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The nature of working memory capacity in sentence comprehension: Evidence against domain-specific working memory resources
Abstract
This paper reports the results of a dual-task experiment which investigates the nature of working memory resources used in sentence comprehension. Participants read sentences of varying syntactic complexity (containing subject- and object-extracted relative clauses) while remembering one or three nouns (similar to or dissimilar from the sentence-nouns). A significant on-line interaction was found between syntactic complexity and similarity between the memory-nouns and the sentence-nouns in the three memory-nouns conditions, such that the similarity between the memory-nouns and the sentence-nouns affected the more complex object-extracted relative clauses to a greater extent than the less complex subject-extracted relative clauses. These results extend Gordon, Hendrick, and Levine’s (2002) report of a trend of such an interaction. The results argue against the domain-specific view of working memory resources in sentence comprehension (Caplan & Waters, 1999).
... Numerous studies have been conducted on the interactive or separate cognitive resources of structure and WM in both Turkish (Kaya, 2012;Çalışkanel, 2013;Arslan, Hohenberger & Verbrugge, 2017;Yücel, 2022) and many other languages such as English (Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, 2006, Weighall & Altmann, 2011, German (Fiebach, Schlesewsky, & Friederici, 2001, Fiebach et al., 2005Makuuchi et al., 2009;Vos et al., 2010), French and Hindi (Vasishth et al., 2011). Across languages, it is generally assumed that simple structures require less cognitive effort, whereas complex structures require more cognitive effort during sentence comprehension. ...
... On the other hand, there is an opposing view of the integration between structure and WM load during online sentence comprehension at the psycholinguistic and/or neurolinguistic levels (e.g., Caplan & Waters, 1999;Traxler & Tooley, 2007;Fiebach et al., 2005;Fedorenko et al., 2006;Makuuchi et al., 2009). Previous work has suggested a nonsyntactic WM load that is not integrated with sentence comprehension. ...
... Overall results of three experiments suggested that syntactic complexity and WM need to be treated separately when modelling the mechanisms of sentence comprehension. Fedorenko et al. (2006) then conducted two experiments using dual-task and spatial-task paradigms. In their first experiment, they found an interaction between arithmetic and syntactic complexities as an overlapping factor on WM, while a separate WM system was proposed for a separate memory load between sentence comprehension and verbal information. ...
... Many studies have reported similarity-based interference effects during online sentence comprehension (e.g., Arnett & Wagers, 2017;Cunnings & Sturt, 2014Dillon et al., 2013;Fedorenko et al., 2006;Gordon et al., 2001Gordon et al., , 2004Gordon et al., 2006;Gordon et al., 2002;Jäger et al., 2020;Lowder & Gordon, 2014;Ness & Meltzer-Asscher, 2017;Nicenboim et al., 2018;Parker & Phillips, 2017;Schlueter et al., 2019;Van Dyke, 2007;Van Dyke & Lewis, 2003;Van Dyke & McElree, 2006, 2011. Although similarity-based interference in sentence comprehension is a rather well-researched phenomenon, there are several open questions in the interference literature on sentence comprehension. ...
... Here, we focus on one line of research that investigates a special case of proactive semantic interference: interference from sentence-external items that were encoded in memory prior to reading a target dependency (e.g., Fedorenko et al., 2006;Gordon et al., 2002;Van Dyke et al., 2014;Van Dyke & McElree, 2006). These 48 studies show that sentence parsing can even be disrupted by linguistic items that are not structurally integrated. ...
... For example, the proactive interference studies by Gordon et al. (2002) and Fedorenko et al. (2006) directly manipulated memory contents, using a dual-task paradigm that consisted of a word memorization task and a sentence reading task. ...
The aim of this dissertation was to conduct a larger-scale cross-linguistic empirical investigation of similarity-based interference effects in sentence comprehension. Interference studies can offer valuable insights into the mechanisms that are involved in long-distance dependency completion. Many studies have investigated similarity-based interference effects, showing that syntactic and semantic information are employed during long-distance dependency formation (e.g., Arnett & Wagers, 2017; Cunnings & Sturt, 2018; Van Dyke, 2007, Van Dyke & Lewis, 2003; Van Dyke & McElree, 2011). Nevertheless, there are some important open questions in the interference literature that are critical to our understanding of the constraints involved in dependency resolution. The first research question concerns the relative timing of syntactic and semantic interference in online sentence comprehension. Only few interference studies have investigated this question, and, to date, there is not enough data to draw conclusions with regard to their time course (Van Dyke, 2007; Van Dyke & McElree, 2011). Our first cross-linguistic study explores the relative timing of syntactic and semantic interference in two eye-tracking reading experiments that implement the study design used in Van Dyke (2007). The first experiment tests English sentences. The second, larger-sample experiment investigates the two interference types in German. Overall, the data suggest that syntactic and semantic interference can arise simultaneously during retrieval. The second research question concerns a special case of semantic interference: We investigate whether cue-based retrieval interference can be caused by semantically similar items which are not embedded in a syntactic structure. This second interference study builds on a landmark study by Van Dyke & McElree (2006). The study design used in their study is unique in that it is able to pin down the source of interference as a consequence of cue overload during retrieval, when semantic retrieval cues do not uniquely match the retrieval target. Unlike most other interference studies, this design is able to rule out encoding interference as an alternative explanation. Encoding accounts postulate that it is not cue overload at the retrieval site but the erroneous encoding of similar linguistic items in memory that leads to interference (Lewandowsky et al., 2008; Oberauer & Kliegl, 2006). While Van Dyke & McElree (2006) reported cue-based retrieval interference from sentence-external distractors, the evidence for this effect was weak. A subsequent study did not show interference of this type (Van Dyke et al., 2014). Given these inconclusive findings, further research is necessary to investigate semantic cue-based retrieval interference. The second study in this dissertation provides a larger-scale cross-linguistic investigation of cue-based retrieval interference from sentence-external items. Three larger-sample eye-tracking studies in English, German, and Russian tested cue-based interference in the online processing of filler-gap dependencies. This study further extends the previous research by investigating interference in each language under varying task demands (Logačev & Vasishth, 2016; Swets et al., 2008). Overall, we see some very modest support for proactive cue-based retrieval interference in English. Unexpectedly, this was observed only under a low task demand. In German and Russian, there is some evidence against the interference effect. It is possible that interference is attenuated in languages with richer case marking. In sum, the cross-linguistic experiments on the time course of syntactic and semantic interference from sentence-internal distractors support existing evidence of syntactic and semantic interference during sentence comprehension. Our data further show that both types of interference effects can arise simultaneously. Our cross-linguistic experiments investigating semantic cue-based retrieval interference from sentence-external distractors suggest that this type of interference may arise only in specific linguistic contexts.
... We suggest that, if working memory is the link between musical training and language skills, then tasks that require working memory to process music must interfere with tasks that require working memory for language. A key paradigm that is used to demonstrate the role of working memory in language processing is a dual-task working memory and sentence reading paradigm (Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, 2006). When readers had to maintain verbal items in memory while reading sentences, comprehension and working memory performance both suffered, especially when both domains consumed more working memory resources (i.e., the sentences were syntactically complex and the working memory stimuli were similar to words in the sentence). ...
... While music influences processing speed in a concurrent dual task, it is unclear whether it is drawing on working memory. If music and language share this limited resource for parsing syntax, then we should be able to find a similar interference for music as we do in linguistic dual-task scenarios (Fedorenko et al., 2006). We tested this by extending the working memory and sentence processing dual-task paradigm to include different kinds of working memory stimuli (e.g., language, music, visuospatial dots). ...
... Following the dual-task logic laid out by Fedorenko et al. (2006), we manipulated the difficulty of the language task through the syntactic complexity of the sentences. We then compared performance to working memory stimuli that should not be processed by the same working memory system (e.g., visuospatial layouts; Wechsler, 1997). ...
Some researchers theorize that musicians’ greater language ability is mediated by greater working memory because music and language share the same processing resources. Prior work using working memory sentence processing dual-task paradigms have shown that holding verbal information (e.g., words) in working memory interferes with sentence processing. In contrast, visuospatial stimuli are processed in a different working memory store and should not interfere with sentence processing. We tested whether music showed similar interference to sentence processing as opposed to noninterference like visuospatial stimuli. We also compared musicians to nonmusicians to investigate whether musical training improves verbal working memory. Findings revealed that musical stimuli produced similar working memory interference as linguistic stimuli, but visuospatial stimuli did not—suggesting that music and language rely on similar working memory resources (i.e., verbal skills) that are distinct from visuospatial skills. Musicians performed more accurately on the working memory tasks, particularly for the verbal and musical working memory stimuli, supporting an association between musicianship and greater verbal working memory capacity. Future research is necessary to evaluate the role of music training as a cognitive intervention or educational strategy to enhance reading fluency.
... Some have argued that language processing relies primarily on a domain-general working memory resource (Wanner and Maratsos, 1978;King and Just, 1991;Just and Carpenter, 1992). This view draws support from evidence that individual differences in nonlinguistic WM capacity modulate linguistic processing (King and Just, 1991;Prat and Just, 2011;Slevc, 2011;Meyer et al., 2013;Payne et al., 2014;Nicenboim et al., 2015Nicenboim et al., , 2016; but see Federmeier et al., 2020), from dual-task experiments supporting a shared pool of linguistic and nonlinguistic WM resources (Gordon et al., 2002;Fedorenko et al., 2006Fedorenko et al., , 2007Van Dyke and McElree, 2006), and from evidence that nonlinguistic WM training can facilitate sentence comprehension (Novick et al., 2014;Hsu and Novick, 2016;Hussey et al., 2017;Hsu et al., 2021). However, others have argued that language processing relies primarily on domain-specific working memory resources (Lewis, 1996;Waters and Caplan, 1996;Caplan and Waters, 1999). ...
... First, our results support the widely held view that a core operation in human sentence processing is to encode and retrieve items in WM as required by the syntactic structure of sentences (Gibson, 2000;McElree et al., 2003;Lewis and Vasishth, 2005;Van Dyke and McElree, 2006;Rasmussen and Schuler, 2018), even in a naturalistic setting where behavioral evidence for such effects has been mixed in the presence of surprisal controls (Demberg and Keller, 2008;Shain and Schuler, 2018). And second, our results challenge prior arguments that the WM operations supporting language comprehension draw on primarily domain-general WM resources (Stowe et al., 1998;Fedorenko et al., 2006Fedorenko et al., , 2007Amici et al., 2007). Activity in the MD network-the most plausible candidate for implementing domain-general WM computations (Goldman-Rakic, 1988;Owen et al., 1990;Kimberg and Farah, 1993;Duncan and Owen, 2000;Prabhakaran et al., 2000;Cole and Schneider, 2007;Duncan, 2010;Gläscher et al., 2010;Rottschy et al., 2012;Camilleri et al., 2018;Assem et al., 2020a)-shows no association with any of the WM measures explored here and shows significantly weaker associations with critical WM predictors than does the LANG network. ...
To understand language, we must infer structured meanings from real-time auditory or visual signals. Researchers have long focused on word-by-word structure building in working memory as a mechanism that might enable this feat. However, some have argued that language processing does not typically involve rich word-by-word structure building, and/or that apparent working memory effects are underlyingly driven by surprisal (how predictable a word is in context). Consistent with this alternative, some recent behavioral studies of naturalistic language processing that control for surprisal have not shown clear working memory effects. In this fMRI study, we investigate a range of theory-driven predictors of word-by-word working memory demand during naturalistic language comprehension in humans of both sexes under rigorous surprisal controls. In addition, we address a related debate about whether the working memory mechanisms involved in language comprehension are language specialized or domain general. To do so, in each participant, we functionally localize (1) the language-selective network and (2) the “multiple-demand” network, which supports working memory across domains. Results show robust surprisal-independent effects of memory demand in the language network and no effect of memory demand in the multiple-demand network. Our findings thus support the view that language comprehension involves computationally demanding word-by-word structure building operations in working memory, in addition to any prediction-related mechanisms. Further, these memory operations appear to be primarily conducted by the same neural resources that store linguistic knowledge, with no evidence of involvement of brain regions known to support working memory across domains.
... Sentence comprehension is a complex cognitive process that requires us to continuously access, maintain, and integrate incoming information. Perhaps then, it is unsurprising that there is mounting evidence that such a complex process is not isolated but rather draws on other cognitive systems to operate successfully (Fedorenko et al., 2006;Baldo and Dronkers, 2007;January et al., 2009). One cognitive system that has been shown to support sentence comprehension is working memory (WM; Martin and He, 2004;Fedorenko et al., 2006;Tan et al., 2017). ...
... Perhaps then, it is unsurprising that there is mounting evidence that such a complex process is not isolated but rather draws on other cognitive systems to operate successfully (Fedorenko et al., 2006;Baldo and Dronkers, 2007;January et al., 2009). One cognitive system that has been shown to support sentence comprehension is working memory (WM; Martin and He, 2004;Fedorenko et al., 2006;Tan et al., 2017). WM allows listeners or readers to keep verbal representations active over short periods of time so that later parts of the sentence can be integrated with earlier ones. ...
Sentence comprehension involves maintaining and continuously integrating linguistic information and, thus, makes demands on working memory (WM). Past research has demonstrated that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, is critical for integrating word meanings across some distance and resolving semantic interference in sentence comprehension. Here, we examined the relation between phonological and semantic WM and the comprehension of center-embedded relative clause sentences, often argued to make heavy demands on WM. Additionally, we examined the relation between phonological and semantic WM and the comprehension of transitive and dative active and passive sentences, which may also draw on WM resources depending on the number of propositions that must be maintained and the difficulty of processing passive clauses. In a large sample of individuals with aphasia (N = 56), we assessed whether comprehension performance on more complex vs. simpler active-passive or embedded relative clause sentences would be predicted by semantic but not phonological WM when controlling for single word comprehension. For performance on the active-passive comprehension task, we found that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, predicted comprehension of dative sentences when controlling for comprehension of transitive sentences. We also found that phonological WM, but not semantic WM, predicted mean comprehension for reversible active-passive sentences when controlling for trials with lexical distractors. On the relative clause comprehension task, consistent with prior results, we found that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, predicted comprehension of object relative clause sentences and relative clause sentences with a passive construction. However, both phonological WM and semantic WM predicted mean comprehension across all relative clause types for reversible trials when controlling for trials with lexical distractors. While we found evidence of semantic WM’s role in comprehension, we also observed unpredicted relations between phonological WM and comprehension in some conditions. Post-hoc analyses provided preliminary evidence that phonological WM maintains a backup phonological representation of the sentence that may be accessed when sentence comprehension processing is less efficient. Future work should investigate possible roles that phonological WM may play across sentence types.
... Another study involved English relative clauses is by Fedorenko et al. (2006). In this self-paced reading study, Fedorenko and colleagues compared reading times within the entire relative clause phrase (the relative pronoun and the determiner+noun+verb sequence inside the relative clause-four words). ...
... This previous data from English relative clause studies gives us some empirical basis for assuming that the object minus subject relative clause difference in the Grodner and Gibson (2005) design on English could range from 10 to 100 ms or so. If the reading time were recorded for the entire relative clause region, as in Fedorenko et al. (2006), obviously the prior would have to be different. ...
We discuss an important issue that is not directly related to the main theses of the van Doorn et al. ( Computational Brain and Behavior , 2021) paper, but which frequently comes up when using Bayesian linear mixed models: how to determine sample size in advance of running a study when planning a Bayes factor analysis. We adapt a simulation-based method proposed by Wang and Gelfand ( Statistical Science 193–208, 2002) for a Bayes factor-based design analysis, and demonstrate how relatively complex hierarchical models can be used to determine approximate sample sizes for planning experiments.
... The facilitation due to the pronoun was observed both at the second noun phrase and at the relative clause verb. While the effect at the pronoun itself could be due to lexical variables (pronouns are shorter and more frequent than definite descriptions), the reading times at the verb more strongly suggest an encoding effect, as the distinction between noun types is unlikely to be a retrieval cue (for similar findings see Barker et al., 2001;Fedorenko et al., 2006;Gordon et al., 2002;Hofmeister & Vasishth, 2014;Jäger et al., 2015;Kush et al., 2015). ...
... Encoding interference effects are common in psycholinguistics. For instance, the comprehension of object relative clauses is facilitated when the subject and object are of different types, for example, a definite description and a pronoun vs. two definite descriptions: The barber that you / the lawyer admired (Gordon et al., 2002; see also Barker et al., 2001;Fedorenko et al., 2006;Hofmeister & Vasishth, 2014). Similarly, it has been shown that participants read words within a cleft clause more slowly when they rhyme with those of a currently maintained memory word list, and that this slowdown occurs prior to the verb/retrieval site (Kush et al., 2015). ...
The comprehension of subject-verb agreement shows “attraction effects,” which reveal that number computations can be derailed by nouns that are grammatically unlicensed to control agreement with a verb. However, previous results are mixed regarding whether attraction affects the processing of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences alike. In a large-sample eye-tracking replication of Lago et al. (2015), we support this “grammaticality asymmetry” by showing that the reading profiles associated with attraction depend on sentence grammaticality. In ungrammatical sentences, attraction affected both fixation durations and regressive eye-movements at the critical disagreeing verb. Meanwhile, both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences showed effects of the attractor noun number prior to the verb, in the first- and second-pass reading of the subject phrase. This contrast suggests that attraction effects in comprehension have at least two different sources: the first reflects verb-triggered processes that operate mainly in ungrammatical sentences. The second source reflects difficulties in the encoding of the subject phrase, which disturb comprehension in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.
... A standard view is that richly structured linguistic representations are incrementally stored, retrieved, and integrated in working memory (WM) via computationally intensive operations (e.g., Frazier & Fodor, 1978;Clifton & Frazier, 1989;Just & Carpenter, 1992;Gibson, 2000;Lewis & Vasishth, 2005;Pallier et al., 2011; see Figure 1). The WM resources that support these operations are often regarded as domain general, either implicitly by invocation of general constraints on WM (e.g., Gibson, 2000; or explicitly based on experimental results (e.g., Gordon et al., 2002;Fedorenko et al., 2006Fedorenko et al., , 2007. This domaingeneral construal of WM for language is consistent with neural mechanisms for abstract structure building in language and other domains of cognition (e.g., Just & Carpenter, 1992;Patel, 2003;Novick et al., 2005). ...
... First, our results support the widely-held view that a core operation in human sentence processing is to encode and retrieve items in WM as required by the syntactic structure of sentences (Gibson, 2000;McElree et al., 2003;Lewis & Vasishth, 2005;Van Dyke & McElree, 2006;Rasmussen & Schuler, 2018), even in a naturalistic setting where behavioral evidence for such effects has been mixed in the presence of surprisal controls (Demberg & Keller, 2008;Shain & Schuler, 2018). And second, our results challenge prior arguments that the WM operations supporting language comprehension draw on domain-general WM resources (Stowe et al., 1998;Fedorenko et al., 2006Fedorenko et al., , 2007Amici et al., 2007). Activity in the MD network-the most plausible candidate for implementing domain-general WM computations (Goldman-Rakic, 1988;Owen et al., 1990;Kimberg & Farah, 1993;Duncan & Owen, 2000;Prabhakaran et al., 2000;Cole & Schneider, 2007;Duncan, 2010;Gläscher et al., 2010;Rottschy et al., 2012;Camilleri et al., 2018;Assem et al., 2020)-shows no association with any of the WM measures explored here and shows significantly weaker associations with critical WM predictors than does the LANG network. ...
A standard view of human language processing is that comprehenders build richly structured mental representations of natural language utterances, word by word, using computationally costly memory operations supported by domain-general working memory resources. However, three core claims of this view have been questioned, with some prior work arguing that (1) rich word-by-word structure building is not a core function of the language comprehension system, (2) apparent working memory costs are underlyingly driven by word predictability ( surprisal ), and/or (3) language comprehension relies primarily on domain-general rather than domain-specific working memory resources. In this work, we simultaneously evaluate all three of these claims using naturalistic comprehension in fMRI. In each participant, we functionally localize (a) a language-selective network and (b) a ‘multiple-demand’ network that supports working memory across domains, and we analyze the responses in these two networks of interest during naturalistic story listening with respect to a range of theory-driven predictors of working memory demand under rigorous surprisal controls. Results show robust surprisal-independent effects of word-by-word memory demand in the language network and no effect of working memory demand in the multiple demand network. Our findings thus support the view that language comprehension (1) entails word-by-word structure building using (2) computationally intensive memory operations that are not explained by surprisal. However, these results challenge (3) the domain-generality of the resources that support these operations, instead indicating that working memory operations for language comprehension are carried out by the same neural resources that store linguistic knowledge.
Significance Statement
This study uses fMRI to investigate signatures of working memory (WM) demand during naturalistic story listening, using a broad range of theoretically motivated estimates of WM demand. Results support a strong effect of WM demand in language-selective brain regions but no effect of WM demand in “multiple demand” regions that have previously been associated with WM in non-linguistic domains. We further show evidence that WM effects in language regions are distinct from effects of word predictability. Our findings support a core role for WM in incremental language processing, using WM resources that are specialized for language.
... Those with higher spans should be able to diagnose and repair syntactic errors more easily than those with lower spans. Some studies have shown some support for this claim, especially those using dual-task paradigms (Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, 2006). In contrast, prior individual differences studies have not supported this position, especially in cases where other individual differences variables are evaluated alongside working memory capacity (Traxler et al., 2005;Van Dyke, Johns, & Kukona, 2014;Freed, Hamilton & Long, 2018). ...
... We should also note that although executive function was an important predictor of online syntactic parsing, there were no consistent differences in executive function abilities between monolinguals and bilinguals -either at the level of individual tasks (Table 6) Working Memory. Previous studies, particularly those employing dual-task paradigms, have argued that working memory plays a critical role in sentence processing (Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, 2006); however, several individual difference studies have failed to support this position (Traxler et al., 2005Van Dyke et al., 2014;Freed, Hamilton & Long, 2017). For example, Van Dyke and colleagues (2014) found that working memory ability was only spuriously related to comprehension performance during a memory interference task. ...
Syntactic parsing plays a central role in the interpretation of sentences, but it is unclear to what extent non-native speakers can deploy native-like grammatical knowledge during online comprehension. The current eye-tracking study investigated how Chinese–English bilinguals and native English speakers respond to syntactic category and subcategorization information while reading sentences with object-subject ambiguities. We also obtained measures of English language experience, working memory capacity, and executive function to determine how these cognitive variables influence online parsing. During reading, monolinguals and bilinguals showed similar garden-path effects related to syntactic reanalysis, but native English speakers responded more robustly to verb subcategorization cues. Readers with greater language experience and executive function showed increased sensitivity to verb subcategorization cues, but parsing was not influenced by working memory capacity. These results are consistent with exposure-based accounts of bilingual sentence processing, and they support a link between syntactic processing and domain-general cognitive control.
... Shain et al., 2019) including grammatical violations (Kuperberg et al., 2003;Nieuwland et al., 2012), and syntactic complexity in unambiguous structures (Peelle et al., 2010). These results align with behavioral evidence for the role of working memory/cognitive control in language comprehension (King & Just, 1991;Gernsbacher, 1993;Waters and Caplan, 1996;Gibson, 1998;Gordon et al., 2002;Fedorenko et al., 2006Fedorenko et al., , 2007Lewis et al., 2006;Novick et al., 2009). Some have therefore proposed that domain-general executive resources-implemented in the MD network-support core aspects of linguistic interpretation (Hasson et al., 2018), like inhibiting irrelevant meanings/parses (Novick et al., 2005), selecting the relevant representation from among alternatives (Thompson-Schill et al., 2002;Hirshorn & Thompson-Schill, 2006;Grindrod et al., 2008), supporting predictive coding for language processing (Strijkers et al., 2019), or keeping linguistic representations active in working memory (Moser et al., 2007). ...
... There is a long tradition in the psycholinguistic literature to describe both lexical access and syntactic/semantic parsing using domain-general cognitive constructs. These include storing information in and retrieving it from working memory, updating focal attention, inhibiting irrelevant information, selecting an option among alternatives, and predictive processing (e.g., Johnson-Laird & Nicholas, 1983;Abney & Johnson, 1991;King & Just, 1991;Resnick, 1992;Gernsbacher, 1993;Waters and Caplan, 1996;Gibson, 1998;McElree, 2000McElree, , 2001Gordon et al., 2002;Fedorenko et al., 2006Fedorenko et al., , 2007Lewis et al., 2006;Novick et al., 2009;Rodd et al., 2010;Schuler et al., 2010;Vergauwe et al., 2010;Smith & Levy, 2013;van Schijndel et al., 2013;Rasmussen & Schuler, 2018). These kinds of mental operations may be implemented in domain-general circuits of the MD network, which has historically been linked to diverse executive demands (Miller & Cohen, 2001;Duncan & Owen, 2000;Duncan, 2010). ...
Aside from the language-selective left-lateralized fronto-temporal network, language comprehension sometimes additionally recruits a domain-general bilateral fronto-parietal network implicated in executive functions: the multiple demand (MD) network. However, the nature of the MD network’s contributions to language comprehension remains debated. To illuminate the role of this network in language processing, we conducted a large-scale fMRI investigation using data from 30 diverse word and sentence comprehension experiments (481 unique participants, 678 scanning sessions). In line with prior findings, the MD network was active during many language tasks. Moreover, similar to the language-selective network, which is robustly lateralized to the left hemisphere, these responses were stronger in the left-hemisphere MD regions. However, in stark contrast with the language-selective network, the MD network responded more strongly (i) to lists of unconnected words than to sentences, and critically, (ii) in paradigms with an explicit task compared to passive comprehension paradigms. In fact, many passive comprehension tasks failed to elicit a response above the fixation baseline in the MD network, in contrast to strong responses in the language-selective network. In tandem, these results argue against a role for the MD network in core aspects of sentence comprehension like inhibiting irrelevant meanings or parses, keeping intermediate representations active in working memory, or predicting upcoming words or structures. These results align with recent evidence of relatively poor tracking of the linguistic signal by the MD regions during naturalistic comprehension, and instead suggest that the MD network’s engagement during language processing likely reflects effort associated with extraneous task demands.
Significance Statement
Domain-general executive processes, like working memory and cognitive control, have long been implicated in language comprehension, including in neuroimaging studies that have reported activation in domain-general multiple demand (MD) regions for linguistic manipulations. However, much prior evidence has come from paradigms where language interpretation is accompanied by extraneous tasks. Using a large fMRI dataset (30 experiments/481 participants/678 sessions), we demonstrate that MD regions are engaged during language comprehension in the presence of task demands, but not during passive reading/listening—conditions that strongly activate the fronto-temporal language network. These results present a fundamental challenge to proposals whereby linguistic computations, like inhibiting irrelevant meanings, keeping representations active in working memory, or predicting upcoming elements, draw on domain-general executive resources.
... The authors concluded that syntactic processing and the recall task did not compete for the same resources and suggested an independent subsystem for processing syntactic structures. In contrast, Fedorenko et al. (2006) provided evidence against a specific pool of resources for sentence processing. In their experiment participants had to read sentences of varying complexity and additionally memorized one, two, or three nouns that either occurred within the sentence they were just reading or not. ...
... German nouns fall into three gender classesmasculine, feminine and neuter gender (masc, fem, and neut). Although attempts have been made to determine formal gender cues in terms of suffixes (Köpcke, 1982), German nouns are generally believed to be inherently marked for gender (Eisenberg, 1994). Thus, gender information is part of the lexical entry and retrieved from the mental lexicon when needed, for instance, when selecting the appropriate definite determiner der, die, or das on which gender is marked in the singular (Hohlfeld, 2006;Levelt et al., 1999;Shantz and Tanner, 2017;van Turennout et al., 1998). ...
The present study investigates in how far morphosyntactic processing is affected by an additional non-verbal task and whether this effect differs between German and Spanish, two languages with differences in processing grammatical gender (lexical vs. cue-based processing). By manipulating task load and language we aimed at getting an insight into subprocesses of morphosyntax and their dependence on resources of general and verbal working memory, respectively. In more general terms, this study contributes to the debate on the modularity of morphosyntax. Written German or Spanish sentences with or without gender violations were presented word by word to native speakers. The critical words temporally overlapped in different degrees with a non-linguistic stimulus (a high or low tone). In a single task (Experiment 1) participants judged sentence acceptability and ignored the tones. Experiment 2 required a response to the tones. Left-anterior negativity (LAN) and P600 components were analyzed in the ERPs to critical words. Whereas the LAN was not affected by any of the experimental manipulations, the P600 was modulated as a function of language during the single task conditions (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2 the additional task did not add up with this effect; instead, the differences between language groups vanished. This may indicate that the processes reflected in the P600 draw on resources of general working memory. The LAN data seem to be in line with modularity of first pass morphosyntactic processing, although this interpretation contradicts findings from other studies. The P600 results may highlight the flexibility of sentence-based syntactic processing.
... Aunque en los dos principales modelos de funcionamiento de la MO (ver revisión en Injoque-Ricle, Barreyro y Burin, 2012) no se contempla el rol de la sintaxis, ciertos supuestos y la evidencia empírica nos permiten pensar que la estructuración sintáctica cumple un rol cardinal. Se ha observado que varía la capacidad de realizar tareas de la MO cuando se procesan oraciones de diferente dificultad sintáctica (Fedorenko, Gibson, Rohde, 2006) o ante una serie de palabras inconexas frente a la articulación en sintaxis normal o anómala. ...
... Del análisis concluimos que, al desconocer la incidencia de la sintaxis, no solo se homologan estructuras de diferente nivel de complejidad sino que se desconoce la diferente función informativo-discursiva que cada una de las estructuras lleva consigo y con ello se homogeneizan las diferencias de empaquetamiento que cada estructura supone (Elvira, 2009;Kibrik, 2007). Desconocer la incidencia de la sintaxis en la capacidad de procesamiento de la MO implica no solo suponer irrelevante la evidencia que señala que la conformación sintáctica impacta en el funcionamiento de la MO (Fedorenko, Gibson, y Rohde, 2006) sino también la que ha demostrado que las variaciones sintácticas correlacionan con la frecuencia de uso de la forma y con su grado de adaptabilidad comunicativa (López Ornat, Fernández, Gallo, y Mariscal, 1986). Además, se desconocen variables léxicas (la relación entre posibilidad de procesamiento y frecuencia) y semánticas (la relación entre procesamiento en la MO y diferencias en la generación de inferencias). ...
Son recomendaciones para la enseñanza del lenguaje en consideración de la cultura virtual en la que se está viviendo y necesidad de superar los enfoques basados en una cultura de la escritura.
... We opted for verbal memory load because it would be more likely to interact with aspects of linguistic processing. Further, we used a type of verbal load (several unrelated nouns) that is commonly used in studies addressing questions similar to ours and has produced the predicted effects (e.g., three nouns in Hartsuiker & Barkhuisen, 2006, for syntactic formulation in production; two nouns in Slevc, 2011, for accessibility effects on syntactic formulation in production; one or three nouns in Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, 2006, for syntactic processing in comprehension). Further, the kind of load we used involves maintenance of information in working memory, which should interfere with the necessary maintenance of any information that (by hypothesis) would be manipulated during syntactic formulation. ...
... Further, we predicted that concurrent memory load would cause greater slowing and reduced accuracy than no load (statistically, a main effect of load). This prediction is based Working memory in syntactic formulation 16 on (1) the standard assumption in dual-task experiments that concurrently performing two tasks disrupts performance (including slowing it down; non-linguistic performance: e.g., de Fockert, Rees, Frith, & Lavie, 2001;Lavie, Hirst, de Fockert, & Viding, 2004;Stins, Vosse, Boomsma, & de Geus, 2004;linguistic performance: e.g., Ferreira & Pashler, 2002); (2) a conception of the language and working memory systems as limited capacity systems (Baddeley, 1995;Bock, 1982); and (3) numerous studies showing that external working memory load including the type used here slows down linguistic processes (in production: Belke, 2008;Martin et al., 2014;in comprehension: Baddeley & Hitch, 1974;Fedorenko et al., 2006;Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, 2007) and causes more production errors (Fayol et al., 1994;Hartsuiker and Barkhuysen., 2006). ...
Four picture-description experiments investigated if syntactic formulation in language production can proceed with only minimal working memory involvement. Experiments 1–3 compared the initiation latencies, utterance durations, and errors for syntactically simpler picture descriptions (adjective–noun phrases, e.g., the red book ) to those of more complex descriptions (relative clauses, e.g., the book that is red). In Experiment 4, the syntactically more complex descriptions were also lexically more complex (e.g., the book and the car vs . the book ). Simpler and more complex descriptions were produced under verbal memory load consisting of 2 or 4 unrelated nouns, or under no load. Across experiments, load actually made production more efficient (as manifested in shorter latencies, shorter durations or both), and sped up the durations of relative clauses more than those of adjective–noun phrases. The only evidence for disproportional disruption of more complex descriptions by load was a greater increase of production errors for these descriptions than for simpler descriptions under load in Experiments 2 and 4. We thus conclude that syntactic formulation in production (for certain constructions or in certain situations) can proceed with minimal working memory involvement.
... In contrast to previous work on the influence of cognitive load on language comprehension (e.g. 371 Fedorenko et al., 2006;Gordon et al., 2002;Rodd et al., 2010), we employed a non-linguistic 372 secondary task to manipulate cognitive load, thereby aiming to engage domain-general executive 373 resources. When investigating the interaction of cognitive load and language predictability on 374 reading time, we found that increased cognitive load diminished the effect of predictability on all 375 timescales, suggesting executive resources are involved in the generation of language prediction 376 across timescales. ...
In everyday communication, humans predict upcoming language seemingly effortlessly. However, it remains unclear to what extent the formation of such predictions taxes executive resources. Our study set out to investigate how a limitation of executive resources impacts natural language prediction on multiple timescales in a novel dual-task paradigm, and how this impact is modulated by age. Participants (N = 175; 18–85 years) read short newspaper articles, presented word by word in varying font colours. This self-paced reading task was either performed in isolation or paired with a competing n-back task (1-back or 2-back) on the words’ font colour. We measured word-level reading time and block-level reading comprehension as well as n - back performance. To quantify word predictability, we estimated word surprisal on four distinct timescales (i.e., context lengths ranging from words to paragraphs) using a large language model. Under high cognitive load, adults aged 60 and over benefited most from high word predictability. Our results show that independent of timescale, higher cognitive load diminishes the benefits of high word predictability on reading time, suggesting language predictions draw on executive resources.
... Although most studies have concluded that interference occurs during retrieval, empirical evidence indicates that it may also arise when elements are being encoded in memory (e.g., Barker et al. 2001;Gordon et al. 2001Gordon et al. , 2002Fedorenko et al. 2006;Hofmeister & Vasishth 2014;Kush et al. 2015;Jä ger et al. 2015;Villata et al. 2018). Encoding interference has initially been argued to be caused by a mechanism of feature overwriting, wherein two elements that share the same feature compete for it. ...
According to the most recent version of Relativized Minimality, the ungrammaticality of weak islands is the result of featural similarity between elements in an intervention configuration. The theory posits that only features triggering movement have the potential to induce intervention effects leading to ungrammaticality. However, recent advancements in the theory have extended the set of features claimed to generate intervention effects to encompass lexical restriction. This theoretical move encounters several empirical challenges. In this paper, we address this question in 3 acceptability judgment experiments in French. We explore how featural similarity influences acceptability judgments across both wh-islands and minimally different grammatical structures, that-clauses extraction, focusing on three distinct features: (i) the feature associated with question operators, (ii) lexical restriction, both anticipated to show intervention effects according to the most recent version of Relativized Minimality, and (iii) animacy, which is not expected to show such effects. Results indicate that featural similarity in lexical restriction and animacy exerts a mild influence on acceptability ratings in both islands and grammatical structures, contrary to what predicted by Relativized Minimality, while similarity in the feature associated with question operators exerts a strong influence. We propose an empirically motivated account that restricts the set of features relevant to grammar-based effects à la Relativized Minimality to core syntactic features triggering movement, and groups together the milder effects arising from similarity in other linguistic features, like lexical restriction and animacy, as resulting from similarity-based interference in memory.
... This in turn implies that the derivation chain of studies in the cognitive neuroscience of language also adopts a number of concepts that originate from general psychology and which play a role during language processing: For example, working memory (e.g., Swets, Desmet, Hambrick, & Ferreira, 2007;Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, 2006), executive functions (e.g., Shao, Janse, Visser, & Meyer, 2014;Baddeley, Hitch, & Allen, 2009), predictive processing (e.g., van der Burght, Friederici, Goucha, & Hartwigsen, 2021;Weber, Grice, & Crocker, 2006), or automaticity of higher mental processes (Pyatigorskaya, Maran, & Zaccarella, 2023). Distinct linguistic theories differ in the strength of their link to these psychological theories. ...
The capacity for language is a defining property of our species, yet despite decades of research, evidence on its neural basis is still mixed and a generalized consensus is difficult to achieve. We suggest that this is partly caused by researchers defining “language” in different ways, with focus on a wide range of phenomena, properties, and levels of investigation. Accordingly, there is very little agreement among cognitive neuroscientists of language on the operationalization of fundamental concepts to be investigated in neuroscientific experiments. Here, we review chains of derivation in the cognitive neuroscience of language, focusing on how the hypothesis under consideration is defined by a combination of theoretical and methodological assumptions. We first attempt to disentangle the complex relationship between linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience in the field. Next, we focus on how conclusions that can be drawn from any experiment are inherently constrained by auxiliary assumptions, both theoretical and methodological, on which the validity of conclusions drawn rests. These issues are discussed in the context of classical experimental manipulations as well as study designs that employ novel approaches such as naturalistic stimuli and computational modeling. We conclude by proposing that a highly interdisciplinary field such as the cognitive neuroscience of language requires researchers to form explicit statements concerning the theoretical definitions, methodological choices, and other constraining factors involved in their work.
... Relative clauses have been extensively studied in psycholinguistics. Subject relatives (SR) have been found to be easier to process than object relatives (OR) in multiple languages for both unimpaired controls (e.g., Grodner and Gibson, 2005;Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, 2006;Gordon, Hendrick, Johnson, & Lee, 2006;Staub, 2010, Staub, Dillon, & Clifton Jr, 2017 and for IWA (e.g., Caramazza & Zurif, 1976;Burchert et al., 2003;Caplan et al., 2007;Dickey & Thompson, 2009;Caplan et al., 2013Caplan et al., , 2015Pregla et al., 2021). The subject-object asymmetry in IWA and controls has been computationally modeled in the cue-based retrieval framework (Mätzig et al., 2018;Vasishth et al., 2019;Lissón et al., 2021a) using self-paced listening data and offline measures in English. ...
Sentence comprehension requires the listener to link incoming words with short-term memory representations in order to build linguistic dependencies. The cue-based retrieval theory of sentence processing predicts that the retrieval of these memory representations is affected by similarity-based interference. We present the first large-scale computational evaluation of interference effects in two models of sentence processing — the activation-based model and a modification of the direct-access model — in individuals with aphasia (IWA) and control participants in German. The parameters of the models are linked to prominent theories of processing deficits in aphasia, and the models are tested against two linguistic constructions in German: pronoun resolution and relative clauses. The data come from a visual-world eye-tracking experiment combined with a sentence-picture matching task. The results show that both control participants and IWA are susceptible to retrieval interference, and that a combination of theoretical explanations (intermittent deficiencies, slow syntax, and resource reduction) can explain IWA’s deficits in sentence processing. Model comparisons reveal that both models have a similar predictive performance in pronoun resolution, but the activation-based model outperforms the direct-access model in relative clauses.
... Rather, the derivation chain also adopts a number of performance-related assumptions originating from general psychology: For example, working memory (e.g., Fedorenko et al., 2006;Swets et al., 2007), executive functions (e.g., Baddeley et al., 2009;Shao et al., 2014), predictive processing (e.g., van der Burght et al., 2021;Weber et al., 2006), or automaticity of higher mental processes (Pyatigorskaya et al., 2022). Distinct linguistic theories differ in the strength of their link to these psychological theories. ...
The capacity for language is a defining property of our species, yet despite decades of research, evidence on its neural basis is still mixed and a generalized consensus is difficult to achieve. We suggest that this is partly caused by researchers defining “language” in radically different ways, with focus on a wide range of phenomena, properties, and levels of investigation. Accordingly, there is very little agreement amongst cognitive neuroscientists of language on the operationalization of fundamental concepts to be investigated in neuroscientific experiments. This paper reviews chains of derivation in the cognitive neuroscience of language, focusing on how the hypothesis under consideration is defined by a combination of theoretical and methodological assumptions. We first attempt to disentangle the complex relationship between linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience in the field. We then focus on how conclusions that can be drawn from any experiment are inherently constrained not just by the research techniques and analyses adopted, but also by the theoretical starting point of the study: auxiliary assumptions, both theoretical and methodological, on which the validity of conclusions drawn rely. These issues are discussed in the context of classical experimental manipulations, as well as study designs that employ novel approaches such as naturalistic stimuli and computational methods. We conclude by proposing that a highly interdisciplinary field such as the cognitive neuroscience of language requires researchers to form explicit statements concerning the theoretical definitions, methodological choices, and other constraining factors involved in their work.
... It is found that phrase-and sentence-rate cortical responses were attenuated by higher WM load, supporting the higher-level modulation hypothesis. This corroborates the evidenced role of working memory in semantic integration and syntactic parsing (King and Just, 1991;MacDonald et al., 1992;Caplan and Waters, 1999;Fedorenko et al., 2006;Martin, 2021). Specifically, the WM system has been found to be responsible for active retention of unintegrated representations (Daneman and Carpenter, 1980;Just and Carpenter, 1992) and efficient retrieval of lexical-semantic and syntactic knowledge from long-term memory (Baddeley, 2000;Burgess and Hitch, 2005;Was and Woltz, 2007;Oberauer, 2009). ...
Working memory load can modulate speech perception. However, since speech perception and working memory are both complex functions, it remains elusive how each component of the working memory system interacts with each speech processing stage. To investigate this issue, we concurrently measure how the working memory load modulates neural activity tracking three levels of linguistic units, i.e., syllables, phrases, and sentences, using a multiscale frequency tagging approach. Participants engage in a sentence comprehension task and the working memory load is manipulated by asking them to memorize either auditory verbal sequences or visual patterns. It is found that verbal and visual working memory load modulate speech processing in similar manners: Higher working memory load attenuates neural activity tracking of phrases and sentences but enhances neural activity tracking of syllables. Since verbal and visual WM load similarly influence the neural responses to speech, such influences may derive from the domain-general component of WM system. More importantly, working memory load asymmetrically modulates lower-level auditory encoding and higher-level linguistic processing of speech, possibly reflecting reallocation of attention induced by mnemonic load.
... Working memory refers to a system with limited capacity (5,6), which is used to temporarily maintain and store information (7). It is a basic support structure of the thinking process (8). ...
Interference control function is a key function in a series of specific functions of working memory (WM), which is usually impaired in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). Event-related potentials (ERPs) have advantages in exploring the neural processing of interference control and WM impairment, and therefore, it is helpful to further understand the neural mechanism of MDD. In the present study, 44 patients with MDD and 44 age- and sex-matched healthy controls (HCs) were recruited. All participants completed a 4-gradient difficulty Brown-Peterson task (BPT), whose difficulty was manipulated by changing the demand of interspersed distraction tasks. High-density EEG was simultaneously recorded. The hit rate and reaction time (RT) toward the target stimulus as well as the underlying ERP features were analyzed. The results showed that, when compared with HCs, MDD patients had significantly lower hit rates and longer RTs among all four difficulties of BPT. For ERP components, no significant between-group difference was found in either N100 or P200 average amplitudes; however, the centroparietal late positive potential (LPP) amplitude of both MDD group and HC group decreased with the increase of BPT difficulty, despite the pattern of the HC group was relative moderate. For both groups, the LPP amplitude was significantly smaller in high-order difficult BPT tasks than in low-order difficult tasks. Moreover, LPP amplitude in high-order difficult tasks was much smaller in MDD group than that of HC group. Our findings suggest that failure to control interference well may play a critical role in the impairment of WM in patients with MDD, and provided new evidence that the neural correlates of interference control dysfunction of WM in MDD.
... Relative clauses have been extensively studied in psycholinguistics. Subject relatives (SR) have been found to be easier to process than object relatives (OR) in multiple languages for both unimpaired controls (e.g., Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, 2006;Gordon et al., 2006;Grodner & Gibson, 2005;Staub, 2010;Staub, Dillon, & Clifton Jr, 2017) and for IWA (e.g., Burchert et al., 2003;Caplan et al., 2013Caplan et al., , 2015Caplan et al., 2007;Caramazza & Zurif, 1976;Dickey & Thompson, 2009;. The subject-object asymmetry in IWA and controls has been computationally modeled in the cue-based retrieval framework Mätzig et al., 2018;Vasishth et al., 2019) using self-paced listening data and offline measures in English. ...
It is well-known that individuals with aphasia (IWA) have difficulties understanding sentences that involve non-adjacent dependencies, such as object relative clauses or passives (Caplan, Baker, & Dehaut, 1985; Caramazza & Zurif, 1976). A large body of research supports the view that IWA’s grammatical system is intact, and that comprehension difficulties in aphasia are caused by a processing deficit, such as a delay in lexical access and/or in syntactic structure building (e.g., Burkhardt, Piñango, & Wong, 2003; Caplan, Michaud, & Hufford, 2015; Caplan, Waters, DeDe, Michaud, & Reddy, 2007; Ferrill, Love, Walenski, & Shapiro, 2012; Hanne, Burchert, De Bleser, & Vasishth, 2015; Love, Swinney, Walenski, & Zurif, 2008). The main goal of this dissertation is to computationally investigate the processing sources of comprehension impairments in sentence processing in aphasia. In this work, prominent theories of processing deficits coming from the aphasia literature are implemented within two cognitive models of sentence processing –the activation-based model (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) and the direct-access model (McEl- ree, 2000)–. These models are two different expressions of the cue-based retrieval theory (Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke, 2006), which posits that sentence processing is the result of a series of iterative retrievals from memory. These two models have been widely used to account for sentence processing in unimpaired populations in multiple languages and linguistic constructions, sometimes interchangeably (Parker, Shvarts- man, & Van Dyke, 2017). However, Nicenboim and Vasishth (2018) showed that when both models are implemented in the same framework and fitted to the same data, the models yield different results, because the models assume different data- generating processes. Specifically, the models hold different assumptions regarding the retrieval latencies. The second goal of this dissertation is to compare these two models of cue-based retrieval, using data from individuals with aphasia and control participants. We seek to answer the following question: Which retrieval mechanism is more likely to mediate sentence comprehension? We model 4 subsets of existing data: Relative clauses in English and German; and control structures and pronoun resolution in German. The online data come from either self-paced listening experiments, or visual-world eye-tracking experiments. The offline data come from a complementary sentence-picture matching task performed at the end of the trial in both types of experiments. The two competing models of retrieval are implemented in the Bayesian framework, following Nicenboim and Vasishth (2018). In addition, we present a modified version of the direct-acess model that – we argue – is more suitable for individuals with aphasia. This dissertation presents a systematic approach to implement and test verbally- stated theories of comprehension deficits in aphasia within cognitive models of sen- tence processing. The conclusions drawn from this work are that (a) the original direct-access model (as implemented here) cannot account for the full pattern of data from individuals with aphasia because it cannot account for slow misinterpretations; and (b) an activation-based model of retrieval can account for sentence comprehension deficits in individuals with aphasia by assuming a delay in syntactic structure building, and noise in the processing system. The overall pattern of results support an activation-based mechanism of memory retrieval, in which a combination of processing deficits, namely slow syntax and intermittent deficiencies, cause comprehension difficulties in individuals with aphasia.
... There is no consensus in the literature as to whether WM maintains language-specific representations (cf. Caplan & Waters, 1999;Fedorenko et al., 2006). However, old experiments with delayed verification did find a sustained effect for linguistic factors, such as morphological complexity and syntactic complexity, whereas extralinguistic factors such as the frequency of the items were eliminated in longer delays (Holyoak et al., 1976;Seymour, 1974). ...
Negated sentences are known to be more cognitively taxing than positive ones (i.e., polarity effect). We present evidence that two factors contribute to the polarity effect in verification tasks: processing the sentence and verifying its truth value. To quantify the relative contribution of each, we used a delayed verification task. The results show that even when participants are given a considerable amount of time for processing the sentence prior to verification, the polarity effect is not entirely eliminated. We suggest that this sustained effect stems from a retained negation-containing representation in working memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
... One proposed that different resources of working memory are used to process (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974;Baddeley, 1986;Hanley, Young and Pearson, 1991;Jonides et al., 1993;Shah and Miyake, 1996;Vallar and Shallice, 1990) but the other one put forward that cognitive tasks use the same resources for verbal working memory King and Just, 1991). In this view, Fedorenko et al. (2006) aimed to see if it is the single pool of working memory or separate pools responsible for the working memory resources which are used in sentence comprehension through a dual-task experiment. The participants were the forty-four native speakers of English and took tests on memory and sentence comprehension. ...
The purpose of this study is to develop a production span test to be used in L1 Turkish and L2 English and to see the role of working memory in the L1 and L2 writing process and quality. In addition to the role of working memory in writing, the study examines if working memory training leads to an increase in working memory capacity and subsequently leads to any change in the writing process and quality due to the improvement in working memory capacity. Twenty-eight freshman students from the Department of English Language Teaching (ELT) who are native speakers of Turkish participated in the study. The study consisted of two parts: a) developing a production span test in L1 Turkish and L2 English and b) examining the relationship between working memory and writing process and quality in L1 and L2, as well as the impact of working memory training on working memory capacity and the writing process in addition to writing quality in L1 and L2. Data comes from reading span test, production span tests which were used for the working memory capacity, and also Inputlog. The writing process was quantified through Inputlog and online working memory training was given to the experimental group for eight weeks through Lumosity. Statistical analyses of factor analyses of Varimax rotation, Spearman's rank-order correlation, and Mann-Whitney U test were used. Argumentative essays in L1 Turkish and L2 English were used for the writing quality and the writing process components. The findings of the study revealed implications with respect to the working memory and writing relationship and the impact of working memory training on the working memory capacity.
... Since the distinction between definite description and pronoun is not cued by the verb, the facilitation effect of mismatch cannot lie in the cue-based retrieval process directed at satisfying the constraints of the verb. Similar results were obtained by and Fedorenko et al. (2006) with a memory load paradigm and by with a sentence-completion task on agreement attraction. Hence, even though the effect was detected at the critical retrieval region (i.e., the verb), it must reflect encoding interference. ...
Formal theories of grammar and traditional parsing models, insofar as they presuppose a categorical notion of grammar, face the challenge of accounting for gradient effects (sentences receive gradient acceptability judgments, speakers report a gradient ability to comprehend sentences that deviate from idealized grammatical forms, and various online sentence processing measures yield gradient effects). This challenge is traditionally met by explaining gradient effects in terms of extra-grammatical factors, positing a purely categorical core for the language system. We present a new way of accounting for gradience in a self-organized sentence processing (SOSP) model. SOSP generates structures with a continuous range of grammaticality values by assuming a flexible structure-formation system in which the parses are formed even under sub-optimal circumstances by coercing elements to play roles that do not optimally suit them. We focus on islands, a family of syntactic domains out of which movement is generally prohibited. Islands are interesting because, although many linguistic theories treat them as fully ungrammatical and uninterpretable, experimental studies have revealed gradient patterns of acceptability and evidence for their interpretability. We describe the conceptual framework of SOSP, showing that it largely respects island constraints, but in certain cases, consistent with empirical data, coerces elements that block dependencies into elements that allow them.
... Future research can affect the role of WMC in participants' parsing preferences. The role of WMC in ambiguity resolution is still open to debate in the literature and clear-cut answers as to how low and high span readers process ambiguous RCs has not yet been reached (e.g., Fedorenko et al., 2006;Hopp, 2014;Traxler, 2007). The interactive effects of semantics and WMC is also another relevant area which can be taken up by future research. ...
The present study explored the effect of semantic priming in the resolution of ambiguous sentences containing Relative Clauses (RCs) preceded by a complex Noun Phrase (NP) by L1-Persian learners of L2 English. The type of semantic relationship examined was the one between the RC and one of the NPs in the complex NP to find out whether semantic manipulation through priming one of the NPs to the RC can affect L2 learners' attachment preference. The participants were 60 L1-Persian learners of L2 English with different proficiency levels. In a self-paced Paraphrase Decision Task using E-prime software, their reading times and attachment preferences while reading ambiguous sentences were examined. The low-proficiency participants' off-line (RC attachment preferences) and on-line data (reading times) were compared with off-line and on-line data obtained from high-proficiency participants. The results revealed that in both groups, semantic priming affected participants' attachment preferences. These findings are consistent with Constraint-based Models of sentence processing, which assume that several sources of information, including semantics, are used in sentence processing. The results also support predictions of the Spreading Activation Model. There were also significant differences between the two groups, low-proficiency participants fully transferred their L1 (Persian) processing strategies to their L2 (English). However, high-proficiency participants processed sentences similarly to native English speakers even though there were still traces of their L1 parsing preferences which is consistent with Shallow Structure Hypothesis.
... Psycholinguists have long invoked "domain-general constructs" when discussing lexical access and syntactic/semantic dependency formation, from storage and retrieval of information from working memory, to updating focal attention, inhibiting irrelevant information, selecting an option among alternatives, and predictive processing (Johnson-Laird 1983;Abney and Johnson 1991;King and Just 1991;Resnik 1992;Gernsbacher 1993;Gibson 1998Gibson , 2000McElree 2000McElree , 2001Gordon et al. 2002;Lewis and Vasishth 2005;Fedorenko et al. 2006Fedorenko et al. , 2007Lewis et al. 2006;Novick et al. 2009;Rodd et al. 2010;Schuler et al. 2010;Vergauwe et al. 2010;van Schijndel et al. 2013;Rasmussen and Schuler 2018;inter alia). If some linguistic processes require these or other domain-general operations, does it mean that language shares neural mechanisms with other domains? ...
What role do domain-general executive functions play in human language comprehension? To address this question, we examine the relationship between behavioral measures of comprehension and neural activity in the domain-general “multiple demand” (MD) network, which has been linked to constructs like attention, working memory, inhibitory control, and selection, and implicated in diverse goal-directed behaviors. Specifically, functional magnetic resonance imaging data collected during naturalistic story listening are compared with theory-neutral measures of online comprehension difficulty and incremental processing load (reading times and eye-fixation durations). Critically, to ensure that variance in these measures is driven by features of the linguistic stimulus rather than reflecting participant- or trial-level variability, the neuroimaging and behavioral datasets were collected in nonoverlapping samples. We find no behavioral-neural link in functionally localized MD regions; instead, this link is found in the domain-specific, fronto-temporal “core language network,” in both left-hemispheric areas and their right hemispheric homotopic areas. These results argue against strong involvement of domain-general executive circuits in language comprehension.
... (Diogo 2018: 1) In the context of language evolution, it is believed that language exapted from pre-existing cognitive domains which, above all, include perceptuo-motor processing (Pulvermüller 2018), different components of working memory (Fedorenko et al. 2006), and declarative and procedural memory (Hamrick et al. 2018): ...
In the present paper, I shall provide a narrative review of selected scientific studies and discussions dealing with the evolution of semantics and syntax. The aim of the present paper is not to provide a complete review. The number of studies and discussions on language evolution has exploded recently and the studies stem from various scientific disciplines, impeding my ability to review and understand the entire literature. The focus of this paper will be on psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic literature which has, however, only sporadically tested hypotheses on language evolution. Independently of this obstacle, I shall search in these studies for potential implications for the evolution of semantics and syntax. The aim of this paper is to acquaint Croatian scientists with the topics of the evolution of semantics and syntax and offer them an interdisciplinary view of different approaches and problems which will provide basic information on the topic to the interested reader.
In the second chapter, I shall briefly describe language evolution in the context of contemporary evolutionary sciences and address some studies which putatively show that animals may display both semantic and syntactic behaviors in their communication. In the third chapter, I shall introduce psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies which suggest that semantics and syntax are embodied in perceptuo-motor system. In the fourth chapter, I shall portray the protolanguage model of language evolution and the accompanying theory of language fossils.
... In fact, memory constraints are independently motivated. Similarity-based accounts of sentence processing, for instance, are not just consistent with wellestablished principles in the Memory literature (Nairne, 2002;Oberauer and Kliegl, 2006), but supported by syntactic and semantic similarity effects found to show up in the processing of a wide range of dependencies (for reviews, see Van Dyke and Johns, 2012;Jäger et al., 2017), including filler-gap dependencies (Gordon et al., 2001(Gordon et al., , 2002Fedorenko et al., 2006;Van Dyke and McElree, 2006), subject-verb dependencies (Van Dyke, 2007;Tan et al., 2017), agreement dependencies (Wagers et al., 2009;Dillon et al., 2013), negative polarity items (Vasishth et al., 2008) and antecedent-reflexive dependencies (Jäger et al., 2020; but see Dillon et al., 2013 andDillon, 2014). Although it has been argued that similarity effects in structures involving movement across a hierarchically intervening DP, such as OR, can be reduced to intervention effects (on this point, see Friedmann et al., 2009;Adani et al., 2010;Belletti and Rizzi, 2013; but see also Villata, 2017), dispensing with memory accounts altogether is unwarranted, as similarity effects greatly exceed the boundaries of movement 18 . ...
Object relative clauses are harder to process than subject relative clauses. Under Grillo’s (2009) Generalized Minimality framework, complexity effects of object relatives are construed as intervention effects, which result from an interaction between locality constraints on movement (Relativized Minimality) and the sentence processing system. Specifically, intervention of the subject DP in the movement dependency is expected to generate a minimality violation whenever processing limitations render the moved object underspecified, resulting in compromised comprehension. In the present study, assuming Generalized Minimality, we compared the processing of object relatives with the processing of subject control in ditransitives, which, like object relatives, instantiates a syntactic dependency across an intervening DP. This comparison is justified by the current debate on whether Control should be analyzed as movement: if control involves movement of the controller DP, as proposed by Hornstein (1999), a parallel between the processing of object relatives and subject control in ditransitives may be anticipated on the basis of intervention. In addition, we explored whether general cognitive factors contribute to complexity effects ascribed to movement across a DP. Sixty-nine adult speakers of European Portuguese read sentences and answered comprehension probes in a self-paced reading task with moving-window display, comprising four experimental conditions: Subject Relatives; Object Relatives; Subject Control; Object Control. Furthermore, participants performed four supplementary tasks, serving as measures of resistance to interference, lexical knowledge, working memory capacity and lexical access ability. The results from the reading task showed that whereas object relatives were harder to process than subject relatives, subject control was not harder to process than object control, arguing against recent movement accounts of control. Furthermore, we found that whereas object relative complexity effects assessed by response times to comprehension probes interacted with Reading Span, object relative complexity effects assessed by comprehension accuracy and reading times did not interact with any of the supplementary tasks. We discuss these results in light of Generalized Minimality and the hypothesis of modularity in syntactic processing (Caplan and Waters, 1999).
... The task is a dual task because it requires participants to (a) read and comprehend sentences, and (b) remember memory words for later recall in the order they were presented to them (serial). Since its original formulation, this task has been adapted by psycholinguists to investigate whether sentence processing interacts with WM capacity (e.g., Caplan & Waters, 1999;Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, 2006;Gordon, Hendrick, & Levine, 2002;Just & Carpenter, 1992, among others). The adapted versions of the task, also referred to as reading, listening or sentence span, ask participants to process sentences and remember unrelated memory words presented at the end of the sentence while simultaneously answering comprehension questions or making grammaticality judgments. ...
Semantic interpretation of aspectual verbs has been shown to cause a processing cost. The present study provides additional evidence that the semantic interpretation of events interacts with sentence processing. The study focused on telicity, an aspectual property that does not solely depend on lexical items but instead on the semantic composition of verb phrase (VP)-level events. Results from a working memory task showed that committing to a semantic interpretation incurs a processing cost and that some adverbials force the parser to commit to a particular aspectual interpretation. Specifically, in-X-time adverbials force the parser to commit to a telic (completed/terminated) interpretation before the VP has been processed. In contrast, for-X-time adverbials, which are compatible with an atelic (completed or incomplete) interpretation, do not force the parser to make an early commitment to a particular semantic interpretation. Instead, processing is always delayed until the VP has been completely parsed. Results support the partial interpretation hypothesis according to which the parser can delay making semantic commitments until it is necessary to do so, that is, in atelic but not telic sentences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
... Various studies have shown that the presence of distractors sharing some of the features of the target to-be-retrieved penalizes sentence processing. Dual-task studies in which participants are asked to memorize a list of words while reading a sentence show longer reading times and decreased comprehension accuracy when the distant target shares semantic/referential properties with words from the list [52], [53]. Various studies also showed effects of similarity between target and distractors within the sentence. ...
Speakers occasionally produce verbs that agree with an element that is not the subject, a so-called ‘attractor’; likewise, comprehenders occasionally fail to notice agreement errors when the verb agrees with the attractor. Cross-linguistic studies converge in showing that attraction is modulated by the hierarchical position of the attractor in the sentence structure. We report two experiments exploring the link between structural position and memory representations in attraction. The method used is innovative in two respects: we used jabberwocky materials to control for semantic influences and focus on structural agreement processing, and we used a Speed-Accuracy Trade-off (SAT) design combined with a memory probe recognition task, as classically used in list memorization tasks. SAT enabled the joint measurement of retrieval speed and retrieval accuracy of subjects and attractors in sentences that typically elicit attraction errors. Experiment 1 first established that attraction arises in jabberwocky sentences, to a similar extent and showing structure-dependency effects, as in natural sentences. Experiment 2 showed a close alignment between the attraction profiles found in Experiment 1 and memory parameters. Results support a content-addressable architecture of memory representations for sentences in which nouns’ accessibility depends on their syntactic position, while subjects are kept in the focus of attention.
... Participants' performance on the WM task was consistent with previous studies on adults (i.e., Riffle & DiGiovanni, 2014;Nagaraj, 2014 Fedorenko, Gibson & Rohde, 2006). Both the Malay and English comprehenders also showed good comprehension of the complex OR sentences, with the Malay group obtaining a mean score of 79.18% and the English group attaining a mean score of 86.94%. ...
... The effect on the RC verb is compatible with retrieval interference, if a collective noun affects the reactivation of a partially feature sharing object, with encoding interference and with an effect on subject-verb agreement within the RC. Subject-verb agreement can be vulnerable to collective words (Kreiner, Garrod & Sturt, 2013) and a semantic effect has been captured in ORCs (Fedorenko, Gibson & Rohde, 2006 Experiment 2 was a follow-up intended to clarify this point. The pattern of the results of Experiment 1 was maintained. ...
... The posterior zone is located in 1/3 posteriorly of the superior temporal gyrus, and the zone that surround the inferior parietal lobe transforms the sensorial stimulus in order to permit an associations that lead to understanding the meaning [6][7][8]. ...
Language, the second signaling system, complexly integrates the body into the environment, assures interference with fellows, and modulates the thoughts and feelings to be communicated to others. The embryonic development of the encephalus is performed early on days 16-20 and determines the appearance of the neuroenteric canal and the appearance of the tridermic embryonic disc. The sketch of the Broca area has been researched from anatomopathological point of view, following a study carried out on fetal brain samples taken postpartum, shows that the sketches of the future Broca area are observed in gestation at week 23. Neural migration and glial cell distribution reveal the existence of a detectable neuroblasts reservoir, beginning at week 18, with exuberant evolution to a organized histoarchitectonics at 20-23 week. The premises of a future impairment in the development of the Broca area and, implicitly, of language can be established early in fetal life.
... In focusing on prediction effects, we recognize that language comprehension involves a good deal more than simply minimizing surprise-meanings conveyed by partially-complete words and syntactic structures are rapidly and incrementally recognized, stored, and integrated into existing knowledge representations as the discourse unfolds (Tanenhaus et al., 1995;Altmann and Kamide, 1999). Numerous studies have probed the computations involved in storage, retrieval, and integration during human sentence comprehension (MacDonald et al., 1992;Kluender and Kutas, 1993;Gibson and Ko, 1998;Felser et al., 2003;Hsiao and Gibson, 2003;Aoshima et al., 2004;Grodner and Gibson, 2005;Lewis and Vasishth, 2005;Fiebach et al., 2005;Fedorenko et al., 2006Fedorenko et al., , 2007Rasmussen and Schuler, 2018), and several memory-based estimators of structural processing have been studied across behavioral and cognitive neuroscience investigations, including embedding difference (Wu et al., 2010), the number of open nodes based on a particular parsing strategy (top-down, bottom-up, or left-corner;Nelson et al., 2017;Brennan & Pylkk€ anen, 2017), dependency locality costs (storage or integration cost from maintaining and retrieving syntactic dependencies; Gibson, 2000), and encoding or retrieval interference (i.e. processing costs in the ACT-R framework; Lewis and Vasishth, 2005). ...
Much research in cognitive neuroscience supports prediction as a canonical computation of cognition across domains. Is such predictive coding implemented by feedback from higher-order domain-general circuits, or is it locally implemented in domain-specific circuits? What information sources are used to generate these predictions? This study addresses these two questions in the context of language processing. We present fMRI evidence from a naturalistic comprehension paradigm (1) that predictive coding in the brain's response to language is domain-specific, and (2) that these predictions are sensitive both to local word co-occurrence patterns and to hierarchical structure. Using a recently developed continuous-time deconvolutional regression technique that supports data-driven hemodynamic response function discovery from continuous BOLD signal fluctuations in response to naturalistic stimuli, we found effects of prediction measures in the language network but not in the domain-general multiple-demand network, which supports executive control processes and has been previously implicated in language comprehension. Moreover, within the language network, surface-level and structural prediction effects were separable. The predictability effects in the language network were substantial, with the model capturing over 37% of explainable variance on held-out data. These findings indicate that human sentence processing mechanisms generate predictions about upcoming words using cognitive processes that are sensitive to hierarchical structure and specialized for language processing, rather than via feedback from high-level executive control mechanisms.
... The effect on the RC verb is compatible with retrieval interference, if a collective noun affects the reactivation of a partially feature sharing object, with encoding interference and with an effect on subject-verb agreement within the RC. Subject-verb agreement can be vulnerable to collective words (Kreiner, Garrod & Sturt, 2013) and a semantic effect has been captured in ORCs (Fedorenko, Gibson & Rohde, 2006 Table 1. Mean reading times (msec) per condition and region in each experiment (*Effect of number: * p <.05; ** p <.01; p =.05; p< .1) ...
In this study, we investigated the argumenthood of locative PPs occurring with
motion verbs in Italian, by means of a behavioral experiment based on the traditional
optionality test for argumenthood. Previous research relied on linguists’ intuitions or
corpus frequencies, and to our knowledge no published research on motion verbs in
Italian has employed a behavioral experiment yet. Consistently with recent
literature, we show that the optional PPs occurring with each motion verb have
different argumenthood scores on a gradient scale depending on the interaction
between their Aktionsart and morphosyntactic class. We observed that achievements
occur with adjuncts, activities with in-between constituents, accomplishments either
with arguments or with adjuncts depending on their auxiliary in compound tenses.
... (Fedorenko et al. 2006) te deklarativno i proceduralno pamćenje (Hamrick et al. 2018).More recently, increasing attention has been paid to the possibility that language is "domain-general", that is, that aspects of language rely on substrates with more general functions that may predate the emergence of this domain, such as categorization, associative learning, working memory, or learning and memory.Indeed, it has been argued that because the reuse of preexisting mechanisms for new functions is expected under biological and evolutionary principles, one should expect domain-general mechanisms for language. (Hamrick et al. 2018(Hamrick et al. : 1487 Primjerice, sposobnost sekvencijske i hijerarhijske obrade radnji, povezane generalno rečeno s vizuospacijalnom obradom i izvršnim funkcijama, mogla je poslužiti za razvijanje nekih aspekata sintakse i semantike (Kemmerer 2012), ali i diskursa 11 (Adornetti 2014 overimitation, the apparent drawbacks of which are in fact essential to human skill transmission. ...
U ovome radu iznio sam pregled odabranih studija i rasprava koje se bave evolucijom semantike i sintakse. Fokus je bio na psiholingvističkoj i neurolingvističkoj literaturi. Uočeni su mnogi problemi u studijama i raspravama o evoluciji semantike i sintakse: nedostatak empirijskih studija, manjak komunikacije između stručnjaka različitih znanstvenih disciplina te mali udio lingvističkih studija i rasprava. Akumulirano znanje o evoluciji jezika sugerira da je jezik egzaptirao iz postojećih kognitivnih domena, suprotno modularnim pretpostavkama evolucije jezika. Također, neke životinje pokazuju određeni semantički i sintaktički kapacitet u svojoj vokalizacijskoj komunikaciji. Studije leksičke semantike pokazuju da je ona utjelovljena, tj. ovisna o senzorimotoričkim informacijama. Najutljelovljenije su riječi koje označuju radnje te konkretne riječi u usporedbi s apstraktnim riječima koje pokazuju manji stupanj utjelovljenosti. Ipak, moguće je da apstraktne riječi filogenetski proizlaze iz konkretnih. Također se čini da su određeni aspekti sintakse utjelovljeni, pri čemu su se najutjelovljenijima pokazali semantički tranzitivni događaji, no postoje i argumenti da je i obrada sintaktičke tranzitivnosti barem djelomično utjelovljena. Nadalje, razne studije ukazuju na pravilo istaknutosti agensa odnosno subjekta na temelju kojeg agens odnosno subjekt načelno u određenim tipovima rečenica dolazi na prvo mjesto u rečenici. To potvrđuju dominantna frekvencija redova riječi SOV i SVO u jezicima svijeta, kognitivna istaknutost agensa tijekom obrade tranzitivnih događaja, prevladavanje nominativno-akuzativnih jezika u odnosu na ergativno-apsolutivne te neurofiziološke studije koje pokazuju da se prva sintaktička sastavnica kognitivno automatski obrađuje kao agens dok morfosintaksa rečenice ne pokaže drugačije. Moguće je da je istaknutost agensa odnosno subjekta rezultat načina na koji Brocino područje obrađuje prototipne tranzitivne događaje. U posljednjem dijelu rada tematizira se model protojezika i teorija jezičnih fosila, no nema jasnih zaključaka. Konačno, pregled literature podupire tezu da su semantika i sintaksa evoluirali gradualno egzaptacijom iz određenih kognitivnih domena te da su i semantika i sintaksa u nekakvoj filogenetskoj vezi sa životinjskim komunikacijskim sustavima. .................................................................................................................................................. This paper reviews selected studies and discussion which address the evolution of semantics and syntax. The focus is on psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic literature. Many problems were observed in the literature: lack of empirical studies, lack of communication between experts coming from different scientific fields and lack of linguistic studies and discussions. Converging evidence suggests that language exapted from pre-existing cognitive domains, a claim which stands opposed to the modular theories of language emergence. Furthermore, some animals demonstrate certain levels of semantic and syntactic capacity in their vocal communication systems. Studies in lexical semantics show that word meaning is embodied, i.e. that it is dependent on sensorimotor information. The most embodied word meanings are those of action and concrete words, compared to abstract words which show lower levels of embodiment. Nevertheless, it is possible that abstract words phylogenetically arose from concrete words. It also seems possible that particular aspects of syntax are embodied. Semantically transitive events seem to demonstrate the highest levels of embodiment. However, there are also arguments that the processing of syntactic transitivity is also at least partially embodied. Additionally, many studies highlight the rule of agent i.e. subject salience according to which the agent i.e. subject typically takes the first sentential slot in particular sentence types. This is confirmed by the dominant frequency of the word orders SOV and SVO in the world languages, the cognitive salience of the agent during the processing of semantically transitive events, prevalence of nominative–accusative languages compared to ergative–absolutive languages and neurophysiological studies which show that the first syntactic constituent is automatically interpreted as an agent until the morphosyntax of the sentence shows otherwise. It is possible that the agent/subject salience rule is the result of the ways in which Broca's area processes prototypical transitive events. In the last part of the paper the progolanguage model and the theory of language fossils are discussed, however, no clear conclusions can be drawn. Finally, this literature review supports the hypothesis that semantics and syntax evolved gradually through exapation from specific pre-existing cognitive domains and that both semantics and syntax are in some phylogenetic connection with animal communication systems.
... Where the land and fishery production factors are now getting rarer and where land and fish have to carry environmental services other than strict provisioning services, this allows us to identify the household types now more sensitive to land access. We also compared total income coming from livelihoods, include nonfarm and off-farm activities, with a theoretical overall minimum poverty threshold (MPT) 9 (MOP 2013(MOP , 2014Gibson et al. 2006;Kimsun and Bopharath 2011). When families have incomes below the MPT, they cannot cover their basic needs unless they sell land or other assets or increase the cultivation cycle, threatening fertility. ...
Livelihoods of people in the Tonle Sap Lake (TSL) area of Cambodia are complex combinations of rice-based cropping, fishery systems, mixed cash crops/home gardens, natural pond culture/aquaculture, cattle and livestock, collection of flooded forest products, and nonfarm and off-farm activities. The productivity of these activities is intimately linked to a number of ecosystem services and natural resources derived from the TSL. However, in recent decades the fish stock and the flooded forest have been degraded. This situation is made even worse as the TSL faces dramatic hydrological changes in the flood pulse regime and water levels. These changes have seriously impacted local livelihoods. In this situation, the environment becomes a significant source of vulnerability. This chapter provides an overview of this situation through economic and mapping analysis of two districts of Battambang Province. The implementation uses agrarian system diagnosis based on geographic information system mapping and qualitative interviews with informants during 2 years with low and normal flood pulses to identify types of household activities and their economic performance, changes in farming systems, agro-ecological zones, levels of poverty and resilience, and the country's related gain and loss in gross domestic production. We discuss the usefulness of such analyses in the field of ecosystem services mapping, which may contribute solutions to the Royal Government of Cambodia and to development partners to recognise this impact of climate and flood changes on rice production, natural resources, household livelihoods, and the country's economy as a whole.
... Caplan & Waters 1999 for one example of the domain-specific view, i.a. SeeFedorenko et al. 2006for evidence and argument against domain-specificity, again i.a.) Regardless, nowhere is it proposed that functional subdivision of memory capacity might break down all the way to the level of separate capacities for particular individual syntactic constructions, thus the present assumption that an underlying resource constraint may be taken as constant across the alternation phenomena under study here. ...
Language scholars as far back as Behaghel (1909) have noted the tendency to produce short before long. What underlies this principle of end-weight? Several accounts that develop an incremental view of production—speakers produce what they can as soon as they can—may be seen as necessarily motivated by a constrained capacity view of human cognitive faculties. Such resources—for example, working memory capacity—typically vary across the population, while the preference for end-weight has previously been modeled as fixed across the population. In the present work, it is argued that if the principle of end-weight is motivated by limits on such an underlying resource that varies by individual, we should see significant variation by individual in strength of preference for end-weight. Corpus and experimental studies subsequently confirm significant individual variation in strength of such preferences. Next, we see the principle of end-weight at play in several English syntactic-alternation constructions, including dative shift, verb-particle placement, prepositional phrase ordering, and heavy-NP shift, among others. Looking across these constructions, if individual preference for end-weight is motivated by a limited, underlying cognitive resource, such a resource should nevertheless remain constant within each individual across constructions. Having thus found individual variation in the principle of end-weight, a given speaker's strength of preference may be expected to remain relatively steady across constructions—that is, consistency in variation. Testing this proposition presents a methodological challenge. Existing syntactically parsed corpora of natural speech are generally built shallow—many speakers but insufficient contributions per speaker to model individual end-weight preference. To address this, a deep parsed corpus is developed—yielding up to 2.5M words per speaker—as well as novel statistical approaches for exploring correlation of per-speaker preferences across models of separate constructions. Multiple studies with this corpus and complementary experiments indicate a significant measure of consistency in each individual's relative strength of end-weight preference across constructions, as predicted. These results do not prove constrained capacity; other compatible accounts include the possibility that we develop individual production preferences through exposure to prior distributions. If so, though, the results above introduce the provision that in developing our individual production preferences, each speaker synthesizes a single rule—or at least a substantially consistent preference—across different syntactic-alternation constructions. This may be seen as a syntactic neighborhood effect. Finally, though, a pair of prior studies suggest that Australians may show greater strength of preference for end-weight in the dative-shift alternation than Americans, an effect of group that is compatible with exposure to differing prior distributions but not at all predicted by constrained capacity. If preference is variable by individual but consistent across constructions—as the core of the present work indicates—might we expect the same at the varietal level? An additional experiment conducted here with American, British, and Australian groups and across four different constructions finds that the Australian preference for end-weight is significantly stronger across the set of constructions. While constrained capacity may be at play in variation by individual, the cross-varietal results support the role of learning by exposure to prior distribution, with syntactic neighborhood effects appearing cross-construction for both individuals and groups.
... It takes less time for a speaker to retrieve the word from memory in the course of speech production, because that particular word is available due its high frequency or its probable context (Ferreira 2008;Gahl 2008;Bell et al. 2009;Gahl et al. 2012;inter alia). As a consequence, frequent or predictable strings have a higher resting activation, because they are retrieved from the memory more often (Fedorenko et al. 2006;Jaeger and Tily 2010). ...
In a study of word shortening of HAVE and contraction of BE , it is found that both high transitional probability and high average context probability (low informativity) result in reduction. Previous studies have found this effect for content words and this study extend the findings to function words. Average context probability is by construction type, showing that words are shorter in constructions with high average predictability, namely in perfect constructions for HAVE and in future and progressive constructions for BE . These findings show that in cases of grammaticalization, it is not an increase in frequency that results in reduction, but a decrease in informativity.
... It may be that movement is only difficult for the parser in particular structural configurations. Similarity-based interference in the case of object vs. subject relative clauses, for instance, shows that movement is difficult when the dependency crosses a "similar" constituent to the antecedent (Fedorenko, Gibson & Rohde, 2006;Gordon et al., 2001;Van Dyke & McElree, 2006). ...
Passive sentences are considered more difficult to comprehend than active ones. Previous online-only studies cast doubt on this generalization. The current paper directly compares online and offline processing of passivization and manipulates verb type: state vs event. Stative passives are temporarily ambiguous (adjectival vs verbal), eventive passives are not (always verbal). Across 4 experiments (self-paced reading with comprehension questions), passives were consistently read faster than actives. This contradicts the claim that passives are difficult to parse and/or interpret, as argued by main perspectives of passive processing (heuristic or syntactic). The reading time facilitation is compatible with broader expectation/surprisal theories. When comprehension targeted theta-roles assignment, passives were more errorful, regardless of verb type. Verbal WM measures did not correlate with the difference in accuracy, excluding it as an explanation. The accuracy effect is argued to reflect a post-interpretive difficulty associated with generating/maintaining a propositional representation of passives required by specific tasks.
... However, there is evidence that the semantic similarity of potential referents can interfere with processing. Gordon and colleagues have demonstrated this using both self-paced reading (Gordon, Hendrick, & Johnson, 2001Gordon, Hendrick, & Levine, 2002; also see Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, 2006;Van Dyke & McElree, 2006) and eye tracking (Gordon, Hendrick, Johnson, & Lee, 2006). These studies have examined how the representational similarity of discourse entities affects the processing of subject-and object-extracted relative clauses. ...
Investigations of coreferential processing typically require participants to link anaphors with semantically underspecified (“empty”) discourse entities. However, outside the laboratory, anaphors often refer to people, objects, or events about which we possess extensive background knowledge. In addition, recent evidence indicates that comprehenders experience processing difficulty when sentence characters are semantically similar. In the current study we examined whether activating pre-existing real-world knowledge about antecedents influenced coreferential processing in a developing sentence context. Event-related potentials were recorded as participants read sentences containing ambiguous pronouns. Antecedents were either “empty” or were real, well-known individuals. In addition, pronouns either matched or mismatched the sex of their antecedents. Mismatching anaphors elicited a P600 effect whose amplitude was significantly greater when sentence characters were real. Moreover, matching pronouns elicited a P600-like effect when their antecedents were semantically “empty”. Our results suggest that the presence of high-quality representations in a discourse model facilitates coreferential processing.
... As these examples highlight, while memory is clearly required for dealing with time, it is not clear whether it is handled implicitly (in terms of activation dynamics) or with an explicit store. Ample evidence exists for links between working memory and language processing, particularly in sentence processing (Caplan & Waters, 1999;Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, 2006;Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990;Just & Carpenter, 1992;King & Just, listeners used a memory buffer. Across six experiments, listeners waited for both the frication spectrum and formant transitions to arrive before activating lexical candidates. ...
Speech unfolds over time, and the cues for even a single phoneme are rarely available simultaneously. Consequently, to recognize a single phoneme, listeners must integrate material over several hundred milliseconds. Prior work contrasts two accounts: (a) a memory buffer account in which listeners accumulate auditory information in memory and only access higher level representations (i.e., lexical representations) when sufficient information has arrived; and (b) an immediate integration scheme in which lexical representations can be partially activated on the basis of early cues and then updated when more information arises. These studies have uniformly shown evidence for immediate integration for a variety of phonetic distinctions. We attempted to extend this to fricatives, a class of speech sounds which requires not only temporal integration of asynchronous cues (the frication, followed by the formant transitions 150–350 ms later), but also integration across different frequency bands and compensation for contextual factors like coarticulation. Eye movements in the visual world paradigm showed clear evidence for a memory buffer. Results were replicated in five experiments, ruling out methodological factors and tying the release of the buffer to the onset of the vowel. These findings support a general auditory account for speech by suggesting that the acoustic nature of particular speech sounds may have large effects on how they are processed. It also has major implications for theories of auditory and speech perception by raising the possibility of an encapsulated memory buffer in early auditory processing.
Much has been written on the abuse and misuse of statistical methods, including p values, statistical significance, and so forth. I present some of the best practices in statistics using a running example data analysis. Focusing primarily on frequentist and Bayesian linear mixed models, I illustrate some defensible ways in which statistical inference—specifically, hypothesis testing using Bayes factors versus estimation or uncertainty quantification—can be carried out. The key is to not overstate the evidence and to not expect too much from statistics. Along the way, I demonstrate some powerful ideas, including the use of simulation to understand the design properties of one's experiment before running it, visualization of data before carrying out a formal analysis, and simulation of data from the fitted model to understand the model's behavior.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 9 is January 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
The goal of this dissertation is to empirically evaluate the predictions of two classes of models applied to language processing: the similarity-based interference models (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; McElree, 2000) and the group of smaller-scale accounts that we will refer to as faulty encoding accounts (Eberhard, Cutting, & Bock, 2005; Bock & Eberhard, 1993). Both types of accounts make predictions with regard to processing the same class of structures: sentences containing a non-subject (interfering) noun in addition to a subject noun and a verb. Both accounts make the same predictions for processing ungrammatical sentences with a number-mismatching interfering noun, and this prediction finds consistent support in the data. However, the similarity-based interference accounts predict similar effects not only for morphosyntactic, but also for the semantic level of language organization. We verified this prediction in three single-trial online experiments, where we found consistent support for the predictions of the similarity-based interference account. In addition, we report computational simulations further supporting the similarity-based interference accounts. The combined evidence suggests that the faulty encoding accounts are not required to explain comprehension of ill-formed sentences. For the processing of grammatical sentences, the accounts make conflicting predictions, and neither the slowdown predicted by the similarity-based interference account, nor the complementary slowdown predicted by the faulty encoding accounts were systematically observed. The majority of studies found no difference between the compared configurations. We tested one possible explanation for the lack of predicted difference, namely, that both slowdowns are present simultaneously and thus conceal each other. We decreased the amount of similarity-based interference: if the effects were concealing each other, decreasing one of them should allow the other to surface. Surprisingly, throughout three larger-sample single-trial online experiments, we consistently found the slowdown predicted by the faulty encoding accounts, but no effects consistent with the presence of inhibitory interference. The overall pattern of the results observed across all the experiments reported in this dissertation is consistent with previous findings: predictions of the interference accounts for the processing of ungrammatical sentences receive consistent support, but the predictions for the processing of grammatical sentences are not always met. Recent proposals by Nicenboim et al. (2016) and Mertzen et al. (2020) suggest that interference might arise only in people with high working memory capacity or under deep processing mode. Following these proposals, we tested whether interference effects might depend on the depth of processing: we manipulated the complexity of the training materials preceding the grammatical experimental sentences while making no changes to the experimental materials themselves. We found that the slowdown predicted by the faulty encoding accounts disappears in the deep processing mode, but the effects consistent with the predictions of the similarity-based interference account do not arise. Independently of whether similarity-based interference arises under deep processing mode or not, our results suggest that the faulty encoding accounts cannot be dismissed since they make unique predictions with regard to processing grammatical sentences, which are supported by data. At the same time, the support is not unequivocal: the slowdowns are present only in the superficial processing mode, which is not predicted by the faulty encoding accounts. Our results might therefore favor a much simpler system that superficially tracks number features and is distracted by every plural feature.
Listening and speaking are quickly alternated during conversations, resulting in short gaps between two speakers. To explain this rapid turn-taking, several processes are hypothesized to proceed simultaneously. First, listeners try to identify or predict the intended message of the utterance to start preparing their response as soon as possible. The listener continues listening to the utterance during response planning to be able to anticipate the upcoming turn end to promptly vocalize the response. How do conversational partners manage to combine these comprehension processes with production planning? In essence, turn-taking represents a complicated multitasking situation where highly similar tasks need to be combined. Such multitasking likely poses great attentional demands on conversations, which may impair listening and production performance. Do interlocutors have different strategies available to overcome such attentional demands? In this chapter, evidence for each of the different aspects of turn-taking is reviewed, followed by a discussion of the research on the attentional demands of comprehension, production and linguistic multitasking. Continuing to investigate the different components of turn-taking and their coordination will not only shed light on everyday use of comprehension and production, but also reveal how humans are capable of such a complex skill so seemingly effortlessly.
An explorative and narrative review of the literature on language evolution with an emphasis on the psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics of lexical semantics and syntax. Based on my thesis for an M. A. degree in Linguistics.
There exist some estimates of the capacity of human memory. Recent studies have proven the fact that Long Term Memory is subject to constant reconfigurations mostly at lower levels of neural clusters. There is no consensus on one definition for the capacity of memory. As far as retrieval of items present in memory is not the concern, it is reasonable to refrain from putting limits on capacity of human memory; otherwise, one must accept a number game which renders no fixed definite final estimation. Recently such capacity is defined as the amount of interference created by the item which must remain active in the memory.
What role do domain-general executive functions play in human language comprehension? To address this question, we examine the relationship between behavioral measures of comprehension and neural activity in the domain-general "multiple demand" (MD) network, which has been linked to constructs like attention, working memory, inhibitory control, and selection, and implicated in diverse goal-directed behaviors. Specifically, fMRI data collected during naturalistic story listening are compared to theory-neutral measures of online comprehension difficulty and incremental processing load (reading times and eye-fixation durations). Critically, to ensure that variance in these measures is driven by features of the linguistic stimulus rather than reflecting participant- or trial-level variability, the neuroimaging and behavioral datasets were collected in non-overlapping samples. We find no behavioral-neural link in functionally localized MD regions; instead, this link is found in the domain-specific, fronto-temporal "core language network", in both left hemispheric areas and their right hemispheric homologues. These results argue against strong involvement of domain-general executive circuits in language comprehension.
Sentence comprehension requires that the comprehender work out who did what to whom. This process has been characterized as retrieval from memory. This review summarizes the quantitative predictions and empirical coverage of the two existing computational models of retrieval and shows how the predictive performance of these two competing models can be tested against a benchmark data-set. We also show how computational modeling can help us better understand sources of variability in both unimpaired and impaired sentence comprehension.
Recently, considerable interest for language evolution has arisen. Many researchers believe that language evolved via exaptation of domain-general cognitive systems such as long-term memory, visuospatial processing and executive functioning. Therefore, many studies on language evolution have focused on determining when specific cognitive functions, which might have supported language, developed.
One approach in this area has been to establish the neurocognitive and neural correlates of specific behaviours during the Palaeolithic period (from ~3.3 mya to ~10 kya). The focus has been on stone-toolmaking-related behaviours because of the higher preservation of stone in the archaeological record compared to other materials.
The earliest stone industry is the pre-Homo Lomekwian. It has been hypothesized based on experimental replication of the knapping process that the Lomekwian findings are suggestive of lesser functional lateralization of the motoric and prefrontal cortex compared to modern humans. The next stone industry – the Oldowan –, typically associated with Homo habilis, has been linked to more complex subsistence strategies and social behaviours. Neuroimaging studies have shown that Oldowan toolmaking predominantly involves frontoparietal sensorimotor areas and the cerebellum, which is why this industry has been described as cognitively relatively „ape-like“. The following industry, the Acheulean, taxonomically linked to Homo erectus and chronologically coinciding with significant brain enlargements in our genus, is believed to be more demanding in hierarchical and sequential action processing compared to earlier technologies. Additionally, neuroimaging studies have shown higher activation of the right Broca's area and temporal cortici during Acheulean compared to Oldowan toolmaking. Recently, a study by our lab comparing sidescraper manufacture, associated with Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals, and Oldowan toolmaking has found higher involvement of visuospatial and executive functions in the former task.
While it is hard to generalize based on this data, we will suggest some implications for the existence of language in early Homo.
THE ORIGINS and adaptive significance of music, long an elusive target, are now active topics of empirical study, with many interesting developments over the past few years. This article reviews research in anthropology, ethnomusicology, developmental and comparative psychology, neuropsychology, and neurophysiology that bears on questions concerning the origins and evolution of music. We focus on the hypothesis that music perception is constrained by innate, possibly human- and music-specific principles of organization, as these are candidates for evolutionary explanations. We begin by discussing the distinct roles of different fields of inquiry in constraining claims about innateness and adaptation, and then proceed to review the available evidence. Although research on many of these topics is still in its infancy, at present there is converging evidence that a few basic features of music (relative pitch, the importance of the octave, intervals with simple ratios, tonality, and perhaps elementary musical preferences) are determined in part by innate constraints. At present, it is unclear how many of these constraints are uniquely human and specific to music. Many, however, are unlikely to be adaptations for music, but rather are probably side effects of more general-purpose mechanisms. We conclude by reiterating the significance of identifying processes that are innate, unique to humans, and specific to music, and highlight several possible directions for future research.
Applies a simulation model of episodic memory, MINERVA 2, to the learning of concepts, as represented by the schema-abstraction task. The model assumes that each experience produces a separate memory trace and that knowledge of abstract concepts is derived from the pool of episodic traces at the time of retrieval. A retrieval cue contacts all traces simultaneously, activating each according to its similarity to the cue, and the information retrieved from memory reflects the summed content of all activated traces responding in parallel. It is suggested that the MINERVA 2 model is able to retrieve an abstracted prototype of the category when cued with the category name and to retrieve and disambiguate a category name when cued with a category exemplar. The model successfully predicts basic findings from the schema-abstraction literature (e.g., differential forgetting of prototypes and old instances, typicality, and category size effects), including some that have been cited as evidence against exemplar theories of concepts. The model is compared with other classification models, and its implications regarding the abstraction problem are discussed. (63 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Compares several methods of presenting text, including a new paradigm that produces reading-time data with many of the characteristics of naturally occurring eye-fixation data. In the "moving window" condition, a reader presses a button to see each successive word in a text, and the previous word is removed when a new word appears. 35 undergraduates read short passages under cumulative, moving-, and stationary-window conditions. The moving-window condition most closely resembled gaze durations. Results suggest that readers initiate the processing of each word as soon as they encounter it rather than buffer words and delay processing. It is considered that the tendency to immediately process text might interact with other techniques for text presentation, such as the rapid serial visual presentation condition. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Three experiments explored the relationship between verbal working memory capacity and the comprehension of garden path sentences.
In Experiment 1, subjects with high, medium, and low working memory spans made acceptability judgments about garden path and
control sentences under whole sentence and rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) conditions. There were no significant differences
between subjects with different working memory spans in the comprehension of garden path sentences in either condition. In
Experiments 2A and 2B, subjects with high and low working memory spans were tested on the same materials at three RSVP rates.
There were no significant differences between subjects with different working memory spans in the magnitude of the effect
of garden path sentences at any presentation rate. The results suggest that working memory capacity, as measured by the Daneman
and Carpenter (1980) reading span task, is not a major determinant of individual differences in the processing of garden path
sentences.
This target article discusses the verbal working memory system used in sentence comprehension. We review the idea of working memory as a short duration system in which small amounts of information are simultaneously stored and manipulated in the service of a task and that syntactic processing in sentence comprehension requires such a storage and computational system. We inquire whether the working memory system used in syntactic processing is the same as that used in verbally mediated tasks involving conscious, controlled processing. Various forms of evidence are considered: the relationship between individual differences in working memory and individual differences in the efficiency of syntactic processing; the effect of concurrent verbal memory load on syntactic processing; and syntactic processing in patients with poor short term memory, poor working memory, or aphasia. The experimental results suggest that the verbal working memory system specialized for assigning the syntactic structure of a sentence and for using that structure in determining sentence meaning is distinct from the working memory system that underlies the use of sentence meaning to accomplish further functions. We present a theory of the components of the verbal working memory system and suggestions as to its neural basis.
Extended the search of associative memory model for recall proposed by J. G. Raaijmakers and R. M. Shiffrin (see record 1981-20491-001) by assuming that a familiarity process is used for recognition. The recall model posits cue-dependent probabilistic sampling and recovery from an associative network. The present recognition model is closely related to the recall model because the total episodic activation due to the context and item cues is used in recall as a basis for sampling and in recognition to make a decision. The model, formalized in a computer simulation program, correctly predicts a number of findings in the literature as well as the results from an experiment on the word-frequency effect in which 80 undergraduates participated. (3½ p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The concept of working memory is central to theories of human cognition because working memory is essential to such human skills as language comprehension and deductive reasoning. Working memory is thought to be composed of two parts, a set of buffers that temporarily store information in either a phonological or visuospatial form, and a central executive responsible for various computations such as mental arithmetic. Although most data on working memory come from behavioural studies of normal and brain-injured humans, there is evidence about its physiological basis from invasive studies of monkeys. Here we report positron emission tomography (PET) studies of regional cerebral blood flow in normal humans that reveal activation in right-hemisphere prefrontal, occipital, parietal and premotor cortices accompanying spatial working memory processes. These results begin to uncover the circuitry of a working memory system in humans.
The current study demonstrates the separability of spatial and verbal working memory resources among college students. In Experiment 1, we developed a spatial span task that taxes both the processing and storage components of spatial working memory. This measure correlates with spatial ability (spatial visualization) measures, but not with verbal ability measures. In contrast, the reading span test, a common test of verbal working memory, correlates with verbal ability measures, but not with spatial ability measures. Experiment 2, which uses an interference paradigm to cross the processing and storage demands of span tasks, replicates this dissociation and further demonstrates that both the processing and storage components of working memory tasks are important for predicting performance on spatial thinking and language processing tasks.
As a potential alternative to standard null hypothesis significance testing, we describe methods for graphical presentation of data--particularly condition means and their corresponding confidence intervals--for a wide range of factorial designs used in experimental psychology. We describe and illustrate confidence intervals specifically appropriate for between-subject versus within-subject factors. For designs involving more than two levels of a factor, we describe the use of contrasts for graphical illustration of theoretically meaningful components of main effects and interactions. These graphical techniques lend themselves to a natural and straightforward assessment of statistical power.
this paper (except the resliced images labeled "Axial" in Fig. 2). The brain images at the left show in color the voxels that produced a significantly higher MR signal intensity (based on smoothed data) during the epochs containing faces than during those containing objects (1a) and vice versa (1b) for 1 of the 12 slices scanned. These significance images (see color key at right for this and all figures in this paper) are overlaid on a T1-weighted anatomical image of the same slice. Most of the other 11 slices showed no voxels that reached significance at the p , 10
Abstract All other things being equal the parser favors attaching an ambiguous modifier to the most recent possible site. A plausible explanation is that locality preferences like this arise in the service of minimizing memory,costs—more,distant sentential material is more difficult to reactivate than more recent material. Note that processing any sentence requires linking each new lexical item with material in the current parse. Often this will involve the construction of long-distance dependencies. Under a resource-limited view of language processing, lengthy integrations should induce difficulty even in unambiguous sentences. To date there has been little direct quantitative evidence in support of this perspective. This paper presents two self-paced reading studies which explore the hypothesis that dependency,distance is a fundamental determinant of reading complexity in unambiguous constructions in English. The evidence suggests that the difficulty associated with integrating a new input item is heavily determined by the amount of lexical material intervening between the input item and the site of its target dependents. The patterns observed here are not straightforwardly accounted for within purely experience-basedmodels,of complexity. Instead this work supports the role of a memory,bottleneck in language comprehension. This constraint arises because hierarchical linguistic relationships must be recovered from a linear input stream. 3 In 1951, Karl Lashley famously argued that the complexity of human sequential behavior could
A sentence-picture matching task was used to test the ability of patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) and age- and education-matched control subjects to interpret nine different sentences. These sentences differed on two dimensions…syntactic complexity and number of propositions. Subjects were tested on this task with no concurrent task (alone) and while concurrently remembering a digit load that was one less than their span or equivalent to their span. Neither group of subjects showed an effect of syntactic complexity, but DAT patients did show an effect of the number of propositions in a sentence. For all subjects, comprehension of sentences with more propositions was more greatly affected by larger digit loads, but comprehension of more complex syntactic structures was not. The performance of DAT patients was more affected than that of the control subjects on the digit task, but they were not disproportionately impaired on the sentence types which were more complex or had more propositions compared to normals. The results are discussed in relationship to the hypothesis that there is a sentence comprehension impairment in DAT that is related to the processing resource requirements of different aspects of the sentence comprehension process.
Ferreira and Clifton (1986, Experiment 1) found that readers experienced equal difficulty with temporarily ambiguous reduced relatives clauses when the first noun was animate (e.g., "The defendant examined by the lawyer was . . .") and when it was inanimate and thus an unlikely Agent (e.g., "The evidence examined . . ."). This data pattern suggested that a verb′s semantic constraints do not affect initial syntactic ambiguity resolution. We repeated the experiment using: (1) inanimate noun/verb combinations that did not easily permit a main clause continuation, (2) a baseline condition with morphologically unambiguous verbs (e.g., "stolen"), (3) a homogeneous set of disambiguating prepositional phrases, and (4) a display in which all of the critical regions were presented on the same line of text. In two eye-movement experiments, animacy had immediate effects on ambiguity resolution: only animate nouns showed clear signs of difficulty. Post-hoc regression analyses revealed that what little processing difficulty readers had with the inanimate nouns varied with the semantic fit of individual noun/verb combinations: items with strong semantic fit showed no processing difficulty compared to unambiguous controls, whereas items with weak semantic fit showed a pattern of processing difficulty which was similar to Ferreira and Clifton (1986). The results are interpreted within the framework of an evidential (constraint-based) approach to ambiguity resolution. Analyses of reading times also suggested that the millisecond per character correction for region length is problematic, especially for small scoring regions. An alternative transformation is suggested.
Surveys theories of human learning and memory, covering both the classical approaches and the newer information-processing approaches. Methodological principles, techniques and empirical laws of the field, and the solution of theoretical problems are integrated and discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
series of studies were designed to examine the role of working memory and its subcomponents in written sentence comprehension (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The results of two experiments indicate that individual differences in syntactic processing are governed in part by the amount of working memory capacity available for language comprehension processes. Reading the verbs of an object relative sentence, such as The reporter that the senator attacked admitted the error, takes more time for readers with less working memory capacity for language, and their resulting comprehension is less accurate. Experiment 1 investigated the effects of a concurrent working memory load and found that with no load or a small memory load many Low Span readers comprehended object relative sentences very poorly although their reading times in the critical area of these sentences were greater than those of High Span subjects. Experiment 2 replicated the reading time effects of Experiment 1 for object relative sentences and showed that pragmatic information improved the comprehension of the lower capacity readers, although their use of this information was limited to the clause in which it was presented.
Measures of the speed and accuracy of processing sentences with nonadjacent dependencies derived from the response-signal speed-accuracy tradeoff procedure were used to examine the nature of the memory system that underlies sentence comprehension. Three experiments with different sentence structures demonstrated that the accuracy of processing a dependency decreased as more material was interpolated between nonadjacent constituents. However, processing speed was unaffected by the amount of interpolated material, indicating that memory representations for previously processed constituents can be accessed directly. These results suggest that a content-addressable memory system mediates sentence comprehension, in which syntactic and semantic information provide direct access to memory representations without the need to search through extraneous representations. Notably, content-addressability appears to underlie the interpretation of sentence structures that also require the recovery of order information, a type of operation that has been shown to necessitate a slow search process in list-learning experiments (McElree, 2001; McElree & Dosher, 1993).
The present experiment attempted to specify the locus and nature of the “release from PI” phenomenon. On the critical trial, the material to be remembered (word triads) shifted from one subset of a larger category to another subset. No release was found when subjects were provided with the general category name as a retrieval cue, but release was obtained when the appropriate subset name was given as a cue at presentation. A similar release effect was obtained when the subset cue was presented at retrieval. The results favor a retrieval explanation of the release phenomenon although it is unclear whether cues increase accessibility to the TBR material or, rather, help to discriminate current from previous items.
Individual differences in reading comprehension may reflect differences in working memory capacity, specifically in the trade-off between its processing and storage functions. A poor reader's processes may be inefficient, so that they lessen the amount of additional information that can be maintained in working memory. A test with heavy processing and storage demands was devised to measure this trade-off. Subjects read aloud a series of sentences and then recalled the final word of each sentence. The reading span, the number of final words recalled, varied from two to five for 20 college students. This span correlated with three reading comprehension measures, including verbal SAT and tests involving fact retrieval and pronominal reference. Similar correlations were obtained with a listening span task, showing that the correlation is not specific to reading. These results were contrasted with traditional digit span and word span measures which do not correlate with comprehension.
Three experiments addressed the question whether semantic content or pragmatic context can direct the initial syntactic analysis assigned to sentences. Each experiment determined whether syntactic processing biases that have been observed in sentences presented in isolation can be overcome. In two experiments that measured eye movements, we found that the syntactic processing biases remained even when they resulted in thematically based anomaly or when they conflicted with discourse biases. In a third experiment, we used a self-paced reading task to replicate some of the results obtained using eye movement measures. We argue that the data support the existence of a syntactic processing module.
All other things being equal the parser favors attaching an ambiguous modifier to the most recent possible site. A plausible explanation is that locality preferences such as this arise in the service of minimizing memory costs-more distant sentential material is more difficult to reactivate than more recent material. Note that processing any sentence requires linking each new lexical item with material in the current parse. This often involves the construction of long-distance dependencies. Under a resource-limited view of language processing, lengthy integrations should induce difficulty even in unambiguous sentences. To date there has been little direct quantitative evidence in support of this perspective. This article presents 2 self-paced reading studies, which explore the hypothesis that dependency distance is a fundamental determinant of reading complexity in unambiguous constructions in English. The evidence suggests that the difficulty associated with integrating a new input item is heavily determined by the amount of lexical material intervening between the input item and the site of its target dependents. The patterns observed here are not straightforwardly accounted for within purely experience-based models of complexity. Instead, this work supports the role of a memory bottleneck in language comprehension. This constraint arises because hierarchical linguistic relations must be recovered from a linear input stream.
A theory of the way working memory capacity constrains comprehension is proposed. The theory proposes that both processing and storage are mediated by activation and that the total amount of activation available in working memory varies among individuals. Individual differences in working memory capacity for language can account for qualitative and quantitative differences among college-age adults in several aspects of language comprehension. One aspect is syntactic modularity: The larger capacity of some individuals permits interaction among syntactic and pragmatic information, so that their syntactic processes are not informationally encapsulated. Another aspect is syntactic ambiguity: The larger capacity of some individuals permits them to maintain multiple interpretations. The theory is instantiated as a production system model in which the amount of activation available to the model affects how it adapts to the transient computational and storage demands that occur in comprehension.
A case study is presented of a female patient, ELD, who has difficulty in the immediate recall of short sequences of visuo-spatial material following a right-hemisphere aneurysm. Despite poor performance on tasks such as the Brooks Matrix and the Corsi Blocks, ELD is good at the immediate serial recall of letters even when presentation modality is visual and shows effects of phonological similarity and articulatory suppression. This pattern of performance represents a double dissociation from that which has been observed with the short-term memory patient PV (Vallar & Baddeley, 1984), who is extremely poor at serial recall of verbal material but shows no visual memory impairment. It is argued that ELD has an impairment to the visuo-spatial component of working memory (Baddeley, 1986) in the absence of any phonological loop deficit. Further investigation reveals that ELD performs poorly on mental rotation tasks and finds it difficult to use imagery mnemonics, but has no difficulty in retrieving visuo-spatial information from long-term memory so long as it was learnt before her illness.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found an area in the fusiform gyrus in 12 of the 15 subjects tested that was significantly more active when the subjects viewed faces than when they viewed assorted common objects. This face activation was used to define a specific region of interest individually for each subject, within which several new tests of face specificity were run. In each of five subjects tested, the predefined candidate "face area" also responded significantly more strongly to passive viewing of (1) intact than scrambled two-tone faces, (2) full front-view face photos than front-view photos of houses, and (in a different set of five subjects) (3) three-quarter-view face photos (with hair concealed) than photos of human hands; it also responded more strongly during (4) a consecutive matching task performed on three-quarter-view faces versus hands. Our technique of running multiple tests applied to the same region defined functionally within individual subjects provides a solution to two common problems in functional imaging: (1) the requirement to correct for multiple statistical comparisons and (2) the inevitable ambiguity in the interpretation of any study in which only two or three conditions are compared. Our data allow us to reject alternative accounts of the function of the fusiform face area (area "FF") that appeal to visual attention, subordinate-level classification, or general processing of any animate or human forms, demonstrating that this region is selectively involved in the perception of faces.
This paper proposes a new theory of the relationship between the sentence processing mechanism and the available computational resources. This theory--the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT)--has two components: an integration cost component and a component for the memory cost associated with keeping track of obligatory syntactic requirements. Memory cost is hypothesized to be quantified in terms of the number of syntactic categories that are necessary to complete the current input string as a grammatical sentence. Furthermore, in accordance with results from the working memory literature both memory cost and integration cost are hypothesized to be heavily influenced by locality (1) the longer a predicted category must be kept in memory before the prediction is satisfied, the greater is the cost for maintaining that prediction; and (2) the greater the distance between an incoming word and the most local head or dependent to which it attaches, the greater the integration cost. The SPLT is shown to explain a wide range of processing complexity phenomena not previously accounted for under a single theory, including (1) the lower complexity of subject-extracted relative clauses compared to object-extracted relative clauses, (2) numerous processing overload effects across languages, including the unacceptability of multiply center-embedded structures, (3) the lower complexity of cross-serial dependencies relative to center-embedded dependencies, (4) heaviness effects, such that sentences are easier to understand when larger phrases are placed later and (5) numerous ambiguity effects, such as those which have been argued to be evidence for the Active Filler Hypothesis.
Participants remembered a short set of words while reading syntactically complex sentences (object-extracted clefts) and syntactically simpler sentences (subject-extracted clefts) in a memory-load study. The study also manipulated whether the words in the set and the words in the sentence were of matched or unmatched types (common nouns vs. proper names). Performance in sentence comprehension was worse for complex sentences than for simpler sentences, and this effect was greater when the type of words in the memory load matched the type of words in the sentence. These results indicate that syntactic processing is not modular, instead suggesting that it relies on working memory resources that are used for other nonsyntactic processes. Further, the results indicate that similarity-based interference is an important constraint on information processing that can be overcome to some degree during language comprehension by using the coherence of language to construct integrated representations of meaning.
Musical abilities are generally regarded as an evolutionary by-product of more important functions, such as those involved in language. However, there is increasing evidence that humans are born with musical predispositions that develop spontaneously into sophisticated knowledge bases and procedures that are unique to music. Recent findings also suggest that the brain is equipped with music-specific neural networks and that these can be selectively compromised by a congenital anomaly. This results in a disorder, congenital amusia, that appears to be limited to the processing of music. Recent evidence points to fine-grained perception of pitch as the root of musical handicap. Hence, musical abilities appear to depend crucially on the fine-tuning of pitch, in much the same way that language abilities rely on fine time resolution.
What precisely is the universal nature of the human syntactic parser, such that it copes easily with some embedded structures, yet fails so dramatically on others (e.g., classic double center-embeddings)? A theory is proposed in the form of an architecture for parsing based on two simple ideas. The first is that human short-term memory is an indexing structure which can give rise to interference effects (storage limitations) when contents overlap with respect to the indices. For parsing, the contents are syntactic structures, and the indices are potential structural relations. The second idea is that the capacity of STM is the minimum capacity required to support the basic functions of parsing. The theory successfully accounts for the contrasts between over 50 difficult and acceptable constructions from English, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish. The theory has independent psychological and computational motivation, and is a functional part of a broader cognitive ...
The origins of music: Innateness, development, and evolution
- J Mcdermott
- M Hauser
McDermott, J., & Hauser, M. (in press). The origins of music: Innateness, development, and evolution. Music Perception.
Working memory The psychology of learning and motivation Working memory
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Baddeley, A. D., & Hitch, G. (1974). Working memory. In G. H. Bower (Ed.). The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 8, pp. 47–89). New York: Academic Press. Baddeley, A. D. (1986). Working memory. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Raw reading times Raw reading times in milliseconds, as a function of syntactic complexity, memory load, and memory-noun type (standard errors in parentheses) for Region 1
- D Appendix
Appendix D. Raw reading times
Raw reading times in milliseconds, as a function of syntactic complexity, memory load, and memory-noun type (standard errors in
parentheses) for Region 1