Glossa Psycholinguistics

A central endeavor in psycholinguistic research has been to determine the processing profile of syntactically ambiguous strings. Previous work investigating syntactic attachment ambiguities has shown that discarding a locally grammatically available, but globally failing, parse is costly. However, little is known about how comprehenders cope with semantic parsing ambiguities. Using the case study of scopally ambiguous definite descriptions such as the rabbit in the big hat, we examine whether comparable penalties arise for non-lexical semantic ambiguities. In a series of reference resolution tasks, we find dispreference for strings that are globally defined but fail to refer under alternative semantic parses, compared to strings where all readings successfully refer to the same individual. Crucially, this effect is only detectable when the alternative failing reading gives rise to a REFERENTIAL GARDEN PATH, where a dynamic constraint evaluation process temporarily settles on a unique referent before eventually failing. We conclude that failing alternative readings cause dispreference for a definite description, but only when the failing interpretation constitutes a red herring.

Vowel letters are a source of difficulty in reading English words, for they have both long and short pronunciations. In two studies, we examined how vowels are pronounced before different types of medial consonants in the words of English and the degree to which skilled readers follow those vocabulary statistics in their behavior. We found more short vowels before sequences beginning with ‹s› than before those such as ‹pl›, regardless of whether the letter after ‹s› corresponded to a stop consonant (e.g., ‹sp›) or a sonorant (e.g., ‹sl›). These results show that pronunciation of vowels is influenced by the nature and not just the number of following consonants, contrary to the assumptions that commonly underlie phonics instruction. Although the results support a statistical learning view of reading, in that participants showed an implicit use of untaught patterns, participants’ pronunciations differed in some ways from those expected given the vocabulary statistics. 

In support of an account in which disfluency can cue social reasoning in real time, Loy et al. (2019) showed that listeners are more likely to make an early commitment to a socially undesirable meaning of some as all, if it follows disfluent uh in a context where larger values are associated with greed (“I ate, [uh], some biscuits”). However, their finding is also compatible with an account in which disfluency simply heightens attention to the core semantic meaning of some, namely, some and possibly all. The current study differentiates these two accounts, using contexts in which smaller values are the socially undesirable interpretations of some. In two experiments, we recorded participants’ mouse movements as they heard fluent and disfluent utterances in a job interview context (“I have, [uh], some qualifications”) and clicked on one of four images corresponding to specific interpretations of some. Here, in keeping with an account in which the effects of disfluency reflect social reasoning, and contrary to one in which such effects depend on heightened attention, disfluency reduces the value participants associate with some. We found that participants were more likely to select images corresponding to one, or zero, qualifications following disfluent utterances. However, their mouse movements show that they are quick to commit to one qualification (Experiment 1) and slow to commit to zero (Experiment 2), suggesting that social context and manner of speech can combine to affect the interpretation of some as an utterance unfolds. Assigning its meaning to one is relatively easy, but imposing a meaning of zero – in effect, deciding that a speaker is lying – is more demanding.

Adult language learners have variable performance with subject-verb number agreement. But it is unclear whether their performance additionally depends on the availability of agreement morphology in their first language. To address this question, we conducted a self-paced reading task comparing different speaker groups: (a) first vs. second language speakers of German; (b) intermediate-to-advanced German learners whose first language had more or less productive number agreement morphology (Spanish vs. English). Two manipulations were used to diagnose number processing: agreement violations and agreement attraction. Our results showed decreased sensitivity to agreement violations in language learners, irrespective of the morphological productivity of their first language. Meanwhile, differences in attraction effects were inconclusive in all between-group comparisons. We suggest that second language variability with subject-verb agreement is unlikely to result from increased retrieval interference – the effect underlying attraction. Instead, variable performance more likely arises because learners have difficulties in the real-time mapping of inflectional morphemes to syntactic features.

Recent studies suggest that language users generate and maintain multiple predictions in parallel, especially in tasks that explicitly instruct participants to generate predictions. Here, we investigated the possibility of parallel gradedness of linguistic predictions in a simple reading task, using a new measure—imbalance—that captures the probabilistic difference between multiple sentence completions. We focus on prenominal gender-marked articles in German to obtain prediction-specific effects. Native speakers of German read predictable or unpredictable gender-marked nouns that were preceded by prediction-consistent or -inconsistent prenominal articles. Sentence frames either biased expectations more strongly toward the most likely continuation of the sentence, or balanced expectations between the first and second most likely continuation. The results showed reading facilitation for gender-marked articles when sentences were more biased but slowing when sentences were more balanced, irrespective of article predictability. We conclude that readers issue multiple prenominal predictions and weigh them according to their likelihood, providing evidence for parallel gradedness of prenominal predictions. The results are discussed in light of theoretical models on prediction and rational sentence processing.

In nominal classification systems, both form (i.e., morphology, phonology or both) and meaning often interact to determine the class or gender of the noun. In Bantu languages in particular, linguistic analysis has often put the emphasis on meaning, both inherent and evaluative (e.g., diminutive). However, recent quantitative studies have argued that both meaning and morphophonology – the ubiquitous nominal prefixes – serve as cues to class in Bantu, with their robustness and specific aspects potentially differing across individual languages. Here, we conducted an experimental study aimed at establishing whether speakers of Kîîtharaka (Bantu, E54) are sensitive to both semantics and morphophonology when classifying novel Kîîtharaka nouns. We used two wug-task-style experiments to establish whether particular aspects of meaning or form (here, nominal prefixes) would influence participants’ production of agreement on nominal dependents. Results showed that speakers are sensitive to two inherent features, Human and Fruit, and evaluative features like Augmentative, Pejorative and Diminutive. On the other hand, they are robustly sensitive to all morphophonological features tested when classifying novel nouns. Our results suggest that semantic features are generally less productive than morphophonology in the Kîîtharaka nominal classification system.