agramática (PCAA) identificaron dificultades en la comprensión de oraciones en orden no canónico ... more agramática (PCAA) identificaron dificultades en la comprensión de oraciones en orden no canónico y problemas en la interpretación de palabras funcionales. Aunque algunos de esos estudios registraron problemas en la interpretación de pronombres clíticos de objeto, el patrón de rendimiento no resulta claro y tampoco existe consenso respecto de qué podría causar las dificultades. Este trabajo se focalizó en investigar el procesamiento de oraciones con pronombres clíticos de objeto en español rioplatense. Se diseñó una prueba de emparejamiento oración-dibujo en la que se manipuló el orden oracional (canónico y no canónico), la pronominalización del objeto directo y su posición. Participaron en el estudio 5 PCAA y un grupo de 10 sujetos controles sanos (GC). En todas las condiciones, el GC tuvo un rendimiento significativamente mejor que el de PCAA. Además, ambos grupos tuvieron un mejor desempeño con las oraciones en orden canónico que en aquellas con orden no canónico. Finalmente, no se observó un efecto principal de la pronominalización del objeto directo. Sin embargo, sí emergió un efecto cuando se analizaron particularmente las oraciones en orden no canónico: las PCAA rindieron mejor en las oraciones con pronombres clíticos que cuando el objeto era un nominal pleno. La preservación de los pronombres clíticos, independientemente de su posición, en conjunto con este patrón aparentemente inesperado en las oraciones no canónicas desafía las explicaciones representacionales y parece ajustarse mejor a las hipótesis basadas en limitación de recursos.
Neste artigo apresentamos um percurso crítico pelas várias investigações realizadas até ao moment... more Neste artigo apresentamos um percurso crítico pelas várias investigações realizadas até ao momento sobre a assimetria sujeito/objeto na compreensão de sentenças contendo orações relativas em espanhol. Revisamos os resultados alcançados até agora através de diferentes técnicas experimentais e oferecemos uma visão geral de como aquelas descobertas contribuem para a discussão das principais propostas teóricas sobre a compreensão de sentenças. Enfocamos quatro aspectos das orações relativas em espanhol que podem permitir-nos enriquecer as nossas hipóteses: (i) a ambiguidade estrutural, (ii) a variedade de tipos relativos em espanhol, (iii) a ordem dos constituintes e (iv) a informação de animacidade e o gênero, número e caso dos nominais das orações relativas. Assim, procuramos identificar o que sabemos, o que resta compreender e quais são os rumos de investigação mais relevantes em espanhol para informar os modelos teóricos contemporâneos.
IV Congreso Internacional de Investigación y Práctica Profesional en Psicología XIX Jornadas de Investigación VIII Encuentro de Investigadores en Psicología del MERCOSUR, 2012
Willem J. M. Levelt. 2013. A history of Psycholinguistics. The pre-chomskyan era . Oxford: Oxford... more Willem J. M. Levelt. 2013. A history of Psycholinguistics. The pre-chomskyan era . Oxford: Oxford University Press. 654 paginas.
Neste artigo apresentamos um percurso crítico pelas várias investigações realizadas até ao moment... more Neste artigo apresentamos um percurso crítico pelas várias investigações realizadas até ao momento sobre a assimetria sujeito/objeto na compreensão de sentenças contendo orações relativas em espanhol. Revisamos os resultados alcançados até agora através de diferentes técnicas experimentais e oferecemos uma visão geral de como aquelas descobertas contribuem para a discussão das principais propostas teóricas sobre a compreensão de sentenças. Enfocamos quatro aspectos das orações relativas em espanhol que podem permitir-nos enriquecer as nossas hipóteses: (i) a ambiguidade estrutural, (ii) a variedade de tipos relativos em espanhol, (iii) a ordem dos constituintes e (iv) a informação de animacidade e o gênero, número e caso dos nominais das orações relativas. Assim, procuramos identificar o que sabemos, o que resta compreender e quais são os rumos de investigação mais relevantes em espanhol para informar os modelos teóricos contemporâneos.
The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and ... more The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the field. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However, existing databases tend to be small in terms of the number of items they include, and have also been normed in a limited number of languages, despite the recent boom in multilingualism research. In this paper we present the Multilingual Picture (Multipic) database, containing naming norms and familiarity scores for 500 coloured pictures, in thirty-two languages or language varieties from around the world. The data was validated with standard methods that have been used for existing picture datasets. This is the first dataset to provide naming norms, and translation equivalents, for such a variety of languages; as such, it will be of partic...
The asymmetry in the processing of subject (S) and object (O) relative clauses (RC) is well docum... more The asymmetry in the processing of subject (S) and object (O) relative clauses (RC) is well documented in literature and seems to be present in a wide range of languages. However, this asymmetry has only been studied in sentences with transitive activity predicates (TAP), while there has been no evidence reported regarding the processing of RCs with psychological predicates. Since Friedmann et al. (2009), it has been argued that the advantage for SRCs can be explained by the Featural Relativized Minimality theory (fRM; Rizzi 2004) as an effect of syntactic intervention. However, the syntactic structure of sentences with third class psychological predicates (TCPP) (Belletti & Rizzi 1988) such as gustar (‘to like’) differs from the structure of sentences with TAPs. Pujalte (2015) argues that in Spanish, ‘objects’ of TCPPs are generated in a higher syntactic position than ‘subjects’, i.e. as high applicative phrases (Pylkkänen 2008). Therefore, the effects of syntactic intervention should occur in the opposite condition and the processing of ORCs with these predicates should entail lower cognitive cost than SRCs. We designed a sentence comprehension task to address this issue. As predicted, SRCs with TCPPs were more difficult to comprehend than ORCs. These results can be explained as an effect of the intervention of the ‘object’ NP in the movement of the ‘subject’ NP to the left periphery, following the fRM proposal. They are also consistent with the fact that not all languages exhibit the same pattern of SRC/ORC asymmetry, depending of the structural properties of these languages.
The asymmetry in the processing of subject (S) and object (O) relative clauses (RC) is well docum... more The asymmetry in the processing of subject (S) and object (O) relative clauses (RC) is well documented in literature and seems to be present in a wide range of languages (e.g, in Span-ish; in English; in German; and French). However, this asymmetry has mostly been studied in sentences with transitive activity predicates (ACT), while there has been no evidence reported regarding the processing of RCs with psychological predicates (PSY). Memory based accounts of this phenomena predict a general locality preference for shorter filler-gap dependencies (Gibson, 1998; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005). In the case RCs with ACTs, SRCs instantiate a shorter filler-gap dependency than ORCs and this explains why the former are easier to process. How-ever, considering the structural properties of PSYs in Spanish (see note 1), it’s in the case of ORCs that a shorter filler-gap dependency is established. Therefore, the processing of ORCs with these predicates should entail less difficulty and lower cognitive effort than SRCs. Task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPR) have been used as a reliable neurophysiological index of cognitive effort in different domains (Beatty, 1982; Beatty & Lucero-Wagoner, 2000). In the sen-tence comprehension domain, TEPRs have provided a measure of differential processing cost according to the type of structure and its syntactic complexity (e.g, Just and Carpenter, 1993; Scheepers & Crocker, 2004; Schluroff, 1982). Design: 33 subjects participated in an auditory sentence comprehension task. They were asked to listen to a sentence; then were showed an image and were prompted to judge whether the image they saw faithfully reflected the content of the sentence heard or not (see Fig. 1). The stimuli (n=20) consisted of RCs with PSYs (1) and with ACTs (2) (see note 2). We manipulated the type of RC with each predicate: SRCs (1.a and 2.a) and ORCs (1.b and 2.b). The images selected were counterbalanced to make the sen-tences either true or false. Response accuracy and reaction times (RTs), as well as TEPRs, were measured during the task. Pupil diameter was monitored using a desktop-mounted, video-based eye tracker (EyeLink 1000, SR Research Ltd., Ontario, Canada) at a sampling rate of 1000 Hz. Results: on average, participants answered 89% (SE= 0.8%) of the total stimuli cor-rectly; Figs. 2 and 3 show mean correct answers and standard error, and mean RTs and stan-dard error (only RTs of correct answers were considered) according to condition respectively. Linear mixed-effect models were fitted for data analysis. Results show that RCs with PSYs were harder to comprehend (p=.02) and were processed more slowly (p<.001) than RCs with ACTs. As it was expected, in the case of RC with ACTs, SRCs were easier to comprehend (p=.003) and faster to process than ORCs (p=.004). In the case of PSYs, we found that ORCs were easier to comprehend (p=.007) but that there were no significant differences between ORCs and SRCs RTs (p=.58). Analysis of TEPRs (in progress): For each individual trial, mean pupil size during the presentation of the fixation cross will be considered as baseline pu-pil size. Cognitive effort of sentence processing will be operationalized as the difference be-tween the maximum pupil diameter size achieved during the exploration of the image and the pause after the response and the baseline pupil diameter size (ΔTEPR). Linear mixed-effects models will be fitted for data analysis with ΔTEPR as dependent variable, predicate type and RC type as fixed factors, log verb frequency as control factor, and item and subject as random factors. Discussion: Accuracy measures showed the expected pattern, i.e. opposite asymme-tries for SRC/ORC with ACTs and PSYs. However, the asymmetry is not evident for PSYs re-garding RTs. We hypothesize that while more time (compared to ACTs) leads to accurate res-ponses in the case of the less demanding ORC, it does not comprise enough time to get the right answer in the more difficult SRC. We will explore this issue using pupil size measures as a proxy of the entailed cognitive demand. Conclusions: Our results agree to some extent with the predictions of memory based explanations of the SRC/ORC asymmetry regarding the processing of RCs with PSYs in Spanish. Pupil size data will help understanding the dynamics of the cognitive effort entailed by the processing of these specific structures.
ABSTRACT: Several studies have found that factors of different nature (semantic, morphological an... more ABSTRACT: Several studies have found that factors of different nature (semantic, morphological and syntactic) affect the computation of subject-verb agreement during sentence production (BOCK; MILLER, 1991; FRANCK; VIGLIOCCO; NICOL, 2002; HARTSUIKER et. al., 2003; HASKELL; MACDONALD, 2003; VIGLIOCCO; BUTTERWORTH; SEMENZA 1995) The aim of this paper are: a) to investigate the influence of the linear order of constituents, exploiting the relative flexibility of Spanish; b) inquire whether a semantic variable, such as distributive reading, and a morphological variable, such as manipulation of the number of local noun, are factors that affect the processing of the agreement. We designed an experiment using an image description task with preambles in which the order of the subject of the sentence (pre-verbal or post-verbal), the type of preamble (nominal phrases with distributive and non-distributive reading) and the number of the local noun (singular-plural) was manipulated. The results...
ABSTRACT: This paper reports an experiment designed to assess the occurrence of lexical interfere... more ABSTRACT: This paper reports an experiment designed to assess the occurrence of lexical interference in verb production in Spanish. Using the semantic competitors paradigm (HOWARD et al., 2006), we show that the higher the number of verbs of the same category produced, the longer it takes to retrieve another verb of the same category in a picture naming task. According to our data, the production of a related verb delays the naming of a new member of the category by 20 ms., which means that, as is the case with nouns, semantically related verbs compete for selection. These results support the statement that, regardless their differences with respect to semantic representation and organization, verb and noun selection are guided by the same principles. Methodologically, our findings confirm that the paradigm is highly sensitive to semantic proximity effects, in terms of either categories or features. In light of these findings, we discuss the reasons why previous studies exploring se...
Los modelos de procesamiento linguistico plantean como rasgo central la autonomia del formulador ... more Los modelos de procesamiento linguistico plantean como rasgo central la autonomia del formulador sintactico (Levelt, 1989; Bock et al., 2004). El fenomeno de la concordancia entre el sujeto y el verbo en la produccion de habla permite estudiar esta autonomia. Estudios previos en diferentes lenguas mostraron que el procesamiento de la concordancia durante la produccion puede verse modulado por factoressemanticosymorfofonologicos.Asi,factoresdenaturalezano lexico-sintactica podrian interferir durante el procesamiento on line, dando lugar a errores de atraccion. En estos, el verbo principal de la oracion establece la concordancia con el sustantivo inmediatamente precedente en lugar de con el sustantivo nucleo del sujeto: Ej. *La etiqueta de las botellas SON AMARILLAS. Utilizando el paradigma de elicitacion de errores a traves de una tarea de completamiento oral de oraciones (Bock & Miller 1991), este trabajo se propone investigar la influencia de la informacion semantica y morfofonolog...
Alfa: Revista de Linguística (São José do Rio Preto), 2020
RESUMEN: Este artículo presenta un experimento diseñado para evaluar la ocurrencia de interferenc... more RESUMEN: Este artículo presenta un experimento diseñado para evaluar la ocurrencia de interferencia léxica en la producción de verbos en español. Usando el paradigma de los competidores semánticos (HOWARD et al., 2006), mostramos que cuanto mayor es el número de verbos de la misma categoría producidos, más tiempo lleva recuperar otro verbo de la misma categoría en una tarea de denominación de imágenes. Según nuestros datos, la producción de un verbo relacionado retrasa la denominación de un nuevo miembro de la categoría en 20 ms, lo que significa que, como es el caso para los sustantivos, los verbos relacionados semánticamente compiten por la selección. Estos resultados respaldan la propuesta de que, independientemente de sus diferencias con respecto a la representación y organización semántica, la selección de verbos y sustantivos se rige por los mismos principios. Metodológicamente, nuestros hallazgos confirman que el paradigma es altamente sensible a los efectos de proximidad sem...
agramática (PCAA) identificaron dificultades en la comprensión de oraciones en orden no canónico ... more agramática (PCAA) identificaron dificultades en la comprensión de oraciones en orden no canónico y problemas en la interpretación de palabras funcionales. Aunque algunos de esos estudios registraron problemas en la interpretación de pronombres clíticos de objeto, el patrón de rendimiento no resulta claro y tampoco existe consenso respecto de qué podría causar las dificultades. Este trabajo se focalizó en investigar el procesamiento de oraciones con pronombres clíticos de objeto en español rioplatense. Se diseñó una prueba de emparejamiento oración-dibujo en la que se manipuló el orden oracional (canónico y no canónico), la pronominalización del objeto directo y su posición. Participaron en el estudio 5 PCAA y un grupo de 10 sujetos controles sanos (GC). En todas las condiciones, el GC tuvo un rendimiento significativamente mejor que el de PCAA. Además, ambos grupos tuvieron un mejor desempeño con las oraciones en orden canónico que en aquellas con orden no canónico. Finalmente, no se observó un efecto principal de la pronominalización del objeto directo. Sin embargo, sí emergió un efecto cuando se analizaron particularmente las oraciones en orden no canónico: las PCAA rindieron mejor en las oraciones con pronombres clíticos que cuando el objeto era un nominal pleno. La preservación de los pronombres clíticos, independientemente de su posición, en conjunto con este patrón aparentemente inesperado en las oraciones no canónicas desafía las explicaciones representacionales y parece ajustarse mejor a las hipótesis basadas en limitación de recursos.
Neste artigo apresentamos um percurso crítico pelas várias investigações realizadas até ao moment... more Neste artigo apresentamos um percurso crítico pelas várias investigações realizadas até ao momento sobre a assimetria sujeito/objeto na compreensão de sentenças contendo orações relativas em espanhol. Revisamos os resultados alcançados até agora através de diferentes técnicas experimentais e oferecemos uma visão geral de como aquelas descobertas contribuem para a discussão das principais propostas teóricas sobre a compreensão de sentenças. Enfocamos quatro aspectos das orações relativas em espanhol que podem permitir-nos enriquecer as nossas hipóteses: (i) a ambiguidade estrutural, (ii) a variedade de tipos relativos em espanhol, (iii) a ordem dos constituintes e (iv) a informação de animacidade e o gênero, número e caso dos nominais das orações relativas. Assim, procuramos identificar o que sabemos, o que resta compreender e quais são os rumos de investigação mais relevantes em espanhol para informar os modelos teóricos contemporâneos.
IV Congreso Internacional de Investigación y Práctica Profesional en Psicología XIX Jornadas de Investigación VIII Encuentro de Investigadores en Psicología del MERCOSUR, 2012
Willem J. M. Levelt. 2013. A history of Psycholinguistics. The pre-chomskyan era . Oxford: Oxford... more Willem J. M. Levelt. 2013. A history of Psycholinguistics. The pre-chomskyan era . Oxford: Oxford University Press. 654 paginas.
Neste artigo apresentamos um percurso crítico pelas várias investigações realizadas até ao moment... more Neste artigo apresentamos um percurso crítico pelas várias investigações realizadas até ao momento sobre a assimetria sujeito/objeto na compreensão de sentenças contendo orações relativas em espanhol. Revisamos os resultados alcançados até agora através de diferentes técnicas experimentais e oferecemos uma visão geral de como aquelas descobertas contribuem para a discussão das principais propostas teóricas sobre a compreensão de sentenças. Enfocamos quatro aspectos das orações relativas em espanhol que podem permitir-nos enriquecer as nossas hipóteses: (i) a ambiguidade estrutural, (ii) a variedade de tipos relativos em espanhol, (iii) a ordem dos constituintes e (iv) a informação de animacidade e o gênero, número e caso dos nominais das orações relativas. Assim, procuramos identificar o que sabemos, o que resta compreender e quais são os rumos de investigação mais relevantes em espanhol para informar os modelos teóricos contemporâneos.
The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and ... more The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the field. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However, existing databases tend to be small in terms of the number of items they include, and have also been normed in a limited number of languages, despite the recent boom in multilingualism research. In this paper we present the Multilingual Picture (Multipic) database, containing naming norms and familiarity scores for 500 coloured pictures, in thirty-two languages or language varieties from around the world. The data was validated with standard methods that have been used for existing picture datasets. This is the first dataset to provide naming norms, and translation equivalents, for such a variety of languages; as such, it will be of partic...
The asymmetry in the processing of subject (S) and object (O) relative clauses (RC) is well docum... more The asymmetry in the processing of subject (S) and object (O) relative clauses (RC) is well documented in literature and seems to be present in a wide range of languages. However, this asymmetry has only been studied in sentences with transitive activity predicates (TAP), while there has been no evidence reported regarding the processing of RCs with psychological predicates. Since Friedmann et al. (2009), it has been argued that the advantage for SRCs can be explained by the Featural Relativized Minimality theory (fRM; Rizzi 2004) as an effect of syntactic intervention. However, the syntactic structure of sentences with third class psychological predicates (TCPP) (Belletti & Rizzi 1988) such as gustar (‘to like’) differs from the structure of sentences with TAPs. Pujalte (2015) argues that in Spanish, ‘objects’ of TCPPs are generated in a higher syntactic position than ‘subjects’, i.e. as high applicative phrases (Pylkkänen 2008). Therefore, the effects of syntactic intervention should occur in the opposite condition and the processing of ORCs with these predicates should entail lower cognitive cost than SRCs. We designed a sentence comprehension task to address this issue. As predicted, SRCs with TCPPs were more difficult to comprehend than ORCs. These results can be explained as an effect of the intervention of the ‘object’ NP in the movement of the ‘subject’ NP to the left periphery, following the fRM proposal. They are also consistent with the fact that not all languages exhibit the same pattern of SRC/ORC asymmetry, depending of the structural properties of these languages.
The asymmetry in the processing of subject (S) and object (O) relative clauses (RC) is well docum... more The asymmetry in the processing of subject (S) and object (O) relative clauses (RC) is well documented in literature and seems to be present in a wide range of languages (e.g, in Span-ish; in English; in German; and French). However, this asymmetry has mostly been studied in sentences with transitive activity predicates (ACT), while there has been no evidence reported regarding the processing of RCs with psychological predicates (PSY). Memory based accounts of this phenomena predict a general locality preference for shorter filler-gap dependencies (Gibson, 1998; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005). In the case RCs with ACTs, SRCs instantiate a shorter filler-gap dependency than ORCs and this explains why the former are easier to process. How-ever, considering the structural properties of PSYs in Spanish (see note 1), it’s in the case of ORCs that a shorter filler-gap dependency is established. Therefore, the processing of ORCs with these predicates should entail less difficulty and lower cognitive effort than SRCs. Task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPR) have been used as a reliable neurophysiological index of cognitive effort in different domains (Beatty, 1982; Beatty & Lucero-Wagoner, 2000). In the sen-tence comprehension domain, TEPRs have provided a measure of differential processing cost according to the type of structure and its syntactic complexity (e.g, Just and Carpenter, 1993; Scheepers & Crocker, 2004; Schluroff, 1982). Design: 33 subjects participated in an auditory sentence comprehension task. They were asked to listen to a sentence; then were showed an image and were prompted to judge whether the image they saw faithfully reflected the content of the sentence heard or not (see Fig. 1). The stimuli (n=20) consisted of RCs with PSYs (1) and with ACTs (2) (see note 2). We manipulated the type of RC with each predicate: SRCs (1.a and 2.a) and ORCs (1.b and 2.b). The images selected were counterbalanced to make the sen-tences either true or false. Response accuracy and reaction times (RTs), as well as TEPRs, were measured during the task. Pupil diameter was monitored using a desktop-mounted, video-based eye tracker (EyeLink 1000, SR Research Ltd., Ontario, Canada) at a sampling rate of 1000 Hz. Results: on average, participants answered 89% (SE= 0.8%) of the total stimuli cor-rectly; Figs. 2 and 3 show mean correct answers and standard error, and mean RTs and stan-dard error (only RTs of correct answers were considered) according to condition respectively. Linear mixed-effect models were fitted for data analysis. Results show that RCs with PSYs were harder to comprehend (p=.02) and were processed more slowly (p<.001) than RCs with ACTs. As it was expected, in the case of RC with ACTs, SRCs were easier to comprehend (p=.003) and faster to process than ORCs (p=.004). In the case of PSYs, we found that ORCs were easier to comprehend (p=.007) but that there were no significant differences between ORCs and SRCs RTs (p=.58). Analysis of TEPRs (in progress): For each individual trial, mean pupil size during the presentation of the fixation cross will be considered as baseline pu-pil size. Cognitive effort of sentence processing will be operationalized as the difference be-tween the maximum pupil diameter size achieved during the exploration of the image and the pause after the response and the baseline pupil diameter size (ΔTEPR). Linear mixed-effects models will be fitted for data analysis with ΔTEPR as dependent variable, predicate type and RC type as fixed factors, log verb frequency as control factor, and item and subject as random factors. Discussion: Accuracy measures showed the expected pattern, i.e. opposite asymme-tries for SRC/ORC with ACTs and PSYs. However, the asymmetry is not evident for PSYs re-garding RTs. We hypothesize that while more time (compared to ACTs) leads to accurate res-ponses in the case of the less demanding ORC, it does not comprise enough time to get the right answer in the more difficult SRC. We will explore this issue using pupil size measures as a proxy of the entailed cognitive demand. Conclusions: Our results agree to some extent with the predictions of memory based explanations of the SRC/ORC asymmetry regarding the processing of RCs with PSYs in Spanish. Pupil size data will help understanding the dynamics of the cognitive effort entailed by the processing of these specific structures.
ABSTRACT: Several studies have found that factors of different nature (semantic, morphological an... more ABSTRACT: Several studies have found that factors of different nature (semantic, morphological and syntactic) affect the computation of subject-verb agreement during sentence production (BOCK; MILLER, 1991; FRANCK; VIGLIOCCO; NICOL, 2002; HARTSUIKER et. al., 2003; HASKELL; MACDONALD, 2003; VIGLIOCCO; BUTTERWORTH; SEMENZA 1995) The aim of this paper are: a) to investigate the influence of the linear order of constituents, exploiting the relative flexibility of Spanish; b) inquire whether a semantic variable, such as distributive reading, and a morphological variable, such as manipulation of the number of local noun, are factors that affect the processing of the agreement. We designed an experiment using an image description task with preambles in which the order of the subject of the sentence (pre-verbal or post-verbal), the type of preamble (nominal phrases with distributive and non-distributive reading) and the number of the local noun (singular-plural) was manipulated. The results...
ABSTRACT: This paper reports an experiment designed to assess the occurrence of lexical interfere... more ABSTRACT: This paper reports an experiment designed to assess the occurrence of lexical interference in verb production in Spanish. Using the semantic competitors paradigm (HOWARD et al., 2006), we show that the higher the number of verbs of the same category produced, the longer it takes to retrieve another verb of the same category in a picture naming task. According to our data, the production of a related verb delays the naming of a new member of the category by 20 ms., which means that, as is the case with nouns, semantically related verbs compete for selection. These results support the statement that, regardless their differences with respect to semantic representation and organization, verb and noun selection are guided by the same principles. Methodologically, our findings confirm that the paradigm is highly sensitive to semantic proximity effects, in terms of either categories or features. In light of these findings, we discuss the reasons why previous studies exploring se...
Los modelos de procesamiento linguistico plantean como rasgo central la autonomia del formulador ... more Los modelos de procesamiento linguistico plantean como rasgo central la autonomia del formulador sintactico (Levelt, 1989; Bock et al., 2004). El fenomeno de la concordancia entre el sujeto y el verbo en la produccion de habla permite estudiar esta autonomia. Estudios previos en diferentes lenguas mostraron que el procesamiento de la concordancia durante la produccion puede verse modulado por factoressemanticosymorfofonologicos.Asi,factoresdenaturalezano lexico-sintactica podrian interferir durante el procesamiento on line, dando lugar a errores de atraccion. En estos, el verbo principal de la oracion establece la concordancia con el sustantivo inmediatamente precedente en lugar de con el sustantivo nucleo del sujeto: Ej. *La etiqueta de las botellas SON AMARILLAS. Utilizando el paradigma de elicitacion de errores a traves de una tarea de completamiento oral de oraciones (Bock & Miller 1991), este trabajo se propone investigar la influencia de la informacion semantica y morfofonolog...
Alfa: Revista de Linguística (São José do Rio Preto), 2020
RESUMEN: Este artículo presenta un experimento diseñado para evaluar la ocurrencia de interferenc... more RESUMEN: Este artículo presenta un experimento diseñado para evaluar la ocurrencia de interferencia léxica en la producción de verbos en español. Usando el paradigma de los competidores semánticos (HOWARD et al., 2006), mostramos que cuanto mayor es el número de verbos de la misma categoría producidos, más tiempo lleva recuperar otro verbo de la misma categoría en una tarea de denominación de imágenes. Según nuestros datos, la producción de un verbo relacionado retrasa la denominación de un nuevo miembro de la categoría en 20 ms, lo que significa que, como es el caso para los sustantivos, los verbos relacionados semánticamente compiten por la selección. Estos resultados respaldan la propuesta de que, independientemente de sus diferencias con respecto a la representación y organización semántica, la selección de verbos y sustantivos se rige por los mismos principios. Metodológicamente, nuestros hallazgos confirman que el paradigma es altamente sensible a los efectos de proximidad sem...
Task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPR) have been used as a reliable neurophysiological index of c... more Task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPR) have been used as a reliable neurophysiological index of cognitive effort in different domains (Beatty, 1982; Beatty & Lucero-Wagoner, 2000). In the sentence comprehension domain, TEPRs have provided a measure of differential processing cost according to the type of structure and its syntactic complexity (e.g, Just and Carpenter, 1993; Scheepers & Crocker, 2004; Sevilla et al. 2014). Sentences with subject-extracted (S) relative clauses (RC), have been consistently reported in psycholinguistic literature to be easier to process than object-extracted (O) RCs (e.g. in Spanish, Betancort et al., 2009; Sánchez et al., 2017). However, there have been no studies evaluating the comprehension of RCs in Spanish using TEPRs. In this study, an auditory sentence comprehension task with SRCs and ORC in Spanish was carried out. Response accuracy, reaction times (RTs) and TEPRs were measured during the task. Pupil diameter was monitored using a desktop-mounted, video-based eye tracker at a sampling rate of 1000 Hz. Linear mixed-effect models were fitted for data analysis. Results show that ORCs were harder to comprehend than SRCs: more prone to errors (p < .001), processed more slowly (p < .001) and showed higher increase in pupil size (p = .03). Our data agrees with previous studies on the comprehension of RCs and confirm the sensibility of TEPRs as a proxy for cognitive effort related to syntactic processes in sentence comprehension.
The asymmetry in the processing of subject (SR) and object (OR) relative clauses (RC) is well doc... more The asymmetry in the processing of subject (SR) and object (OR) relative clauses (RC) is well documented in literature and seems to be present in a wide range of languages: in language acquisition (e.g. Friedmann et al. 2009), in sentence production (e.g. Belletti & Contemori 2010; in Spanish, Muñoz Pérez & Lago 2012); and in sentence comprehension (e.g. Gordon et al. 2004; in Spanish, Sánchez et al. 2017). However, this asymmetry has only been studied in sentences with transitive activity predicates, while there has been no evidence reported regarding the processing of RCs with psychological predicates. Since Friedmann et al. (2009), it has been argued that the advantage for SRs can be explained by the Featural Relativized Minimality theory (fRM; Rizzi 2004) as an effect of syntactic intervention. As both the subject NP and the object NP share the [+N] syntactic feature, the subject NP functions as an intervener when the object NP moves to the left periphery, hindering the establishment of the syntactic dependency. However, the syntactic structure of sentences with third class psychological predicates such as gustar („to like‟) differs from the structure of sentences with transitive activity verbs (Belletti & Rizzi 1988). In Spanish, the „object‟ of psychological predicates is generated in a higher syntactic position than the subject (Pujalte 2015), i.e. as a high applicative phrase (Pylkkänen 2008). Therefore, the effects of syntactic intervention should occur in the opposite condition. Hence, we expect that the processing of ORs with these kind of predicates entails lower cognitive cost than SRs. Design: we designed a sentence comprehension task in which participants (n=33) were asked to listen to a sentence; then were showed an image and they had to decide whether the sentence they heard was true or false regarding the image they saw. The stimuli (n=20) consisted of RCs with third class psychological predicates (1) and with transitive activity verbs (2). In Spanish third class psychological predicates project the theme of the event with nominative case and the experiencer with dative case, so we chose transitive activity predicates that also project the agent of the event with nominative case and the patient with dative case. We manipulated the type of RC with each predicate: RCs with the nominative case argument as the antecedent or „subject‟ (1.a and 2.a) and RCs with dative arguments as the antecedent or „object‟ (1.b and 2.b). The image showed after the sentence was randomly selected to make the sentence either true or false. Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 show sample picture stimuli for sentences in (1). Response accuracy and reaction times (RTs) were measured during the task. Results: on average, participants answered 89% (SE= .8) of the total stimuli correctly; Table 1 shows the mean of correct answers and standard error per condition; Table 2 shows the mean of RTs and standard error. Linear mixed-effect models were fitted for data analysis. Results show that RCs with psychological predicates were harder to comprehend (p=.02) and were processed more slowly (p<.001) than RCs with activity verbs. As it was expected, in the case of RCs with activity verbs, SRs were easier to comprehend (p=.003) and faster to process than ORs (p=.004). In the case of RCs with psychological predicates, we found that ORs were easier to comprehend (p=.007) but that there were no significant differences between ORs and SRs RTs (p=.82). Discussion: As predicted, SRs with psychological predicates were more difficult to comprehend than ORs. These results can be explained as an effect of the intervention of the „object‟ NP in the movement of the subject NP to the left periphery, following the fMR proposal. They are also consistent with the fact that not all languages exhibit the same pattern of SR/OR asymmetry, depending of the structural properties of these languages (Hsiao & Gibson 2003 for Chinese; Ishizuka et al. 2006 for Japanese; Carreiras et al. 2010 for Basque; Kwon et al. (2013) for Korean). Conclusions: Our results agree to some extent with the predictions of fRM regarding the processing of RCs with psychological predicates and point to a structure-dependent account of the RCs processing asymmetries. However, further research is needed to explain the difference between the cognitive effort indicated by the RTs and the response accuracy in the case of RCs with psychological predicates.
The asymmetry in the processing of subject (S) and object (O) relative clauses (RC) is well docum... more The asymmetry in the processing of subject (S) and object (O) relative clauses (RC) is well documented in literature and seems to be present in a wide range of languages (e.g, in Span-ish; in English; in German; and French). However, this asymmetry has mostly been studied in sentences with transitive activity predicates (ACT), while there has been no evidence reported regarding the processing of RCs with psychological predicates (PSY). Memory based accounts of this phenomena predict a general locality preference for shorter filler-gap dependencies (Gibson, 1998; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005). In the case RCs with ACTs, SRCs instantiate a shorter filler-gap dependency than ORCs and this explains why the former are easier to process. How-ever, considering the structural properties of PSYs in Spanish (see note 1), it’s in the case of ORCs that a shorter filler-gap dependency is established. Therefore, the processing of ORCs with these predicates should entail less difficulty and lower cognitive effort than SRCs. Task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPR) have been used as a reliable neurophysiological index of cognitive effort in different domains (Beatty, 1982; Beatty & Lucero-Wagoner, 2000). In the sen-tence comprehension domain, TEPRs have provided a measure of differential processing cost according to the type of structure and its syntactic complexity (e.g, Just and Carpenter, 1993; Scheepers & Crocker, 2004; Schluroff, 1982). Design: 33 subjects participated in an auditory sentence comprehension task. They were asked to listen to a sentence; then were showed an image and were prompted to judge whether the image they saw faithfully reflected the content of the sentence heard or not (see Fig. 1). The stimuli (n=20) consisted of RCs with PSYs (1) and with ACTs (2) (see note 2). We manipulated the type of RC with each predicate: SRCs (1.a and 2.a) and ORCs (1.b and 2.b). The images selected were counterbalanced to make the sen-tences either true or false. Response accuracy and reaction times (RTs), as well as TEPRs, were measured during the task. Pupil diameter was monitored using a desktop-mounted, video-based eye tracker (EyeLink 1000, SR Research Ltd., Ontario, Canada) at a sampling rate of 1000 Hz. Results: on average, participants answered 89% (SE= 0.8%) of the total stimuli cor-rectly; Figs. 2 and 3 show mean correct answers and standard error, and mean RTs and stan-dard error (only RTs of correct answers were considered) according to condition respectively. Linear mixed-effect models were fitted for data analysis. Results show that RCs with PSYs were harder to comprehend (p=.02) and were processed more slowly (p<.001) than RCs with ACTs. As it was expected, in the case of RC with ACTs, SRCs were easier to comprehend (p=.003) and faster to process than ORCs (p=.004). In the case of PSYs, we found that ORCs were easier to comprehend (p=.007) but that there were no significant differences between ORCs and SRCs RTs (p=.58). Analysis of TEPRs (in progress): For each individual trial, mean pupil size during the presentation of the fixation cross will be considered as baseline pu-pil size. Cognitive effort of sentence processing will be operationalized as the difference be-tween the maximum pupil diameter size achieved during the exploration of the image and the pause after the response and the baseline pupil diameter size (ΔTEPR). Linear mixed-effects models will be fitted for data analysis with ΔTEPR as dependent variable, predicate type and RC type as fixed factors, log verb frequency as control factor, and item and subject as random factors. Discussion: Accuracy measures showed the expected pattern, i.e. opposite asymme-tries for SRC/ORC with ACTs and PSYs. However, the asymmetry is not evident for PSYs re-garding RTs. We hypothesize that while more time (compared to ACTs) leads to accurate res-ponses in the case of the less demanding ORC, it does not comprise enough time to get the right answer in the more difficult SRC. We will explore this issue using pupil size measures as a proxy of the entailed cognitive demand. Conclusions: Our results agree to some extent with the predictions of memory based explanations of the SRC/ORC asymmetry regarding the processing of RCs with PSYs in Spanish. Pupil size data will help understanding the dynamics of the cognitive effort entailed by the processing of these specific structures.
We report the results of a study investigating the production of gender and number agreement betw... more We report the results of a study investigating the production of gender and number agreement between matrix head noun and an embedded predicative adjective in Spanish using an elicited-error paradigm with preambles that included either Control (CV) or Raising verbs (RV) (Ex. Sorprendentemente eligió (CV)/ parecía (RV) el cuñado (head noun or N1) del verdulero (local noun or N2) anoche estar… “Last night, the greengrocer’s brother-in-law surprisingly chose/ seemed to be…”). In order to identify if the subjects of the infinitivals selected by these two verb types are syntactically identical (Movement Theory of Control) or distinct (Theory of Control by PRO or anaphora), the following features in the preambles were manipulated: gender of N1 (Feminine-Masculine), gender and number (Singular-Plural) of N2, and type of verb (Control-Raising). We analyzed the agreement errors pattern, omissions, and response times in the production of the target adjective. The error rate was not different across the two syntactic conditions, but the Control verb class was associated with significantly larger number of target omissions. Furthermore, omissions in the Control condition were specifically associated with feminine head nouns. This pattern was also reflected in the adjective production latency. Taken together, these results undermine a unified account of Raising and Control (i.e. the Control by Movement Theory) and argue for a Control by PRO analysis of Control constructions. Our findings provide novel data to both theoretical and experimental discussions about the difference between Control and Raising.
Se llevó a cabo un estudio de comprensión auditiva de oraciones de relativo (OR) encabezadas y se... more Se llevó a cabo un estudio de comprensión auditiva de oraciones de relativo (OR) encabezadas y semilibres en la variante del español argentino. Los resultados muestran que las ORs de objeto son más difíciles de comprender que las de sujeto, tanto en el caso de las encabezadas como en el de las semilibres. Estos resultados argumentan a favor de la propuesta de intervención por inclusión de rasgos morfosintácticos (Rizzi, 2004), ya que en ambos tipos de ORs de objeto se encuentra un restrictor léxico, propiedad expresada por un rasgo nominal [+N], que interfiere en el establecimiento de la dependencia sintáctica.
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