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Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Dec 2021In the long history of psycholinguistic research on verifying negative sentences, an often-reported finding is that participants take longer to correctly judge negative... (Review)
Review
In the long history of psycholinguistic research on verifying negative sentences, an often-reported finding is that participants take longer to correctly judge negative sentences true than false, while being faster to judge their positive counterparts true (e.g. Clark & Chase, Cogn Psychol 3(3):472-517, 1972; Carpenter & Just, Psychol Rev 82(1):45-73, 1975). While many linguists and psycholinguists have strongly advocated the idea that the costs and complexity of negation can be explained by appeal to context, context-based approaches have not been able to provide a satisfying account of this polarity*truth-value interaction. By contrast, the alternative theory of negation processing, which says that negation is processed by separately representing the positive, does provide a plausible account. Our proposals provide a means for reconciliation between the two views since we argue that negation is a strong cue to a positive context. Here we present our account of why and when negation is often apparently processed via the positive. We review many of the factors that are seen to be at play in sentence verification involving negation. We present evidence that participants' adoption of the positive-first procedure in sentence-picture verification tasks is conditioned by context.
Topics: Comprehension; Humans; Language; Psycholinguistics
PubMed: 34455529
DOI: 10.1007/s10936-021-09798-9 -
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Dec 2021Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being... (Review)
Review
Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and negation-related phenomena in psycholinguistics. In generative theoretical linguistics, negation and polarity sensitivity have been extensively studied, as the related phenomena are situated at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and are thus extremely revealing about the architecture of grammar. With the now long tradition of research on negation and polarity in psychology and psycholinguistics, and the emerging field of experimental semantics and pragmatics, a multitude of interests and experimental paradigms have emerged which call for re-evaluations and further development and integration. This special issue contains a collection of 16 research articles on the processing of negation and negation-related phenomena including polarity items, questions, conditionals, and irony, using a combination of behavioral (e.g., rating, reading, eye-tracking and sentence completion) and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG). They showcase the processing of negation and polarity with or without context, in various languages and across different populations (adults, typically developing and ADHD children). The integration of multiple theoretical and empirical perspectives in this collection provides new insights, methodological advances and directions for future research.
Topics: Adult; Child; Humans; Language; Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Reading; Semantics
PubMed: 34787786
DOI: 10.1007/s10936-021-09817-9 -
The Behavioral and Brain Sciences Oct 2023The standardization account predicts short message service (SMS) interactions, allowed by current technology, will support the use and conventionalization of ideographs....
The standardization account predicts short message service (SMS) interactions, allowed by current technology, will support the use and conventionalization of ideographs. Relying on psycholinguistic theories of dialogue, we argue that ideographs (such as emoji) can be used by interlocutors in SMS interactions, so that the main contributor can use them to accompany language and the addressee can use them as stand-alone feedback.
Topics: Humans; Language; Psycholinguistics; Text Messaging
PubMed: 37779289
DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X23000572 -
Trends in Cognitive Sciences Feb 2018Humans differ in innumerable ways, with considerable variation observable at every level of description, from the molecular to the social. Traditionally, linguistic and... (Review)
Review
Humans differ in innumerable ways, with considerable variation observable at every level of description, from the molecular to the social. Traditionally, linguistic and psycholinguistic theory has downplayed the possibility of meaningful differences in language across individuals. However, it is becoming increasingly evident that there is significant variation among speakers at any age as well as across the lifespan. Here, we review recent research in psycholinguistics, and argue that a focus on individual differences (IDs) provides a crucial source of evidence that bears strongly upon core issues in theories of the acquisition and processing of language; specifically, the role of experience in language acquisition, processing, and attainment, and the architecture of the language system.
Topics: Humans; Individuality; Language Development; Psycholinguistics; Verbal Learning
PubMed: 29277256
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2017.11.006 -
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews.... Mar 2022There is a substantial body of literature showing that men and women speak differently and that these differences are endemic to the speech signal. However, the... (Review)
Review
There is a substantial body of literature showing that men and women speak differently and that these differences are endemic to the speech signal. However, the psycholinguistic mechanisms underlying the integration of social category perception and language are still poorly understood. Speaker attributes such as emotional state, age, sex, and race have often been treated in the literature as dissociable, but perceptual systems for social categories demonstrably rely on interdependent cognitive processes. We introduce a diversity science framework for evaluating the existing literature on gender and speech perception, arguing that differences in beliefs about gender may be defined as differences in beliefs about differences. Treating individual, group, and societal level contrasts in ideological patterns as phenomenologically distinctive, we enumerate six ideological arenas which define claims about gender and examine the literature for treatment of these issues. We argue that both participants and investigators predictably show evidence of differences in ideological attitudes toward the normative definition of persons. The influence of social knowledge on linguistic perception therefore occurs in the context of predictable variation in both attention and inattention to people and the distinguishing features which mark them salient as kinds. We link experiences of visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility with ideological variation regarding the significance of physiological, linguistic, and social features, concluding that gender ideologies are implicated both in linguistic processing and in social judgments of value between groups. We conclude with a summary of the key gaps in the current literature and recommendations for best practices studies that may use in future investigations of socially meaningful variation in speech perception. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Psychology > Language Linguistics > Language Acquisition Psychology > Perception and Psychophysics.
Topics: Female; Humans; Language; Linguistics; Male; Psycholinguistics; Speech; Speech Perception
PubMed: 34716654
DOI: 10.1002/wcs.1583 -
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Jun 2022The paper introduces organizational psycholinguistics as an approach to professional communication i.e., the communication in organizations. The author systematizes a...
The paper introduces organizational psycholinguistics as an approach to professional communication i.e., the communication in organizations. The author systematizes a number of theories and concepts as a methodological basis of organizational psycholinguistics. The organizational psycholinguistics methodology is based on Theory of Speech Activity. Organizational psycholinguistics analyzes the communication aimed at a joint activity organization. At the same time, speech activity itself is an activity towards an independent goal to modify a partner's psychic state to involve him/her in a joint activity. The article describes goals, objects, subjects, tasks of the organizational psycholinguistics. The author indicates the methods used in the organizational psycholinguistic research and outlines prospects for further research in this field.
Topics: Communication; Humans; Male; Psycholinguistics; Speech
PubMed: 34160710
DOI: 10.1007/s10936-021-09785-0 -
Scientific Data Jul 2022The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex...
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 particular value to psycholinguists and other interested researchers. The dataset has been made freely available.
Topics: Databases, Factual; Humans; Language; Multilingualism; Psycholinguistics; Recognition, Psychology
PubMed: 35864133
DOI: 10.1038/s41597-022-01552-7 -
Brain and Language Sep 2015This editorial accompanies a special issue of Brain and Language re-visiting old themes and new leads in the electrophysiology of language. The event-related potential...
This editorial accompanies a special issue of Brain and Language re-visiting old themes and new leads in the electrophysiology of language. The event-related potential (ERP) as a series of characteristic deflections ("components") over time and their distribution on the scalp has been exploited by speech and language researchers over decades to find support for diverse psycholinguistic models. Fortunately, methodological and statistical advances have allowed human neuroscience to move beyond some of the limitations imposed when looking at the ERP only. Most importantly, we currently witness a refined and refreshed look at "event-related" (in the literal sense) brain activity that relates itself more closely to the actual neurobiology of speech and language processes. It is this imminent change in handling and interpreting electrophysiological data of speech and language experiments that this special issue intends to capture.
Topics: Brain; Electrophysiology; Evoked Potentials; Humans; Language; Models, Neurological; Psycholinguistics; Speech Perception; Time Factors
PubMed: 26188384
DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2015.06.001 -
Behavior Research Methods Sep 2023The number of databases that provide various measurements of lexical properties for psycholinguistic research has increased rapidly in recent years. The proliferation of...
The number of databases that provide various measurements of lexical properties for psycholinguistic research has increased rapidly in recent years. The proliferation of lexical variables, and the multitude of associated databases, makes the choice, comparison, and standardization of these variables in psycholinguistic research increasingly difficult. Here, we introduce The South Carolina Psycholinguistic Metabase (SCOPE), which is a metabase (or a meta-database) containing an extensive, curated collection of psycholinguistic variable values from major databases. The metabase currently contains 245 lexical variables, organized into seven major categories: General (e.g., frequency), Orthographic (e.g., bigram frequency), Phonological (e.g., phonological uniqueness point), Orth-Phon (e.g., consistency), Semantic (e.g., concreteness), Morphological (e.g., number of morphemes), and Response variables (e.g., lexical decision latency). We hope that SCOPE will become a valuable resource for researchers in psycholinguistics and affiliated disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience of language, computational linguistics, and communication disorders. The availability and ease of use of the metabase with comprehensive set of variables can facilitate the understanding of the unique contribution of each of the variables to word processing, and that of interactions between variables, as well as new insights and development of improved models and theories of word processing. It can also help standardize practice in psycholinguistics. We demonstrate use of the metabase by measuring relationships between variables in multiple ways and testing their individual contribution towards a number of dependent measures, in the most comprehensive analysis of this kind to date. The metabase is freely available at go.sc.edu/scope.
Topics: Humans; South Carolina; Psycholinguistics; Language; Linguistics; Semantics
PubMed: 35971041
DOI: 10.3758/s13428-022-01934-0 -
Cognitive Science Aug 2021This paper develops a novel psycholinguistic parser and tests it against experimental and corpus reading data. The parser builds on the recent research into memory...
This paper develops a novel psycholinguistic parser and tests it against experimental and corpus reading data. The parser builds on the recent research into memory structures, which argues that memory retrieval is content-addressable and cue-based. It is shown that the theory of cue-based memory systems can be combined with transition-based parsing to produce a parser that, when combined with the cognitive architecture ACT-R, can model reading and predict online behavioral measures (reading times and regressions). The parser's modeling capacities are tested against self-paced reading experimental data (Grodner & Gibson, 2005), eye-tracking experimental data (Staub, 2011), and a self-paced reading corpus (Futrell et al., 2018).
Topics: Cues; Humans; Memory; Psycholinguistics; Software
PubMed: 34379334
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.13020