Martin Corley

The University of Edinburgh | UoE · Department of Psychology

People sometimes explicitly announce that they are being sarcastic. The announcement appears to be particularly common in text-based conversations where prosodic cues are more difficult to identify. In certain cases, the tone of a comment is sufficient to determine non-literal meaning. But what happens in the absence of these features, or when cont...

Investigating a developmental disorder (DD) must consider three questions: 1) Who are you measuring? 2) How are you measuring? and 3) What are you measuring? The decisions made – from selecting an appropriate comparison group and deciding what to match on, to the very measurements and statistics we use – directly inform the characterisations of a D...

How do we decide whether a statement is literally true? Here, we contrast participants’ eventual evaluations of a speaker’s meaning with the real-time processes of comprehension. We record participants’ eye movements as they respond to potentially misleading instructions to click on one of two objects which might be concealing treasure ( the treasu...

Speech in everyday conversations is riddled with discourse markers (DMs), such as well, you know, and like. However, in many lab-based studies of speech comprehension, such DMs are typically absent from the carefully articulated and highly controlled speech stimuli. As such, little is known about how these DMs influence online word recognition. The...

Replication studies in psychological science sometimes fail to reproduce prior findings. If these studies use methods that are unfaithful to the original study or ineffective in eliciting the phenomenon of interest, then a failure to replicate may be a failure of the protocol rather than a challenge to the original finding. Formal pre-data-collecti...

Replications in psychological science sometimes fail to reproduce prior findings. If replications use methods that are unfaithful to the original study or ineffective in eliciting the phenomenon of interest, then a failure to replicate may be a failure of the protocol rather than a challenge to the original finding. Formal pre-data collection peer...

Crosby, Monin, and Richardson (2008) found that hearing an offensive remark caused subjects ( N = 25) to look longer at a potentially offended person, but only if that person could hear the remark. On the basis of this result, they argued that people use social referencing to assess the offensiveness. However, in a direct replication in the Reprodu...

When questioning the veracity of an utterance, we perceive certain non-linguistic behaviours to indicate that a speaker is being deceptive. Recent work has highlighted that listeners’ associations between speech disfluency and dishonesty are detectable at the earliest stages of reference comprehension, suggesting that the manner of spoken delivery...

The scalar quantifier some is locally ambiguous between pragmatic (some-but-not-all) and literal (some-and-possibly-all) meanings. Although comprehenders typically favour an eventual pragmatic interpretation, debate persists regarding what factors influence interpretation, the time course of comprehension, and whether literal meaning takes preceden...

Replications in psychological science sometimes fail to reproduce prior findings. If replications use methods that are unfaithful to the original study or ineffective in eliciting the phenomenon of interest, then a failure to replicate may be a failure of the protocol rather than a challenge to the original finding. Formal pre-data collection peer...

Are the cues that speakers produce when lying the same cues that listeners attend to when attempting to detect deceit? We used a two-person interactive game to explore the production and perception of speech and nonverbal cues to lying. In each game turn, participants viewed pairs of images, with the location of some treasure indicated to the speak...

Recent work has begun to focus on the role that individual differences in executive function and intelligence have on the production of fluent speech. However, isolating the underlying causes of different types of disfluency has been difficult given the speed and complexity of language production. In this study, we focused on the role of memory abi...

Where the veracity of a statement is in question, listeners tend to interpret disfluency as signaling dishonesty. Previous research in deception suggests that this results from a speaker model, linking lying to cognitive effort and effort to disfluency. However, the disfluency–lying bias occurs very quickly: Might listeners instead simply heuristic...

We report a study using the "visual-world" paradigm that investigated (1) the time-course of phonological prediction in English by native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers whose native language was Japanese, and (2) whether the Japanese participants predicted phonological form in Japanese. Participants heard sentences which contained a highly predi...

We re-evaluate conclusions about disfluency production in high-functioning forms of autism spectrum disorder (HFA). Previous studies examined individuals with HFA to address a theoretical question regarding speaker- and listener-oriented disfluencies. Individuals with HFA tend to be self-centric and have poor pragmatic language skills, and should b...

We used the visual world eye-tracking paradigm to investigate the effects of cognitive load on predictive eye movements in L1 (Experiment 1) and L2 (Experiment 2) speakers. Participants listened to sentences whose verb was predictive or non-predictive towards one of four objects they were viewing. They then clicked on a mentioned object. Half the p...

In this paper we will discuss cross-linguistic variation in semantic entailment patterns in causative alternations. Previous work has probed this issue with data from elicited semantic judgements on paired linguistic forms, often involving linguistic negation and contradiction. We contribute to the debate in the form of a related psycholinguistic e...

A speaker's manner of delivery of an utterance can affect a listener's pragmatic interpretation of the message. Disfluencies (such as filled pauses) influence a listener's off-line assessment of whether the speaker is truthful or deceptive. Do listeners also form this assessment during the moment-by-moment processing of the linguistic message? Here...

Previous visual world eye-tracking studies have demonstrated that people fixate an object that is likely to be mentioned in an anticipatory fashion [1]. The findings of these studies suggest that some semantic aspects of predictable words are pre-activated. There is also evidence from an ERP study that people pre-activate phonological information [...

This paper presents the results of two sentence production studies addressing the role of language exposure, prior linguistic modelling and discourse-pragmatic appropriateness on the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in bilingual 5-year-olds. We investigated whether French–English bilingual children would be as likely as monolingual ch...

This paper presents the results of two sentence production studies addressing the role of language exposure, prior linguistic modelling and discourse-pragmatic appropriateness on the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in bilingual 5-year-olds. We investigated whether French–English bilingual children would be as likely as monolingual ch...

Previous investigations into metonymy comprehension in ASD have confounded metonymy with anaphora, and outcome with process. Here we show how these confounds may be avoided, using data from non-diagnosed participants classified using Autism Quotient. Participants read sentences containing target words with novel or established metonymic senses (e.g...

It has been suggested that the activation of speech-motor areas during speech comprehension may, in part, reflect the involvement of the speech production system in synthesizing upcoming material at an articulatorily specified level. In this study, we explored that suggestion through the use of articulatory imaging. We investigated whether, and how...

Using a multi-dimensional measure of perfectionism: the Frost Multi-dimensional Perfectionism Scale (FMPS: Frost, Marten, Lahart, & Rosenblate, 1990), this study investigates: (a) whether adults who stutter (AWS) display more perfectionistic attitudes and beliefs than those who do not stutter, and (b) whether, in AWS, more perfectionistic attitudes...

The following study outlines a new computerized executive function task (Slippy's Adventure) inspired by the Towers of Hanoi task. The main focus was to determine if the task was developmentally sensitive. A further consideration was how physical embodiment would affect performance. This line of enquiry arose from recent developments in HCI (human-...

It has been demonstrated that listener-generated predictions of upcoming material can be specified to a phonological level, such that a specific word onset is anticipated (e.g., DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, Nature Neuroscience, 8, 1117-1121, 2005). In the present study, we investigated whether such word-form-specific predictions impact picture-naming l...

It has been shown that in natural speech filled pauses can be beneficial to a listener. In this paper, we attempt to discover whether listeners react in a similar way to filled pauses in synthetic and vocoded speech compared to natural speech. We present two experiments focusing on reaction time to a target word. In the first, we replicate earlier...

Unlabelled: This paper reviews Bloodstein's (1975) Anticipatory Struggle Hypothesis of stuttering, identifies its weaknesses, and proposes modifications to bring it into line with recent advances in psycholinguistic theory. The review concludes that the Anticipatory Struggle Hypothesis provides a plausible explanation for the variation in the seve...

Disfluency is a characteristic feature of spontaneous human speech, commonly seen as a consequence of problems with production. However, the question remains open as to why speakers are disfluent: Is it a mechanical by-product of planning difficulty, or do speakers use disfluency in dialogue to manage listeners' expectations? To address this questi...

Unlabelled: This study investigates whether the experience of stuttering can result from the speaker's anticipation of his words being misrecognized. Twelve adults who stutter (AWS) repeated single words into what appeared to be an automatic speech-recognition system. Following each iteration of each word, participants provided a self-rating of wh...

Many Thoroughbred foals are intended to be sold at public auction. The impact of disease conditions necessitating hospital treatment as a foal on future sales performance is unknown. To determine whether Thoroughbred horses that were treated in a hospital before age 125 days and presented to public auction sell for a different mean price than contr...

Several studies suggest that speech understanding can sometimes benefit from the presence of filled pauses (uh, um, and the like), and that words following such filled pauses are recognised more quickly. Three experiments examined whether this is because filled pauses serve to delay the onset of upcoming words and these delays facilitate auditory w...

Background: Imitation deficits are a robust finding in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and previous findings suggest that imitation performance in ASD appears to be task dependent (Hamilton, 2008; Mostofsky et al., 2006; Smith & Bryson, 2007). However, modality-specific effects on gesture production are not well understood in ASD....

In this study, the relationship between gesture recognition and imitation was explored. Nineteen individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) were compared to a control group of 23 typically developing children on their ability to imitate and recognize three gesture types (transitive, intransitive, and pantomimes). The ASD group performed more p...

To compare the properties of inner and overt speech, Oppenheim and Dell (2008) counted participants' self-reported speech errors when reciting tongue twisters either overtly or silently and found a bias toward substituting phonemes that resulted in words in both conditions, but a bias toward substituting similar phonemes only when speech was overt....

Using a modified version of the Virtual Errands Task (VET; McGeorge et al. in Presence-Teleop Virtual Environ 10(4):375-383, 2001), we investigated the executive ability of multitasking in 18 high-functioning adolescents with ASD and 18 typically developing adolescents. The VET requires multitasking (Law et al. in Acta Psychol 122(1):27-44, 2006) b...

Unlabelled: In their Covert Repair Hypothesis, Postma and Kolk (1993) suggest that people who stutter make greater numbers of phonological encoding errors, which are detected during the monitoring of inner speech and repaired, with stuttering-like disfluencies as a consequence. Here, we report an experiment that documents the frequency with which...

Recent investigations have supported the suggestion that phonological speech errors may reflect the simultaneous activation of more than one phonemic representation. This presents a challenge for speech error evidence which is based on the assumption of well-formedness, because we may continue to perceive well-formed errors, even when they are not...

Silent pauses are a common form of disfluency in speech yet little attention has been paid to them in the psycholinguistic literature. The present paper investigates the consequences of such silences for listeners, using an Event-Related Potential (ERP) paradigm. Participants heard utterances ending in predictable or unpredictable words, some of wh...

Disfluency is a common occurrence in speech and is generally thought to be related to difficulty in the production system. One unexplored issue is the extent to which inhibition is required to prevent incorrect speech plans from being articulated. Therefore, we examined disfluency production in participants with attention-deficit/hyperactivity diso...

When listeners hear a spoken utterance, they are able to predict upcoming information on the basis of what they have already heard. But what happens when the speaker changes his or her mind mid-utterance? The present paper investigates the immediate effects of repairs on listeners' linguistic predictions. Participants listened to sentences like the...

Disfluencies can affect language comprehension, but to date, most studies have focused on disfluent pauses such as er. We investigated whether disfluent repetitions in speech have discernible effects on listeners during language comprehension, and whether repetitions affect the linguistic processing of subsequent words in speech in ways which have...

Background: Both developmental dyspraxia and acquired limb apraxia are disorders of gestural processing. However, in developmental studies, dyspraxia is often referred to as a ‘unitary disorder’, mainly affecting imitation abilities; whereas limb apraxia is usually described as a complex disease, affecting both the production and reception of gestu...

Although Internet-based experiments are gaining in popularity, most studies rely on directly evaluating participants' responses rather than response times. In the present article, we present two experiments that demonstrate the feasibility of collecting response latency data over the World-Wide Web using WebExp-a software package designed to run ps...

We report an experimental investigation of slips of the tongue using a Word Order Competition (WOC) paradigm in which context (entirely non-lexical, mixed) and competitor (whether a possible phoneme substitution would result in a word or not) were crossed. Our primary analysis uses electropalatographic (EPG) records to measure articulatory variatio...

Human speech is peppered with ums and uhs, among other signs of hesitation in the planning process. But are these so-called fillers (or filled pauses) intentionally uttered by speakers, or are they side-effects of difficulties in the planning process? And how do listeners respond to them? In the present paper, we review evidence concerning the prod...

Background: Although imitation deficits have been widely-reported in autism, the cognitive mechanisms affecting the processing of meaningful gestures are not well established. We investigated the role of visuomotor integration (VMI), working memory (WM), and visuoperceptual processing (VP) in praxis processing in a group of individuals with in HFA/...

Filled-pause disfluencies such as um and er affect listeners' comprehension, possibly mediated by attentional mechanisms (J. E. Fox Tree, 2001). However, there is little direct evidence that hesitations affect attention. The current study used an acoustic manipulation of continuous speech to induce event-related potential components associated with...

Nineteen people with Asperger syndrome (AS)/High-Functioning Autism (HFA) (ages 7-15) were tested on imitation of two types of meaningless gesture: hand postures and finger positions. The individuals with AS/HFA achieved lower scores in the imitation of both hand and finger positions relative to a matched neurotypical group. The between-group diffe...

Everyday speech is littered with disfluency, often correlated with the production of less predictable words (e.g., Beattie & Butterworth [Beattie, G., & Butterworth, B. (1979). Contextual probability and word frequency as determinants of pauses in spontaneous speech. Language and Speech, 22, 201-211.]). But what are the effects of disfluency on lis...

We report an eye-movement study that demonstrates differences in regularity effects between adult developmental dyslexic and control non-impaired readers, in contrast to findings from a large number of word recognition studies (see G. Brown, 1997). For low frequency words, controls showed an advantage for Regular items, in which grapheme-to-phoneme...

Spatial perspective can be directed by various reference frames, as well as by the direction of motion. In the present study, we explored how ambiguity in spatial tasks can be resolved. Participants were presented with virtual reality environments in order to stimulate a spatialreference frame based on motion. They interacted with an ego-moving spa...

Psychologists normally attribute the surfacing of phonological speech errors to one of two factors: editing of the speech plan [Levelt (1989)] or feedback between word and phoneme levels [Dell (1986)]. This paper assesses the relative contributions of each factor, focusing on the perception and articulation of elicited speech errors. Experiments on...

Two experiments used a magnitude estimation paradigm to test whether perception of disfluency is a function of whether the speaker and the listener stutter or do not stutter. Utterances produced by people who stutter were judged as "less fluent," and, critically, this held for apparently fluent utterances as well as for utterances identified as con...

The lexical bias effect is the tendency for phonological speech errors to result in words more often than in nonwords. This effect has been accounted for by postulating feedback from sublexical to lexical representations, but also by assuming that the self-monitor covertly repairs more nonword errors than word errors. The only evidence that appears...

This study investigates the role of language on verb concepts in a cross-linguistic environment. The inflectional morphology of verbs in Tamil is contrasted with Mandarin, a language that does not explicitly reflect tense changes in the same manner as Tamil and English. In the baseline condition in experiment 1, participants were required to rate t...

To date, syntactic priming in sentence production has been investigated categorically, in terms of the probabilities of reusing particular syntactic structures. In this paper, we report a web-based replication of Pickering and Branigan (1998), Experiment 1, using a typed sentence completion paradigm that made it possible to record not only the resp...

The Gsearch system allows the selection of sentences by syntactic criteria from text corpora, even when these corpora contain no prior syntactic markup. This is achieved by means of a fast chart parser, which takes as input a grammar and a search expression specified by the user. Gsearch features a modular architecture that can be extended straight...

Current models of Human Sentence Processing fall into two broad categories: Constraint Satisfaction accounts, which emphasise the immediate access of the comprehension processes to detailed linguistic information as parsing progresses (e.g., MacDonald et al., 1994), and Syntax First accounts, which hold that parsing is essentially a two-stage proce...

The Gsearch system allows the selection of sentences by syntactic criteria from text corpora, even when these corpora contain no prior syntactic markup. This is achieved by means of a fast chart parser, which takes as input a grammar and a search expression specied by the user. Gsearch features a modular architecture that can be extended straightfo...

Current theories of language production tend to differentiate between a (syntactic) functional level and a (surface) positional level in the generation of sentences, where functional selection precedes and constrains positional processing. In this paper, we present evidence from a syntactic priming study in German, where position, function, and typ...

This User's Guide explains the installation and use of WebExp, a set of Java classes for conducting psychological experiments over the Word Wide Web. The WebExp toolbox consists of two modules: the WebExp server, which is a stand-alone Java application, and the WebExp client, which is implemented as a Java applet. The server application runs on the...

Several current models of human parsing maintain that initial structural decisions are influenced (or tuned) by the listener's or reader's prior contact with language. The precise workings of these models depend upon the grain, or level of detail, at which previous exposures to language are analyzed and used to influence parsing decisions. Some mod...

Questions concerning relatively immediate determinants of syntactic analysis can be tackled by comparing the reading times within crucial regions of subject- and object-relative clauses. Using such a comparison, G. T. Altmann et al (see record 1994-24172-001) have presented data which they interpreted as evidence for a discourse-driven account of...

Carried out 2 S-paced reading experiments to examine the way in which discourse information exerts its influence in sentence comprehension. The results show that whereas prior discourse context appears to affect the way in which sentences are ultimately parsed, there is no evidence that it has any direct influence on the initial assignment of struc...

Everyone produces disfluencies when they speak spontaneously. However, whereas most disfluencies pass unnoticed, the repetitions, blocks and prolongations produced by stutterers can have a severely disruptive effect on communication. The causes of stuttering have proven hard to pin down - researchers differ widely in their views on the cognitive me...

Two experiments were conducted to elicit naturalistic speech, while manipulating factors thought to influence disfluency production. Participants described the route taken by a marker through visually presented networks of objects linked via one or more paths. In Experiment 1, lexical frequency and name agreement of the object names were manipulate...

This paper investigates the effect of disuencies on lis- teners' on-line processing of speech. More specically , it tests the hypothesis that lled pauses like um, which tend to occur before words that are low in accessibility, act as a signal to the listener that a relatively inaccessible word is about to be produced. Two experiments are reported,...

The Gsearch system allows the selection of sentences by syntactic criteria from text corpora, even when these corpora contain no prior syntactic markup. This is achieved by means of a fast chart parser, which takes as input a grammar and a search expression specied by the user. Gsearch features a modular architecture that can be extended straightfo...

Recent accounts of stuttering (7, 15) consider disfluencies the result of an interaction between speech planning and self- monitoring, emphasizing the continuity between errors made in everyday speech and those made by people who stutter. On Vasiç & Wijnen's (14, 15) account, the monitor is hypervigilant for upcoming problems and interrupts and res...

Inner speech (or verbal thought) is possible without any intention to articulate the words overtly. It is, however, unclear to what extent the speech production network is activated on such occasions. Speedwise, it would be advantageous if plans for such speech remained unspecified at featural (phonetic) and articulatory levels. Dell's (1986) inter...

Draft of December 7, 2006 We examined whether listeners used information about what speakers would find hard to refer to in order to predict what they would be likely to name following a disfluency. Participants followed recorded instructions to press buttons corresponding to images on a computer screen. In 50% of trials, the name of the image was...

BLDSC reference no.: DX220159. Thesis (doctoral)--University of Exeter, 1995.