Review

Authors: Fernanda Ferreira, Zhuang Qiu

Prediction in language processing has been a topic of major interest in psycholinguistics for at least the last two decades, but most investigations focus on semantic rather than syntactic prediction. This review begins with a discussion of some influential models of parsing which assume that comprehenders have the ability to anticipate syntactic nodes, beginning with left-corner parsers and the garden-path model and ending with current information-theoretic approaches that emphasize online probabilistic prediction. We then turn to evidence for the prediction of specific syntactic forms, including coordinate clauses and noun phrases, verb arguments, and individual nouns, as well as studies that use morphosyntactic constraints to assess whether a specific semantic prediction has been made. The last section considers the implications of syntactic prediction for theories of language architecture and describes four avenues for future research.

Topics: Comprehension; Humans; Language; Psycholinguistics; Reading

PubMed: 34453937
DOI: 10.1016/j.brainres.2021.147632

Authors: William Matchin, Gregory Hickok

Syntax, the structure of sentences, enables humans to express an infinite range of meanings through finite means. The neurobiology of syntax has been intensely studied but with little consensus. Two main candidate regions have been identified: the posterior inferior frontal gyrus (pIFG) and the posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG). Integrating research in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience, we propose a neuroanatomical framework for syntax that attributes distinct syntactic computations to these regions in a unified model. The key theoretical advances are adopting a modern lexicalized view of syntax in which the lexicon and syntactic rules are intertwined, and recognizing a computational asymmetry in the role of syntax during comprehension and production. Our model postulates a hierarchical lexical-syntactic function to the pMTG, which interconnects previously identified speech perception and conceptual-semantic systems in the temporal and inferior parietal lobes, crucial for both sentence production and comprehension. These relational hierarchies are transformed via the pIFG into morpho-syntactic sequences, primarily tied to production. We show how this architecture provides a better account of the full range of data and is consistent with recent proposals regarding the organization of phonological processes in the brain.

Topics: Brain Mapping; Comprehension; Female; Humans; Language; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Prefrontal Cortex; Psycholinguistics; Speech Perception

PubMed: 31670779
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhz180

Authors: Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, Ana Baciero, Kyriakos Antoniou...

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

Authors: Carel Ten Cate, Judit Gervain, Clara C Levelt...

Human languages all have a grammar, that is, rules that determine how symbols in a language can be combined to create complex meaningful expressions. Despite decades of research, the evolutionary, developmental, cognitive, and computational bases of grammatical abilities are still not fully understood. "Artificial Grammar Learning" (AGL) studies provide important insights into how rules and structured sequences are learned, the relevance of these processes to language in humans, and whether the cognitive systems involved are shared with other animals. AGL tasks can be used to study how human adults, infants, animals, or machines learn artificial grammars of various sorts, consisting of rules defined typically over syllables, sounds, or visual items. In this introduction, we distill some lessons from the nine other papers in this special issue, which review the advances made from this growing body of literature. We provide a critical synthesis, identify the questions that remain open, and recognize the challenges that lie ahead. A key observation across the disciplines is that the limits of human, animal, and machine capabilities have yet to be found. Thus, this interdisciplinary area of research firmly rooted in the cognitive sciences has unearthed exciting new questions and venues for research, along the way fostering impactful collaborations between traditionally disconnected disciplines that are breaking scientific ground.

Topics: Animals; Humans; Infant; Language Development; Learning; Linguistics; Models, Theoretical; Psycholinguistics

PubMed: 32134565
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12493

Review

Authors: Gregory Hickok

Speech production has been studied predominantly from within two traditions, psycholinguistics and motor control. These traditions have rarely interacted, and the resulting chasm between these approaches seems to reflect a level of analysis difference: whereas motor control is concerned with lower-level articulatory control, psycholinguistics focuses on higher-level linguistic processing. However, closer examination of both approaches reveals a substantial convergence of ideas. The goal of this article is to integrate psycholinguistic and motor control approaches to speech production. The result of this synthesis is a neuroanatomically grounded, hierarchical state feedback control model of speech production.

Topics: Cerebral Cortex; Feedback; Humans; Models, Biological; Neuroanatomy; Psycholinguistics; Speech

PubMed: 22218206
DOI: 10.1038/nrn3158

Review

Authors: Carolin Dudschig, Barbara Kaup, Mingya Liu...

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

Authors: Chuanji Gao, Svetlana V Shinkareva, Rutvik H Desai...

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

Authors: Padraic Monaghan, Seán G Roberts

Iconicity, the resemblance between the form of a word and its meaning, has effects on behavior in both communicative symbol development and language learning experiments. These results have invited speculation about iconicity being a key feature of the origins of language, yet the presence of iconicity in natural languages seems limited. In a diachronic study of language change, we investigated the extent to which iconicity is a stable property of vocabulary, alongside previously investigated psycholinguistic predictors of change. Analyzing 784 English words with data on their historical forms, we found that stable words are higher in iconicity, longer in length, and earlier acquired during development, but that the role of frequency and grammatical category may be less important than previously suggested. Iconicity is revealed as a feature of ultra-conserved words and potentially also as a property of vocabulary early in the history of language origins.

Topics: Humans; Language; Language Development; Psycholinguistics; Vocabulary

PubMed: 33877696
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12968

Authors: Jørgen Dines Johansen

In this article it is argued that feelings are all important to the function of literature. In contradiction to music that is concerned with the inwardness of humankind, literature has, because of language, the capacity to create fictional worlds that in many respects are similar to and related to the life world within which we live. One of the most important reasons for our emotional engagement in literature is our empathy with others and our constant imagining and hypothesizing on possible developments in our interactions with them. Hence, we understand and engage ourselves in fictional worlds. It is further claimed and exemplified, how poetic texts are very good at rhetorically engage and manipulate our feelings. Finally, with reference to the important work of Ellen Dissanayake, it is pointed out that the first kind of communication in which we engage, that between mother and infant, is a kind of speech that positively engages the infant in a dialogue with the mother by means of poetic devices.

Topics: Emotions; Empathy; Humans; Literature; Music; Poetry as Topic; Psycholinguistics; Science

PubMed: 20162383
DOI: 10.1007/s12124-009-9112-0

Review

Authors: Shenshen Wang, Chao Sun, Ye Tian...

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