Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

Many studies have shown the double processing of negation, suggesting that negation integration into sentence meaning is delayed. This contrasts with some researches that have found that such integration is rather immediate. The present study contributes to this debate. Affirmative and negative compound sentences (e.g., “because he was not hungry, he did not order a salad”) were presented orally in a visual world paradigm while four printed words were on the screen: salad, no salad, soup, and no soup. The eye-tracking data showed two different fixation patterns for negative causal assertions, which are linked to differences in the representation and inferential demands. One indicates that negation is integrated immediately, as people look at the explicit negation (e.g., no salad) very early. The other, in which people look at the alternate (e.g., soup) much later, indicates that what is delayed in time is the representation of the alternate. These results support theories that combine iconic and symbolic representations, such as the model theory.

This study examined the mediating role of working memory (WM) in the relation between rapid automatized naming (RAN) and Chinese reading comprehension. Three tasks assessing differentially visual and verbal components of WM were programmed by E-prime 2.0. Data collected from 55 Chinese college students were analyzed using correlations and hierarchical regression methods to determine the connection among RAN, reading comprehension, and WM components. Results showed that WM played a significant mediating role in the RAN-reading relation and that auditory WM made stronger contributions than visual WM. Taking into account of the multi-component nature of WM and the specificity of Chinese reading processing, this study discussed the mediating powers of the WM components, particularly auditory WM, further clarifying the possible components involved in the RAN-reading relation and thus providing some insight into the complicated Chinese reading process.

Previous research on adults has demonstrated incidental foreign-language acquisition by watching subtitled television programs in a foreign language. Based on these findings and the literature about the sensitive period for language acquisition, we expected the acquisition to be larger with children. A short subtitled cartoon was presented to Dutch-speaking children (8–12 years old). We varied the channel in which the foreign and native languages were presented (sound track and subtitles); we also looked at the effects of the existing knowledge of the foreign language (due to formal teaching at school) and the linguistic similarity between the native and the foreign language (using Danish and French as foreign languages). We obtained real but limited foreign-language acquisition and in contrast to the sensitive language-acquisition hypothesis, the learning of the children was not superior to that of adults investigated in prior studies. The acquisition here does not profit from the more formal language learning at school. Contrary to the adults, the children tend to acquire more when the foreign language is in the sound track than in the subtitles.

Stimulus and psychological measures of a battery of 36 rate-manipulated versions of an extended message indicate that optimization of the efficiency of aural coding beyond that previously reported can be accomplished by the simultaneous application of a combination of natural and artificial distortions of the durational characteristics of speech. Peak efficiency of listening was successfully pushed to 400 wpm (words per minutes) primarily by means of a selective reduction of speech pause time. Regression estimates predicting the influence of pause time, total duration, and talker rate upon judgments of speech rate and comprehension are presented and implications for listening strategies and speech apperception drawn.

After a review of recent work connected with Grice's maxims of conversation, special attention is paid to the principles related to the concept of informativeness. The operation of those principles constrains logic by limiting the meaning of logical particles and, more importantly, by contradicting axioms and many theorems of the propositional calculus. It is argued that, as the development of the individual's formal operations proceeds, a conflict with laws of language use arises. The notion of a conflict between two subsystems, logical and linguistic, is used in a developmental perspective to account, in a unified manner, for the observed discrepancy between subjects' behavior in deductive and inductive reasoning tasks and predictions based on formal logic.

Subjects produced subject-verb sentences of prespecified structure, such asThe man is kicking, in response to pictures. The amount of information required to identify the pictured actor or action and to retrieve a name for the actor was varied. The following results, based on subject response latencies, were obtained. Experiment I demonstrated that only some initial amount of verb information processing occurs before and delays the initiation of such subject-verb sentences. Experiment II demonstrated that verb information processing is initiated only after the subject of the sentence has been identified. Finally, Experiment III demonstrated that verb information processing is initiated in parallel with the retrieval of the name for the subject of the sentence.

This study investigates the production of Arabic intervocalic geminate obstruents as produced by American L2 learners of Arabic. The participants of the study were 24 Arabic learners (12 advanced, 12 beginners) at North Georgia University and 12 native speakers of Jordanian Arabic (the control group). An examination of the results reveals that native speakers of Arabic and advanced Arabic learners pattern similarly while the beginner Arabic learners show a different pattern. Native speakers as well as advanced L2 learners of Arabic maintain a contrast between geminate and singleton consonants in terms of consonant duration while beginner L2 leaners do not. Unlike the case of the beginner L2 learners, the duration of the preceding vowel is found to be shorter before a geminate in native speakers and advanced L2 learners. However, the duration of vowels following a geminate is not affected across all proficiency levels. Further, the results suggest that the place and manner of articulation have no effect on the production of geminate consonants for both native and advanced L2 learners. Finally, voicing of geminates is found to have a significant effect on the duration of geminates, in favor of voiceless geminates, among native speakers and beginner L2 learners.

This paper describes a fully implemented, broad-coverage model of human syntactic processing. The model uses probabilistic parsing techniques, which combine phrase structure, lexical category, and limited subcategory probabilities with an incremental, left-to-right “pruning” mechanism based on cascaded Markov models. The parameters of the system are established through a uniform training algorithm, which determines maximum-likelihood estimates from a parsed corpus. The probabilistic parsing mechanism enables the system to achieve good accuracy on typical, “garden-variety” language (i.e., when tested on corpora). Furthermore, the incremental probabilistic ranking of the preferred analyses during parsing also naturally explains observed human behavior for a range of garden-path structures. We do not make strong psychological claims about the specific probabilistic mechanism discussed here, which is limited by a number of practical considerations. Rather, we argue incremental probabilistic parsing models are, in general, extremely well suited to explaining this dual nature—generally good and occasionally pathological—of human linguistic performance.