs in the present tense were significantly faster than all the
other groups. Irregular verbs in the present and past tense and mixed verbs in the past (i.e. the groups
with the irregular forms) were slowest and did not differ statistically from each other. Regular verbs
in the past and mixed verbs in the present tense did not differ from each other, but differed both from
the fastest group and the three slowest groups.
In Experiment 2 we replicated the findings with a picture naming paradigm – a task that involves
conceptualisation and avoids possible priming between the presented and elicited forms. The results
corresponded to those of Experiment 1 with differences expected due to the changes of the paradigm.
Crucially, the present forms of both mixed and irregular verbs were produced more slowly (and did
not differ statistically) than the regular present forms of the regular verbs.
We argue that postulating two different mechanisms for the processing of regular and irregular
inflection cannot account for all data, in particular not for the fact that even regular forms of mixed
verbs are produced more slowly than regular forms of the regular verbs. We propose that the crucial
explanatory factor is the complexity of the lexical entry: If a verb has multiple stems (irregular and
mixed verbs), the retrieval of the appropriate one takes longer than the retrieval of a single stem entry
(regular verbs).
References
Clahsen, H. (1999). Lexical entries and rules of language: A multi-disciplinary study of German
inflection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 991-1060.
Pinker, S. (1998). Words and rules. Lingua, 106, 219
Notes
182

P130
The processing of negated sentences in Turkish learners of French: A
preference for scope-to-the-right
Sarah Schimke
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
E-mail: sarah.schimke@mpi.nl
In verb-raising languages such as French, finite verbs precede the negator (1a), which then has scope
to the left. This placement has been shown to be difficult for beginning adult learners: they often
produce pre-verbal negation in utterances with (ungrammatical) non-finite main verbs (1d), and
occasionally also with finite verbs (1b). This preference was also found in learners whose first
language has no pre-verbal negation, as Turkish. In line with this observation, Schimke (2008) found
that beginning Turkish learners were slower in processing post- than pre-verbal negation in a selfpaced
listening study in German, in which equivalents of sentences 1a-d were used. Native speakers
were slower when listening to sentences 1c-d than 1a.
The current study tested the same sentence types in a self-paced listening task with Turkish learners
of French. In contrast to German, infinitives are not homophone with any finite verb form in French,
so that they cannot be perceived as agreement errors as might have been the case in the study on
German. Moreover, in French, less elements can be introduced between the verb and the negator than
in German, which might favour the acquisition of post-verbal negation and the ease of its processing
in French.
Results show that both learners and a native speaker control group listened more slowly to the verb
and negator-region in 1b/d than 1a/c. On the following segments however, native speakers were faster
after post-verbal negation with finite, but after pre-verbal negation with non-finite verbs. Learners
were slower on the segments following post- than pre-verbal negation irrespective of verb type, as
had been the case in the study on German. We suggest that the slower processing of the segments
following post-verbal negation is due to learners having difficulties in finding the elements that are in
the scope of the negator. In contrast, the interaction effect for native speakers suggests that they are
influenced by grammaticality rather than scope-direction. Finally, the initial slow-down in sentence
types 1b and d suggests that frequencies of word orders also influence processing ease.
1a Le garcon écrit (fin) pas à sa tante.
The boy writes not to his aunt.
1b *Le garçon pas écrit à sa tante.
1c *Le garçon écrire pas à sa tante.
1d *Le garçon pas écrire (inf) à sa tante.
References
Schimke, S. (2008). Grammatical versus semantically transparent word order in negated sentences:
Comparing production, imitation,and processing in Turkish learners of German. Poster at 21st
CUNY Conference on human sentence processing.
Notes
183

P131
The role of prosody in discovering hierarchical structure in
continous speech
Alan Langus 1 , Erika Marchetto 1 , Ricardo A.H. Bion 1 , & Marina Nespor 2
1
SISSA, Trieste, Italy, 2 University Milano Bicocca, Italy
E-mail: langus@sissa.it
Processes triggered by the speech signal play a central role in the acquisition of spoken language
(Morgan & Demuth, 1996). It has, nevertheless, been assumed that the acoustic properties of human
speech do not contain transparent cues for different syntactic levels and are therefore insufficient for
acquiring the hierarchical structure of syntactic representations (e.g. Shaffran & Wilson, 2003).
Consistent and systematic cues for some syntactic structures do however exist in prosody (Nespor &
Vogel, 1986) and infants as young as 10-months have been shown to exploit Intonational as well as
Phonological Phrase boundaries to constrain lexical access (e.g. Gout, Christophe & Morgan, 2004).
Nevertheless, in order to develop an account of signal driven acquisition of syntax, it is additionally
important to show that humans can use the prosodic cues also for keeping track of the hierarchical
structure present in the continuous speech stream.
To test this possibility, we habituated adult native speakers of Italian with an artificial stream of
nonsense syllables for two minutes. The stream was structured both at the level of “words” as well as
“sentences”. The “words” were tri-syllabic nonsense sequences following long-distance dependency
rules, while the “sentences” contained two “words” and adhered to different sets of long-distance
dependencies. Importantly, the “words” and “sentences” could only be extracted in case participants
made use of the prosodic information that marked: (a) each word by an increase in duration of the
word-final syllable, and (b) each sentence with a declining pitch contour.
In the test phase of the experiments, participants were queried either for words or sentences with a
forced choice between two sequences of syllables: (a) one following the long-distance dependency
rule, but with a novel surface form; and (b) one that violated both the long-distance dependency, but
was present in the habituation stream.
Our results show that participants chose significantly more syllable sequences that followed the longdistance
dependency rule (that could only be extracted using the prosodic cues), than syllable
sequences they actually heard during the habituation violating the rule. These findings demonstrate
that humans are finely tuned to processing prosodic information, keeping track of both segmental as
well as hierarchical information. The results are discussed in the light of recent advances in the
understanding of the role prosody plays in the bootstrapping of syntax.
Notes
184

P132
Perceptual simulations of negated binary-state sentences
Sarah E. Anderson 1 , Simone N. Zuares 2 , & Michael J. Spivey 1
1 University of California, USA, 2 Cornell University, USA
E-mail: sec57@cornell.edu
Experimental findings support that comprehension of textual information is tied to the creation of
perceptual simulations (Barsalou, 1999; Zwaan et al., 2002), but the comprehension of negated
sentences does not seem to use these perceptual simulations in the same way. Kaup et al. (2007)
presented participants with sentences like, “The eagle was not in the sky,” and asked participants to
make judgments about whether a subsequently presented picture was mentioned in the sentence they
had just read. If the perceptual simulation process can implement negation on its own, then
participants should be quicker to respond “yes” to pictures that match the sentence, i.e., an eagle with
its wings folded. Quite the opposite, they found that when participants read negated sentences,
response times to a picture that did not match the negated sentence (showing the eagle in the air) were
faster than pictures that did match the negated sentence, suggesting that a perceptual simulation of the
affirmative version of the situation was being created in response to a negated sentence.
However, it may be the case that when participants read a negated sentence, they do create a
perceptual simulation of the negation, but the pictures they were asked to respond to did not capture
that simulation. For example, instead of simulating an eagle with its wings folded, perhaps
participants simulate one of a number of other activities the eagle performs when not in the air. In the
current research, we tested this hypothesis using the same experimental paradigm used by Kaup et al.
(2007), but using items that can only be in one of two states, such as a coin that can be heads up or
tails up only. If participants can incorporate negation into their perceptual simulation, such binary
state objects should constrain the range of perceptual simulations possible, and we should see faster
reaction times to pictures of the negated situation. We found a reliable interaction in which
affirmative sentences elicited faster reaction times to pictures that corresponded to that described state
(e.g., Zwaan et al., 2002) and the negated versions of those same sentences elicited the reverse pattern
for the same pairs of pictures, F(1,29)=p

P133
Priming of syntactic attachment between prepositional phrases and
relative clauses
Maaike Loncke, Sébastien Van Laere, & Timothy Desmet
Ghent University, Belgium
E-mail: Maaike.Loncke@ugent.be
Recently, it was shown that the (high vs. low) attachment in a relative clause attachment ambiguity
(“Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony”) is susceptible to priming. Using
sentence completion, Scheepers (Cognition2003) and Desmet and Declercq (JML2006) found that
participants produced more high-attached relative clauses in target sentences after high-attachment
primes than after low-attachment primes.
The syntactic information related to relative clause attachment ambiguity cannot be tied to specific
lexical entries and should therefore be represented at a more abstract syntactic level. Scheepers (2003)
suggested that people keep a mental record of the exact sequence in which the phrase structure rules
are applied. Desmet and Declercq (2006) suggested that the effect could be due to activation of more
general sentence processing principles, such as late closure or predicate proximity, which are not
necessarily tied to specific phrase structure rules.
The present experiment aimed to discriminate between these two explanations. If priming of general
processing principles underlies the relative clause attachment priming effect, then the application of
these principles in another syntactic structure should also prime relative clause attachments. However,
if the priming effect is caused by the activation of sequences of specific syntactic phrase structure
rules, then we should not find a priming effect over syntactic structures, as these rules differ between
structures.
We tested whether a prepositional phrase attachment could prime an ambiguous relative clause
attachment as well as another relative clause attachment could. We used prime sentences that forced
to attach either a relative clause or a prepositional phrase and to attach it either high or low. Target
sentences contained an ambiguous relative pronoun, and could thus be completed with a high as well
as a low attached relative clause.
Targets were completed more often with a high attachment relative clause after a high attachment
prime (M = 29.36%) than after a low attachment prime (M = 22.64%), F1(1,43) = 4.27, p = .045;
F2(1,23) = 12.70, p = .002. Target attachment was not influenced by prime structure (prepositional
phrase vs. relative clause), Fs < 1. There was no interaction between prime attachment and prime
structure (F1(1,43) = 1.34, p = .253; F2(1,23) = 1.06, p = .313).
These results can be explained by the activation of more general syntactic procedures (Desmet &
Declercq, 2006) but not by the activation of sequences of phrase structure rules (Scheepers, 2003).
Notes
186

P134
Verb repetition is not required for structural priming in L2 English
production in Japanese-English bilinguals
Sunfa Kim, Gail Mauner, & Jean-Pierre Koenig
The State University of New York at Buffalo, USA
E-mail: sunfakim@buffalo.edu
Repetition of verbs is typically not required to observe structural priming in language production. For
example, Flett et al. (2004) observed L2 to L2 structural priming for Spanish actives and passives in
English-Spanish bilinguals when verbs varied across primes and targets. However, Matsumoto and
Yamashita (2006) observed L2 to L2 structural priming for English double object and dative
sentences in Japanese-English bilinguals only when verbs were repeated across primes and targets.
Matsumoto and Yamashita proposed that for Japanese-English bilinguals, L2 English syntactic
information is not shared across verbs but rather is stored on individual verbs. One crucial difference
between these studies is that English (L1) has active and passive constructions while Japanese (L1)
has a dative but no double object construction. In cases where constructional alternation does not
exist in L1, L2 learners may represent L2 constructions on a verb by verb basis as Tomasello (2001)
has proposed for children’s early syntactic acquisition. We investigated whether L2 to L2 structural
priming would be observed for English active and passive sentences in Japanese-English bilinguals
when verbs vary across primes and targets. Both Japanese (L1) and English (L2) have active and
passive constructions. Structural priming should only be observed if syntactic representations are
shared across verbs in L2. In addition, we examined whether thematic role assignment influences
sentence formulation in bilinguals as it does in monolinguals (Melinger, 2006). Specifically, we
examined whether more passives would be produced after unaccusative primes (patient subject: The
teacher arrived early) and more actives after unergative primes (agent subject: The girl skated
gracefully).
Japanese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals read aloud English active, passive,
unaccusative, or unergative prime sentences and then described a 2-participant picture in English
using an auditorily presented verb which differed from the prime verb. Both groups produced more
passive structures after passive primes than after active primes, but only L1 English speakers
produced more passives after unaccusative primes. Thus Japanese-English bilinguals demonstrated
sensitivity to the syntactic structure of English prime sentences but not to the thematic roles assigned
to subject NPs. These results indicate that when a syntactic alternation is present in both L1 and L2,
L2 syntactic representations are shared across verbs in L2 even though surface word order differs
dramatically between Japanese and English.
Notes
187

P135
Mental representation and processing of nominal compounds: Evidence
from constituent priming in Italian
Davide Crepaldi 1 , Marco Marelli 2 , & Claudio Luzzatti 2
1 Royal Holloway University of London, UK, 2 Universita’ di Milano-Bicocca, Italy
E-mail: davide.crepaldi@rhul.ac.uk
Most studies on compound processing were performed in English and Dutch, languages that admit
only head-final compounds: as a consequence, the effect of headedness might have been confounded
with that of constituent position (but see [1]). Italian is ideally suited to address this issue, as Noun-
Noun compounds can be either head-initial or head-final, with neither structure being clearly
dominant over the other. The present study aims at disentangling the roles of semantic transparency,
headedness and constituent position in the processing of Italian compound nouns.
Thirty-two neurologically intact subjects participated in a priming experiment (SOA=300ms) with a
lexical decision task. Forty-eight Noun-Noun compounds were selected as probes; they were either
transparent or opaque (e.g., fotocopia, photocopy, vs boccaporto, hatch, lit. mouth+harbour) and
head-initial or head-final (e.g., fotocopia vs capobanda, ring-leader, lit. chief+gang). The four groups
of probes were matched for length, surface frequency and stem frequency. Each compound probe was
primed by both its initial and its final constituent in separate runs; constituent primes were matched
with orthographically similar control words (e.g., capo, chief vs. caso, chance) for length, surface
frequency, stem frequency and orthographic neighbourhood.
The ANOVA showed a first-level priming effect, with no significant interaction. The
planned-comparison t-tests showed that the facilitation effect is modulated by headedness and
constituent position, i.e. there is no difference when the head or the modifier were primed in
head-initial compounds, while the head elicited a greater effect in head-final compounds (see Figure).
The presence of a priming effect with all kinds of targets suggests that constituents of Italian Noun-
Noun compounds are automatically accessed, independently of semantic transparency, constituent
position and headedness. However, the latter two factors do modulate constituent priming, with
greater effects elicited by the morphological head in head-final compounds; this seems to indicate that
while head-final compounds have a hierarchical head-modifier representation, head-initial
compounds do not.
References
[1] Jarema G. et al. (1999). Processing compounds: A crosslinguistic study. Brain and Language, 68,
362–369.
188

FIGURE: Priming effect plotted against the position of the primed constituent (X axis) and the
compound type (separate lines).
90
70
t(46) = 0.98
n.s.
Priming effect (ms)
50
t(46) = 2.12
p

P136
Do readers try to salvage incorrect sentences An ERP-study
Els Severens, & Robert J. Hartsuiker
Ghent University, Belgium
E-mail: els.severens@ugent.be
Errors of subject-verb number agreement sometimes occur in spontaneous speech and writing, and
thus readers can encounter errors like “the bag with the letters were printed with the logo of the Royal
Mail”. How does the language comprehension system react when confronted with a verb that does not
match with the subject in number It is possible that the reader computes agreement with the first
noun phrase, which is the subject in canonical sentences of English and Dutch, detects a number
clash, and perceives an error. However, it is also possible that upon detection of the number clash, the
parser adopts an alternative, non-canonical analysis, which would (temporarily) salvage grammatical
correctness. This is possible for the Dutch translation of “the bag with the letters were...”, which can
be completed with a post-verbal subject (“...they missing", meaning "they were missing the bag with
the letters"). According to this account, error perception can be delayed until the sentence is
disambiguated between canonical/erroneous and noncanoncial/correct (“printed” in the example).
To test this, we presented participants with Dutch sentences containing agreement errors and
measured the on-line effects on comprehension using EEG. We used a distributive (De postzegel op
de brieven is/zijn bedrukt [The stamp on the letters is/are printed]) or nondistributive subject (De
fietstas met de brieven is/zijn bedrukt [The bag with the letters is/are printed]). Distributive sentences,
in which the subject is notionally plural, elicit more errors (plural verbs) than non-distributive
sentences in production (e.g., Vigliocco et al., 1996); one thus might expect this factor to modulate
the brain response to agreement errors in comprehension (with a weaker response for distributive
sentences). But importantly, a self-paced reading pretest demonstrated that it is easier to process postverbal
subjects following the non-distributive noun phrases. If readers can adopt such an analysis to
salvage grammatical well-formedness, they should be more likely to do so in the non-distributive
condition. This instead predicts delayed brain responses to violations in non-distributive sentences.
In the distributive condition we found a LAN and a P600 for the incorrect verbs compared to the
correct verbs, consistent with other ERP studies that presented morphosyntactic violations.
Importantly, in the non-distributive condition (which more readily allows a post-verbal subject) there
was no LAN or P600, but there was a LAN on the (disambiguating) word following the incorrect
verb. These findings thus confirm the view that the parser rather adopts a noncanonical but
grammatically correct analysis, than a canonical analysis with a grammatical violation.
References
Vigliocco, G., Hartsuiker, R. J., Jarema, G., & Kolk, H. H. J. (1996). One or more labels on the
bottles Notional concord in Dutch and French. Language and Cognitive Processes, 11(4), 407-
442.
Notes
190

Self-paced listening with picture verification: A new paradigm to
investigate on-line sentence processing in children and adults
P137
Theodoros Marinis, Vasiliki Chondrogianni, & Halit Firat
University of Reading, UK
E-mail: t.marinis@reading.ac.uk
This paper presents a novel paradigm that was designed to provide a child-friendly procedure to
investigate on-line sentence comprehension in typically and atypically developing monolingual (L1)
and bilingual (L2) children. The task combines self-paced listening with picture verification.
Participants first see a picture on the computer screen in order to create a mental representation of the
scene. Then they listen to a sentence in a segment-by-segment fashion by pressing a button while the
picture remains on the computer screen. Reaction Times (RTs) are recorded for each segment
similarly to a self-paced listening task. Half of the sentences match the picture and for the other half
there is a mismatch between the sentence and the picture. At the end of each sentence, participants are
asked whether there was a match or a mismatch between the sentence and the picture. This keeps
participants on task, and provides off-line data on how accurate they are in comprehending the
sentences.
We used this task to investigate how L1 and L2 children and adults process actives/passives and
pronouns/reflexives in real-time. Match/mismatch was compared through a minimal pair. In the task
with actives/passives, this involved the inflectional suffixes of the present/past participle, as shown in
(1) and (2) below.
(1) I think/that/the zebra/was kissing/the camel/at the zoo/last Monday
(2) I think/that/the zebra/was kissed/by the camel/at the zoo/last Monday
Until the verb, it is ambiguous as to whether there is a match or mismatch between the picture and the
sentence. The disambiguating information is encoded in the inflectional suffix of the participle (–
ing/–ed) which constitutes the critical segment in this experiment. The rationale of the task is that RTs
in the mismatch condition of the critical segment will be longer than in the matching condition if
participants process the morpho-syntactic information and assign thematic roles rapidly before the
end of the sentence. This was borne out in both experiments. In the critical segment, mismatch
conditions showed significantly longer RTs than matching conditions. The present talk will introduce
the task, present data on actives/passives and pronouns/reflexives from 20 adults, 30 6;9-8;9 year old
English L1 children, and 28 6;10-8;8 year-old children with English as L2, and will discuss the
advantages and disadvantages of this task compared to other tasks (word-monitoring, self-paced
listening, cross-modal priming) that have been used in the past to investigate on-line sentence
processing in children.
Notes
191

P138
The representation of L2 syntax is influenced by second-language
proficiency: Evidence from cross-linguistic syntactic priming
Sarah Bernolet 1 , Marloes Bressers 2 , Robert J. Hartsuiker 1 , & Martin J. Pickering 3
1 Ghent University, Belgium, 2 Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands,
3 University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: sarah.bernolet@ugent.be
Evidence from cross-linguistic syntactic priming suggests that bilinguals can share syntactic
representations across languages (e.g., Bernolet, Hartsuiker & Pickering, 2007; Hartsuiker, Pickering
& Veltkamp, 2004). The current study investigates how these shared representations are established
in late learners of a second language. Specifically, are representations of syntactic structures in a
second language (L2) immediately collapsed with similar structures of the first language (L1) when
they are learned or are they initially represented separately
In order to investigate this question, we studied within- and between-language syntactic priming for
English genitives (the ball of the boy is green (of-genitive) vs. the boy’s ball is green (Saxon
genitive)) in late Dutch-English bilinguals. The bilinguals in our study learned their L2 around the
same age and they all lived in an L1 dominant environment. They only differed in their level of selfrated
L2 proficiency, on the basis of which they were divided in two proficiency groups. Experiment
1 (L2-L2) showed within-language priming of English genitives for both less proficient (48.7%
priming) and more proficient bilinguals (54.5% priming). In Experiment 2 (L1-L2), the English
genitives were primed with Dutch genitives that are identical to their English equivalent or slightly
different: The of-genitive is identical in both languages (the ball of the boy – de bal van de jongen),
while the Dutch and the English Saxon genitive differ in their realization of the possessive marker
(the boy’s ball – de jongen zijn bal). In this experiment, the between-language priming effect
interacted with the participant’s proficiency level: For less proficient bilinguals, no between-language
priming was observed (1.5%), while for more proficient bilinguals, significant cross-linguistic
priming (25.9%) between Dutch and English genitives was obtained. Hence, our results indicate that
there is a shift from separate syntactic representations for L2 structures in less proficient late
bilinguals to shared representations in more proficient late bilinguals.
References
Bernolet, S., Hartsuiker, R. J., & Pickering, M. J. (2007). Shared syntactic representations in
bilinguals: Evidence for the role of word-order repetition. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33, 931-949.
Hartsuiker, R. J., Pickering, M. J., & Veltkamp, E. (2004). Is syntax separate or shared between
languages Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish-English bilinguals. Psychological
Science, 15, 409-414.
Notes
192

A theory of processing difficulty based on syntactic prediction
P139
Vera Demberg, & Frank Keller
The University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: v.demberg@ed.ac.uk
Recent work in sentence processing suggests that comprehenders make predictions while they process
language: not only do they integrate new words incrementally with previous input, but they also
anticipate upcoming linguistic material (Kamide et al., JML 2003). We propose a model of syntactic
processing difficulty based on the explicit prediction of syntactic categories. The model is word-byword
incremental and assumes that fully connected syntactic structures are built. Alternative
structures for ambiguous input are processed in parallel, with a search beam to capture memory
limitations. The assumptions of the proposed model are:
* At each word, a set E of syntactic expectations e is generated; an expectation is an incomplete
syntactic structure that denotes the categories needed to build a grammatical sentence from the
current input.
* Expectations are held in memory in parallel, and have a probability P(e).
* Decay is modeled by a decay function f which takes into account the timestamp t corresponding
to when a structure was first predicted, or last activated.
* Processing difficulty is incurred either when expectations become incompatible with the current
input (denoted by the set of discarded structures E_d; this bears similarities to analyses changing
ranks as in Jurafsky, Cogsci J 1996), or when successful integration takes place (denoted by the
set of integrated structures E_i).
We can then formalize the processing difficulty D_w at word w as:
D_w = SUM{e:E_i} f(1/P(e)) + SUM{e:E_d} f(P(e))
To implement this model, we use an incremental version of tree-adjoining grammar (TAG), as
proposed by Demberg & Keller (TAG Conf 2008).
The proposed model is attractive because it incorporates cognitive concepts such as memory
limitations and decay and accounts for a wide range of empirical phenomena:
* locality effects (Gibson, Cognition 1998): the more dependents are integrated (E_i), the more
processing cost is incurred, subject to a distance-based decay function f;
* surprisal effects (Hale, NAACL 2001): the more expectations are discarded (E_d), the more
processing cost in incurred;
* digging-in effects (Tabor & Hutchins, JEP 2004): discarding expectations that have been
maintained longer is more costly (decay function f).
* prediction (Staub & Clifton, JEP 2006): syntactic categories are predicted explicitly as part of the
formalism;
* ambiguity resolution and garden paths: accounted for by probabilistically ranked parallelism as
proposed by Jurafsky (1996).
Notes
193

P140
Clefting, topicalization and the given-new preference: Eyetracking
evidence from Hindi
Rukshin F. Shaher 1 , Pavel Logacev 1 , Felix Engelmann 1 , Shravan Vasishth 1 ,
& Narayanan Srinivasan 2
1 University of Potsdam, Germany, 2 University of Allahabad, India
E-mail: vasishth@acm.org
Readers detect focused information more quickly and accurately, and remember it better than nonfocused
information. E.g., in a probe recognition and naming task Birch and Garnsey (1995) showed
that clefted nouns ('It was a…') can be named faster than non-clefted ones. This facilitation due to
focusing implies that information-structure marking can exert an influence on the activation of items
in memory, independent of working memory factors such as decay and/or interference. Indeed, using
a speed-accuracy tradeoff study and an eyetracking experiment Foraker & McElree (2007) show that
clefting a noun improves its availability in online sentence comprehension.
We extend this work by showing that: (i) there is an initial processing cost (ENCODING COST)
associated with encoding a focused element; (ii) but this results in richer encoding, which facilitates
later processing (INTEGRATION ADVANTAGE); and (iii) the integration advantage interacts with
the well-known given-before-new ordering preference: the clefted (sentence-initial) element is easier
to process when it is new (not previously mentioned) rather than given.
A Hindi eyetracking study (n=32) was carried out that involved Hindi clefted sentences read in
context; the factors clefting and given-new order were manipulated. We found that clefting a noun
resulted in higher first-pass regression probability at the noun (ENCODING COST) but faster rereading
time at the noun as well as at a subsequent integration region (INTEGRATION
ADVANTAGE). In addition, although whole sentence total reading time showed a given-new
advantage (confirming the received opinion that given-new order is easier to process), the clefted
word itself was read faster when it was new rather than given.We replicated the above findings
through a second eyetracking experiment (n=32) involving Hindi left-dislocated topicalizations that
superficially resemble clefts but have a different information-structuring function (topic-shifting).
In sum, we present new evidence from online sentence comprehension that syntactic informationstructure
markers such as clefts and left-dislocated topics serve to enhance the availability of the
clefted/topicalized element, although an initial cost is incurred in encoding focused/topicalized words.
We also argue that the given-new preference may apply only in later integrative processes that occur
after parsing completes.
References
Birch & Garnsey 1995. Journal of Memory and Language.Volume 34.
Foraker & McElree 2007. Journal of Memory and Language.Volume 56.
Notes
194

P141
Speech perception involves statistically optimal multi-modal integration
Vikranth R. Bejjanki, Meghan Clayards, David C. Knill, & Richard N. Aslin
University of Rochester, USA
E-mail: vrao@bcs.rochester.edu
During speech perception, visual information conveyed by the speaker’s facial movements has a
significant effect on the perception of auditory information. Indeed, a large body of evidence suggests
that speech perception involves the integration of information from the visual and auditory
modalities. What is the computational principle that governs such integration Previous work on
multi-modal integration along continuous perceptual dimensions (e.g. position or size) has suggested
that a statistically optimal strategy called Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) is a good
description of human performance in many tasks. In particular, studies have consistently found that
participants weight information from each of several cues, by that cue’s reliability relative to the other
cues.
We propose that human performance in multi-modal, categorical speech perception is also well
described by an MLE model. Behavioral experiments were designed to provide a quantitative
estimate of information integration during speech perception. We measured participants’ performance
in separate unimodal phonetic labelling tasks (/ba/ or /da/ labelling) using either visual information
provided by a video of a virtual speaker or audio information provided by synthesized phonemes,
from a ba-da continuum. We used the slopes of the psychometric functions associated with each
modality to construct an MLE estimator to predict the optimal combination of visual and auditory
inputs in a bi-modal phonetic labelling task. We compared participants’ performance in the same bimodal
task to the predictions of the MLE estimator. The MLE model reliably predicted human
performance in our task – weights assigned to each modality depended on the modality’s relative
reliability.
We then tested a stronger prediction of the MLE model. Decreasing the reliability of a modality
should decrease the weight assigned to that modality and increase the weight assigned to the other
modality. We accomplished this by blurring the visual stimuli and testing participants, using these
new stimuli, in the unimodal and bi-modal labelling tasks. Performance was again well predicted by
the MLE model. Assigned weights to the visual modality accurately tracked visual reliability – even
on a trial by trial basis. We conclude that humans are dynamically optimal in perceiving speech from
visual and auditory information.
Acknowledgements
We thank Dominic Massaro for providing the original visual stimuli. This work was supported by
ONR-MURI research grant (N000140510834).
Notes
195

P142
Stimulation of Broca’s area causes better error detection in an artificial
language: a tDCS study
Meinou H. De Vries, André Barth, Stefan Knecht, Pienie Zwitserlood, & Agnes Floeel
University of Münster, Germany
E-mail: mdevries@uni-muenster.de
Artificial grammar learning (AGL) is a form of cognitive implicit learning, and Broca’s area (BA
44/45) is generally identified as the neural circuitry underlying this. The AGL paradigm involves a
visual presentation of a series of letter strings generated by a finite state grammar. After being
presented to these strings, people can distinguish new strings on whether they are formed by this
grammar or not – although they cannot verbalize what they just have learned. These classification
judgments are based on the implicit knowledge of the rule system, as well as on how familiar the new
items look to the trained items.
In this pilot study, we investigated the role of Broca’s area in the classical AGL paradigm, by
stimulating Broca’s area by anodal tDCS (transcranial direct current stimulation). We tested 10
participants, of which 5 received stimulation, and 5 were in the sham condition. All strings were
controlled for string familiarity.
In our analysis, we had to exclude one participant due to extremely slow reaction times. Our results
reveal only a slight improvement in the general learning success (% correct responses) for the tDCS
group. However, the nature of responding significantly differs in both groups. There is a general
tendency for the sham group to base their judgments more often on superficial similarity of the strings
than in the tDCS group, suggesting that the latter was better able to extrapolate the grammatical rules
that they just had learned. However, this effect was significant only in the case of correct error
detection: the tDCS group performed significantly better on correct rejections, even when these were
highly familiar with the strings that they had been trained on. Overall, this leads to significantly
different d’ scores, indeed indicating a better performance for the tDCS group on artificial grammar
learning.
Afterwards, the participants were instructed to perform a transfer task, making grammatical
judgments on 20 strings that followed the same grammar, but contained different letters (i.e., without
superficial similarity). The differences between the tDCS group and the sham group for correct
rejections became even bigger: whereas the tDCS group was still able to perform remarkably well on
correct error detection, the sham group dropped down further in performance, indicating the ability to
extrapolate rules as a prerequisite for the transfer task.
We have shown that stimulating Broca’s area when learning an artificial grammar results in a better
ability to extrapolate rules, resulting in better error detection.
Notes
196

P143
The locus of attention in the mapping of motion events onto a visual world
Yuki Kamide
University of Dundee, UK
E-mail: y.kamide@dundee.ac.uk
In recent years, a growing amount of research has explored the mechanism by which linguistic and
visual information interact in language comprehension. In particular, several studies have focused on
the question of how representations of a motion event are mapped onto listeners’ mental space (e.g.,
Richardson & Matlock, 2007; Zwaan et al., 2004). Such studies have implications for accounts
claiming that language comprehension involves mental simulations of states/events described in the
linguistic input (Barsalou, 1999; Glenberg, 1997).
Previously, Kamide (2007; AMLaP Poster) showed that the locus of listeners’ attention can be
modulated by the trajectory implied by a verb. In a signal detection experiment, participants were
presented with a picture containing two objects (e.g., a ball, a bin lying on the floor) and an auditory
sentence containing a verb either implying an upwards-curving trajectory, or a straight one (e.g., ‘The
ball will be thrown/rolled into the bin.’). At verb offset, a very small signal was presented for 50 ms
on a motion path plausible for one of the two verbs. Results suggested that the signal was detected
faster when the position of the signal roughly matched the (implied) motion path than when it didn’t.
Thus, it was suggested that listeners shifted their attention along the path of the object implied by the
verb.
The present experiment investigates another type of semantic information in English motion verbs:
instead of the shape of trajectory, the specificity of the trajectory is examined. Verbs that imply a
specific trajectory (e.g., roll) were contrasted with those that don’t (e.g., take). It can be argued that
“non-specific” verbs place linguistic focus on the end state of the motion event, rather than the
object’s trajectory. The present experiment examines the time-course of application of such subtle
semantic information using the same technique as Kamide (2007). Two sentences were created for
each of the original visual scenes (e.g., ‘The ball will be rolled/taken into the bin,’). Signals were
presented at verb offset either on the motion path or near the goal object. Results showed that the
matching conditions (roll/path; take/goal) elicited faster detection times than the mismatching
conditions (roll/goal; take/path), indicating listeners’ rapid attention shifts in accordance with motion
information implied by the verb. The findings will be discussed in the light of recent accounts and
experimental studies (e.g., Papafragou et al., 2008).
Notes
197

P144
Does 'you' help you retrieve 'ewe' TOT evidence on frequency inheritance
Carson T. Schütze 1 , Tamar H. Gollan 2 , & Mary K. Champion 2
1 University of California, Los Angeles, USA, 2 University of California, San Diego, USA
E-mail: cschutze@humanities.ucla.edu
Frequency is a powerful predictor of retrieval success, and the nature of frequency effects in language
production is vigorously debated. On one view they arise at the level of word form, independent of
word meaning; evidence for this is that homophones (e.g. EWE) may inherit the frequency of their
higher frequency counterparts (YOU; Jescheniak & Levelt 1994). But recent work challenges the
existence of homophone frequency inheritance (e.g., Caramazza et al. 2001). We bring novel
evidence to bear on this question by eliciting tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states for very low frequency
(LF) homophone targets (e.g., bicycle SPOKE). TOTs allow consideration of the possibility that
frequency inheritance may be more easily detected among the least frequent words—where small
frequency differences have large effects—and when retrieval fails.
TOTs increase as frequency decreases; thus, if homophones share a single form representation, they
should elicit fewer TOTs than matched LF controls. On the opposing view, TOT likelihood should
correlate with the specific frequency of target homophones alone. To test these predictions we created
56 triplets with homophone targets (e.g., URN), specific frequency-matched “LF controls” (WICK),
and cumulative frequency-matched “HF controls” (VAN). These were used to elicit TOTs from
monolingual English speakers using definitions, pictures, or both. Response measures included TOT
rates, correct response rates (GOTs), failed recognition rates (postDKs), and reaction times (RTs) for
correct responses. Homophones elicited significantly more TOTs, fewer GOTs, slower correct RTs,
and more postDKs than HF controls (all ps < .01). Unexpectedly, homophones also showed more
TOTs and fewer GOTs than LF controls (ps < .05). However, subsequent analyses factoring out
independently-rated effectiveness of TOT stimuli for eliciting target words left no differences
between homophones and LF controls on any measure (ps > .30); differences from HF controls
remained (ps < .01). Correlational analyses showed that specific frequency predicts homophone
retrievability (ps < .05) but cumulative frequency does not (ps > .25). Our results demonstrate that
only the specific link between meaning and form predicts retrieval success.
References
Caramazza, A., Costa, A., Miozzo, M., & Bi, Y. (2001). The specific-word frequency effect:
Implications for the representation of homophones. JEP:LMC 27, 1430–1450.
Jescheniak, J.D., & Levelt, W.J.M. (1994). Word frequency effects in speech production: Retrieval of
syntactic information and of phonological form. JEP:LMC 20, 824–843.
Notes
198

P145
Negation reveals preferences in long distance dependency formation
Zeynep Ilkin, & Patrick Sturt
University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: z.ilkin@ed.ac.uk
Humans show a preference for forming long-distance dependencies at the first potential gap position
(Frazier&Clifton,1989) However in head final structures like; [Filler...Gap1...[...Gap2...V2]...V1]
the embedded verb (V2) precedes the main verb (V1), so Gap2 is the first gap position that will allow
a thematic role assignment of the filler, although it is structurally the most distant. Here we report 2
reading time studies and a sentence completion test exploring the time course of gap projection. In
Turkish a neg(ative) NP (“Nobody”) needs neg morphology on its licensing verb. If a neg NP is an
embedded verb argument, there will be processing difficulty if the embedded verb lacks neg
morphology, but if the NP is interpreted as a main clause argument, a similar effect should be found
at the main verb. We orthogonally manipulated the ambiguous dative NPs, (“Nobody” vs.
“Somebody”), and the form of the embedded and main verbs (if subordinate verb was neg, the main
verb was affirmative, and vice-versa). In exp 1 the ambiguous dative NP was sentence initial, in exp 2
it followed the matrix subject but preceded the embedded subject.
In exp1 and exp2 at the embedded verb, there was no hint of an interaction so no evidence for the
embedded clause interpretation. However, the main verb showed an interaction; (affirmative verbs
were slow following “Nobody” and vice versa for neg verbs): clear preference for the main-clause
interpretation. Again, in the off-line completion data, dative NPs were overwhelmingly associated
with the matrix predicates rather than the embedded predicates, regardless of the negative NP's
position However there was some evidence of neg priming on the embedded verbs, despite clear
matrix-clause disambiguation.
In similar constructions in Japanese, Aoshima et al (AeA) (2004, JML) found that sentence-initial
dative wh-NPs were associated with the embedded verb on-line, in contrast to our results. One
interpretation of AeA's results might be that the parser tries to satisfy morphological requirements as
soon as possible, leading to an embedded clause interpretation (Japanese has an obligatory scopemarking
question-particle, and the embedded verb is the first opportunity to place it). However, our
results don't support this: the Turkish requirement for neg verbal morphology didn't lead to an
embedded clause interpretation. It is possible that AeA's embedded clause preference reflects some
special property of wh-questions. Future work with Turkish wh-questions (which don't have questionparticles)
will examine this issue further.
Notes
199

P146
Native versus non-native processing asymmetries in noun/verb morphology
Adam Zawiszewski 1 , Beatriz Fernández 2 , & Itziar Laka 2
1 Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany,
2 University of the Basque Country, Spain
E-mail: zawis@cbs.mpg.de
Very proficient non-native speakers (Age of Acquisition 1 to 5) process some aspects of grammar
unlike native speakers [1], but the extent to which specific components of grammar show
maturational effects is still not well-known. Here we present the results of an Event-Related Brain
potentials (ERP) study on noun and verb morphology in Basque: our results show a maturational
effect for noun morphology (case) but not for verb morphology (agreement). In our ungrammatical
(*) stimuli (1) the subject of the sentence lacks case morphology (suffix –k) and in the ungrammatical
condition in (2) the auxiliary verb does not contain the required object agreement morpheme (prefix
na-):
1. Goiz-ean ogia erosi d-u-t ni-k /*ni denda-n.
Morning-in bread-Obj bought it-have-I I-Subj/*I-Obj shop-in
‘In the morning I bought bread in the shop’
2. Zu-k ni hondartza-ra eramaten na-u-zu /*d-u-zu batzuetan
You-Subj I-Obj beach-to take me-have-you/*it-have-you sometimes
‘Sometimes you take me to the beach’
Previous ERP studies have shown (a) that in native and very proficient non-native speakers,
morpohosyntactic violations elicit a P600 component, usually preceded by a Left Anterior Negativity
(LAN) and (b) that regarding the late processing effects (P600) early proficient non-natives show no
difference with respect to natives [2].
The results of our study revealed no significant differences in verb morphology processing between
natives and very proficient non-natives (AoA 3yrs); however, non-natives responded differently to
noun morphology violations in comparison to the native group – they did not show a P600
component. These findings were confirmed by the behavioural data: non-natives made significantly
more errors than natives in noun morphology violations, but not in the verb morphology condition.
Our results show different maturational effects for these two types of morphological processes and
suggest that within the morphological component of grammar, age of acquisition may have an
asymmetrical impact, independent of proficiency and dependent on the type of grammatical process
at play, in this case, nominal versus verbal morphology.
References
[1] Weber-Fox, Ch., Neville, H. (1996). Maturational Constraints on Functional Specializations for
Language Processing: ERP and Behavioural Evidence in Bilingual Speakers. Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience, 8 (3), 231-256.
[2] Kotz, S., Holcomb, Ph., Osterhout, L. (in press). ERPs reveal comparable syntactic sentence
processing in native and non-native readers of English. Acta Psychologica
Notes
200

Object relatives ARE easier than subject relatives in Chinese
P147
Xiaomei Qiao, & Kenneth I. Forster
University of Arizona, USA
E-mail: xqiao@email.arizona.edu
It has been claimed that it is universally true that subject-extracted relative clauses are easier to
process than object-extracted relative clauses. However, contradictory results have been found in
prenominal languages, for example Chinese. Hsiao and Gibson (2003) found that object relatives
were easier to process than subject relatives, while Lin (2006) found the opposite. Both experiments
used self-paced reading. One major disagreement concerns the region where the difficulty arises. In
this study, a “maze” task was used to localize processing difficulty by requiring participants to make a
choice between two alternatives at every single position of the sentence. This task has been shown to
be sensitive to a number of phenomena associated with processing difficulty (Nicol, Forster, & Veres,
1997; Forster, Guerrera, & Elliott, submitted), including the greater ease of processing subjectrelatives
in English. Applied to the problem of measuring the difficulty of subject- and objectrelatives
in Chinese, this task confirmed that object relatives are indeed easier than corresponding
subject relatives in the relative clause region, although this difference is reversed in
the subsequent relative marker region. No difference was found in the head noun position. It is argued
that these results depend on the fact that the task forced participants to adopt a strict incremental
processing mode, whereas self-paced reading allows more freedom. For example, a “wait-and-see”
strategy is possible in tasks such as self-paced reading and eye tracking, but not in a maze task. This
implies that the findings may depend on what kind of task is chosen. It is also argued that a maze task
has the advantage that it is not necessary to include comprehension questions to make sure that
participants are understanding the sentence. This is useful in that it allows for more standardized
conditions of testing.
Notes
201

P148
Syntactic priming between non-identical noun phrase structures
Stella C. Frank, Amit Dubey, & Frank Keller
University of Edinburgh, UK
E-mail: s.c.frank@sms.ed.ac.uk
Syntactic priming is known to occur between two instances of the same syntactic construction (e.g.,
Bock, CogPsy 1986). Here we investigate priming effects between non-identical syntactic
constructions using a corpus study. We find that priming, in the form of increased production
likelihood, occurs between NPs of different forms, and that priming strength is linked to the similarity
of the two NPs.
Adaptation (Church, COLING 2000) measures the increase in probability that results from priming; it
has been used to measure structural priming in corpora (Dubey et al., EMNLP 2005). We use a new
version of adaptation, cross-adaptation, for which the prime and target may differ. In particular, we
compare the cross-adaptation between two structures X and Y with the adaptation between two
occurrences of X (self-adaptation).
We measure cross-adaptation between NPs in three conditions: in adjacent sentences, within the same
sentence, and within a coordination, using two parsed corpora, one of written text (the Brown corpus)
and one of unscripted spoken text (a section from the BNC). In both corpora we find cross-adaptation
strength to be of a similar magnitude as self-adaptation, which indicates that syntactic priming is not
restricted to identically-structured constituents.
Next, we examine whether adaptation strength is linked to construction similarity. We represent an
NP as the right-hand side of the context-free grammar rule that generates it, e.g., "DT NN" for "the
dog". The similarity of two NPs can then be measured as the Euclidean distance between two vectors
of part-of-speech tags. We find a strong and significant correlation (all ps < 0.0001) between NP
similarity and adaptation strength over both corpora and in all three conditions (s. Table). Matching
pairs (self-adaptation) were excluded from this dataset. This result generalizes to other similarity
measures, e.g., edit distance.
We conclude that the occurrence of a structure primes not only the re-occurrence of that exact
structure, but also the occurrence of a set of similar structures. This leads to the prediction that
priming of similar constructions should also lead to facilitation in an experimental setting, as
decreased processing time or increased frequency. This prediction remains to be tested in future work.
Condition
Correlation
BNC (spoken) r N
Between-Sentence 0.51 16682
Within-Sentence 0.50 15996
Within-Coordinate 0.41 233
Brown (written) r N
Between-Sentence 0.45 101856
Within-Sentence 0.45 85335
Within-Coordinate 0.44 1392
Notes
202

203

Author index
Adam, R. ...................................................... O9
Alario, X. ..................................................... P81
Allured, G. ................................................... P78
Altmann, G.T.M. .......................................... P4, P72
Anderson, S.E. ............................................. P132
Andersson, R. ............................................... P120
Andonova, E. ............................................... P44
Andrews, M.W. ............................................ P73
Anton-Mendez, I. ......................................... O14
Apel, J. ......................................................... O16
Arai, M. ........................................................ O18, P31
Arnold, J.E. .................................................. O6
Arnon, I. ....................................................... O17
Aslin, R.N. ................................................... P141
Augurzky, P. ................................................ P59
Augusto, M.A.R. .......................................... P47
Aviles, A. ..................................................... P50
Badecker, W. ................................................ O29, P15, P119
Bannard, C. .................................................. O22, P16
Barr, D.J. ...................................................... O33
Bartels, L. ..................................................... P22
Barth, A. ....................................................... P142
Bejjanki, V.R. .............................................. P141
Bernolet, S. ................................................... P138
Bion, R.A.H. ................................................ P131
Bögels, S. ..................................................... P126
Bohan, J. ....................................................... O32, P21, P70
Bordag, D. .................................................... P129
Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I. ......................... P19, P60
Boves, L. ...................................................... P94
Bowerman, M. ............................................. O2
Bozic, M. ...................................................... O28
Branigan, H.P. .............................................. P10, P28, P46
Breheny, R. .................................................. O5
Bressers, M. ................................................. P138
Brindley, L. .................................................. P71
Brouwer, S.M. .............................................. P37
Brunellière, A.B. .......................................... P13
Brysbaert, M. ............................................... P124
Burchert, F. .................................................. P22, P65
Burigo, M. .................................................... P104
Buttery, P. .................................................... P114
Bye, J. ........................................................... P91
Cai, Z. ........................................................... P128
Cajochen, C. ................................................. P75
Caramazza, A. .............................................. P48

Carbary, K.M. .............................................. O26
Carminati, M.N. ........................................... P36
Carreiras, M. ................................................ P50
Champion, M.K. .......................................... P144
Chen, J. ......................................................... O2
Chen, J-Y. .................................................... P112, P115
Chondrogianni, V. ........................................ P137
Chwilla, D.J. ................................................ P126
Clark, F. ....................................................... P21
Clayards, M. ................................................. P141
Cochrane, S. ................................................. P70
Coco, M.I. .................................................... P27
Conklin, K. ................................................... P54, P78
Cooke, M. ..................................................... O10
Corley, M. .................................................... P3, P33, P41
Corrêa, L.M.S. ............................................. P47, P90
Costa, A.M. .................................................. P10, P81, P106
Coventry, K. ................................................. P44
Crepaldi, D. .................................................. P135
Cummins, C.R. ............................................. P32
Dale, R. ........................................................ O7
Damian, M.F. ............................................... P77, P117
Davidson, D.J. .............................................. P105
Davis, M.H. .................................................. P68, P92, P100
De Bleser, R. ................................................ P65
De Jong, N.H. ............................................... P107
De Vries, M.H. ............................................. P142
Delogu, F. ..................................................... P56
Demberg, V. ................................................. P31, P139
Desmet, T. .................................................... P133
Devereux, B.J. .............................................. O20, P38, P62, P83
Di Betta, A.M. .............................................. O12
Dickey, M-W. .............................................. O3
Diependaele, K. ............................................ P52, P79
Dietrich, R. ................................................... P75
Dikker, S. ..................................................... P2
Ding, G. ........................................................ P38
Dobel, C. ...................................................... P113
Dorjee Khenchen, D. .................................... P42
Dubey, A. ..................................................... O1, P85, P148
Dufau, S. ...................................................... P98
Duyck, W. .................................................... P52
Engelmann, F. .............................................. P140
Farmer, T.A. ................................................. P2
Ferguson, H.J. .............................................. O5, P17
Fernández, B. ............................................... P146
Fernández, E.M. ........................................... P125
Ferreira, F. .................................................... O16, P8, P120
Ferreira,V.S. ................................................. P55
Filik, R. ........................................................ O34

Filipović Đurđević, D. ................................. P39
Finkbeiner, M. .............................................. P48
Firat, H. ........................................................ P137
Floeel, A. ...................................................... P142
Fodor, J.D. .................................................... P125
Ford, M.A. .................................................... O20, P45, P62, P83
Forster, K.I. .................................................. P14, P147
Franck, J. ...................................................... O23
Frank, R. ....................................................... P119
Frank, S. ....................................................... P94
Frank, S.C. ................................................... P148
Frauenfelder, U.H. ....................................... O23, P13
Futrell, R. ..................................................... P87
Garagnani, M. .............................................. P101
Garcia Castro, Y. .......................................... P81
Garrett, M.F. ................................................ P42
Garrod, S. ..................................................... O4, P12, P127
Gaskell, G. ................................................... O12, P97
Gelfand, H. ................................................... O24
Gese, H. ........................................................ P69
Glen, K. ........................................................ P21
Glisky, E.L. .................................................. P42
Gollan, T.H. ................................................. P144
Gómez, R. .................................................... KN1
Görges, F. ..................................................... P110
Grainger, J. ................................................... KN3, P79
Gram, L. ....................................................... P114
Grewe, T. ..................................................... P60
Gualmini, A. ................................................. P61
Gunlogson, C. .............................................. P26
Hackl, M. ..................................................... P123
Haigh, M. ..................................................... P11
Hanne, S. ...................................................... P65
Hare, M.L. .................................................... P89
Hartsuiker, R.J. ............................................ O14, O15, O25, P3, P52, P67, P136, P138
Havelka, J. .................................................... O31
Haywood, S.L. ............................................. P63
Heide, J. ....................................................... P22
Heller, D. ...................................................... P95
Hemforth, B. ................................................ O17
Henderson, J.M. ........................................... O16, P63, P120
Hirschfeld, G. ............................................... P113
Hochmann, J-R. ........................................... P66
Holland, R. ................................................... P71
Hsu, C-C. ..................................................... P115
Huettig, F. .................................................... O2, O25, P37, P53
Hulstijn, J.H. ................................................ P107
Ilkin, Z. ......................................................... P145
Imada, M. ..................................................... P51
Indefrey, P. ................................................... P80

Ivanova, I. .................................................... P10
Jackson, C. ................................................... P29
Jacob, G. ....................................................... P58
Janssen, N. ................................................... P48
Jescheniak, J.D. ............................................ P102, P110
Jesse, A. ....................................................... O11
Jin, M. .......................................................... O8
Jin, Y-S. ....................................................... P33
Jones, M.W. ................................................. P8
Kaiser, E. ...................................................... P57, P99, P108
Kamide, Y. ................................................... P143
Kazanina, N. ................................................. P109
Keller, F. ...................................................... O1, O18, P27, P31, P85, P139, P148
Kerkhofs, R. ................................................. P126
Kessler, K. .................................................... O4, P127
Kidd, E. ........................................................ P11
Kim, C.S. ...................................................... P26, P93
Kim, S. ......................................................... P134
Kirkham, N.Z. .............................................. O7
Klein, M. ...................................................... P94
Klein, N. ....................................................... P123
Klein, N.M. .................................................. P89
Knecht, S. ..................................................... P142
Knicely, J. .................................................... P112
Knill, D.C. .................................................... P141
Koenig, J-P. .................................................. P134
Konieczny, L. ............................................... P86
Koornneef, A.W. .......................................... P74
Kraljic, T. ..................................................... P55
Kreiner, H. ................................................... O4, P127
Kreysa, H. .................................................... P63
Krott, A. ....................................................... P116
Kujala, T. ..................................................... P101
Kuperman, V. ............................................... O19
Laka, I. ......................................................... P146
Langus, A. .................................................... O27, P131
Lao, S-Y.C. .................................................. O6
Lau, K.Y.D. .................................................. P43
Lebib, R. ....................................................... P116
Leonard Cook, A. ......................................... P41
Leuthold, H. ................................................. O32
Lewis, R. ...................................................... P15
Lieven, E.V.M. ............................................. O22, P35
Lin, T. ........................................................... O24
Lindsay, S. ................................................... P97
Llewellyn, E. ................................................ P123
Logacev, P. ................................................... P140
Logie, R. ....................................................... P33
Loncke, M. ................................................... P133
Longtin, C-M. .............................................. P100

Lorenz, A. .................................................... P22
Lorusso, M.L. ............................................... P104
Luzzatti, C. ................................................... P135
Mahon, B.Z. ................................................. P48
Maienborn, C. .............................................. P69
Majid, A. ...................................................... O2
Marantz, A. .................................................. O29
Marchetto, E. ................................................ P131
Marcilese, M. ............................................... P47
Marcus, G.F. ................................................ O24
Marelli, M. ................................................... P135
Marinis, T. .................................................... P23, P137
Marslen-Wilson, W.D. ................................. KN2, O28, P25, P45, P92
Martin, A.E. ................................................. P7
Martin, E. ..................................................... P21
Matsui, H. ..................................................... P51
Matthews, D.E. ............................................ P16, P35
Mattys, S.L. .................................................. O10
Mauner, G. ................................................... P134
McElree, B. .................................................. P7
McLean, J. .................................................... P10
McQueen, J.M. ............................................. O9, O11, P53
Mehler, J. ..................................................... P66
Melinger, A. ................................................. P48
Merkx, M.M. ................................................ P68
Meroni, L. .................................................... P61
Meteyard, L. ................................................. P103
Meyer, A.S. .................................................. P84
Millotte, S. ................................................... O23
Miranda, F.V. ............................................... P47, P90
Mirkovic, J. .................................................. P72
Mitchell, L.M. .............................................. P5
Mitterer, H. ................................................... P37
Miyamoto, E.T. ............................................ P51
Moat, S. ........................................................ P3
Mohr, S. ....................................................... O4, P127
Morgan, J.L. ................................................. P118
Mousoulidou, M. .......................................... O34
Moxey, L.M. ................................................ O34, P88
Müller, D. ..................................................... P86
Myachykov, A. ............................................. P12, P24, P46
Nespor, M. ................................................... O27, P82, P131
Nilsenová, M. ............................................... P96
O’Seaghdha, P.G. ......................................... P112
Oppermann, F. ............................................. P110
Orfanidou, E. ................................................ O9
Ota, M. ......................................................... P41
Paterson, K.B. .............................................. O34
Pattamadilok, C. ........................................... P98
Patterson, K. ................................................. P71, P103

Pechmann, T. ............................................... P129
Perfors, A. .................................................... P76
Perniss, P. ..................................................... P111
Perre, L. ........................................................ P98
Pickering, M.J. ............................................. O8, P10, P28, P63, P67, P128, P138
Pliatsikas, C. ................................................. P23
Pulvermüller, F. ........................................... P71, P101
Pusch, K. ...................................................... P75
Pylkkänen, L. ............................................... O24, P2
Qiao, X. ........................................................ P147
Rabagliati, H.A. ........................................... O24, P2
Race, D.S. .................................................... P89
Raffray, C.N. ................................................ P24, P28
Randall, B. ................................................... O20, P38, P45, P62, P83, P121
Rastle, K. ...................................................... O31, P5, P68, P100, P124
Reilly, E. ...................................................... O29
Reinisch, E. .................................................. O11
Reuland, E. ................................................... P74
Richardson, D.C. .......................................... O7
Roberts, L. .................................................... P29
Rodrigues, E. dos Santos ............................. P49
Roehm, D. .................................................... P122
Rogers, J.C. .................................................. P92
Roland, D. .................................................... P1
Roman, A. .................................................... P112
Rosenberg, J. ................................................ P75
Runner, J.T. .................................................. P26, P93
Sag, I.A. ....................................................... P87
Salverda, A.P. .............................................. O30
Sandra, D. ..................................................... P20, P79
Sanford, A.J. ................................................ O32, P17, P21, P56, P70, P88
Sanford, A.J.S. ............................................. O32, P70
Santiago, J. ................................................... P112
Scheepers, C. ................................................ P12, P17, P24, P46
Schimke, S. .................................................. P130
Schlesewsky, M. .......................................... P19, P60
Schmitt, N. ................................................... P54
Schoonen, R. ................................................ P107
Schreuder, R. ................................................ O19
Schriefers, H. ............................................... P110, P126
Schütze, C.T. ................................................ P144
Schwarzkopf, S. ........................................... P86
Sedin, L. ....................................................... P97
Seifart, F. ...................................................... P111
Sekerina, I.A. ............................................... P65
Severens, E. .................................................. P136
Shafto, M.A. ................................................. O13
Shaher, R.F. .................................................. P140
Shen, X. ........................................................ P117
Shestakova, A. ............................................. P38

Shtyrov, Y. ................................................... P25, P71, P101
Shukla, M. .................................................... P82
Shuval, N. ..................................................... O17
Siu, Y. .......................................................... P55
Siyanova, A. ................................................. P54
Skinner, R. ................................................... O21
Skovbroten, K. ............................................. P95
Smolka, E. .................................................... P50
Snider, N. ..................................................... O17
Snoeren, N.D. ............................................... O12
Solomyak, O. ............................................... O29
Sorace, A. ..................................................... P41, P122
Spalek, K. ..................................................... P77
Spivey, M.J. ................................................. P132
Srinivasan, N. ............................................... P140
Stamatakis, E.A. ........................................... O13
Staum Casasanto, L. ..................................... P87
Stewart, A. ................................................... P11
Stolterfoht, B. ............................................... P69
Strijkers, K. .................................................. P81, P106
Sturt, P. ......................................................... O1, O3, P6, P85, P128, P145
Subacheva, I.P. ............................................. P51
Szlachta, Z. ................................................... P121
Tagawa, T. ................................................... P51
Tam, P.P. ...................................................... O13
Tanenhaus, M.K. .......................................... O26, O30, P26, P89, P95
Tavabi, K. ..................................................... P71
Taylor, D. ..................................................... P15
Taylor, K.I. ................................................... O20, P62, P83
ten Bosch, L.F.M. ........................................ P94
Tenenhaum, J.B. .......................................... P76
Thomas, J.D. ................................................ P14
Thompson, R.L. ........................................... O8, O21, P18
Thornton, R. ................................................. P91, P123
Tily, H. ......................................................... O17
Tomasello, M. .............................................. O22, P35
Tomlinson, J. ................................................ O7
Traxler, M.J. ................................................. P34
Trenkic, D. ................................................... P72
Trompelt, H. ................................................. P129
Tsai, S-H. ..................................................... P115
Tydgat, I. ...................................................... P67
Tyler, L.K. .................................................... O13, O20, O28, P38, P45, P62, P83, P121
Tzeng, A.K. .................................................. P64
Uzule, K. ...................................................... P84
van Amelsvoort, M.A.A. .............................. P96
Van Assche, E. ............................................. P52
van Gompel, R.P.G. . .................................... P36, P58
van Heuven, W.J.B. ..................................... P78
van Jaarsveld, H. .......................................... P94

Van Laere, S. ................................................ P133
Vandekerckhove, B. ..................................... P20
Vasishth, S. .................................................. P65, P140
Vernice, M. .................................................. O15
Vigliocco, G. ................................................ O8, O21, P18, P73, P111
Vinson, D.P. ................................................. O8, O21, P18, P73, P111
Vitoria, P. ..................................................... O19
von Gompel, R.P.G. ..................................... P58
Vonk, W. ...................................................... P126
Wagner, V. ................................................... P102
Wang, L. ....................................................... P19
Weber, K.M. ................................................ P80
Webman, R. ................................................. P125
Weighall, A.R. ............................................. P4, P118
Weldle, H. .................................................... P86
Wennekers, T. .............................................. P101
Wheeldon, L.R. ............................................ P84
Whiting, C.M. .............................................. P25
Wijnen, F. ..................................................... P74
Wonnacott, E. ............................................... P76
Wu, F. ........................................................... P57
Wydell, T. .................................................... O31
Yang, C-L. ................................................... P115
Yoshida, M. .................................................. O3, P6
Yuen, I. ......................................................... P124
Zawiszewski, A. ........................................... P146
Zhuang, J. ..................................................... P45
Ziegler, J. ..................................................... P98
Zondervan, A. .............................................. P61
Zuares, S.N. .................................................. P132
Zwitserlood, P. ............................................. P113, P142