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This article presents the ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) project that offers data on English reading and listening comprehension from 7,338 university‐level advanced learners and native speakers of English representing 19 countries. The... more
This article presents the ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) project that offers data on English reading and listening comprehension from 7,338 university‐level advanced learners and native speakers of English representing 19 countries. The database also includes estimates of reading rate and seven component skills of English, including vocabulary, spelling, and grammar, as well as rich demographic and language background data. We first demonstrate high reliability for ENRO tests and their convergent validity with existing meta‐analyses. We then provide a bird's‐eye view of first (L1) and second (L2) language comparisons and examine the relative role of various predictors of reading and listening comprehension and reading speed. Across analyses, we found substantially more overlap than differences between L1 and L2 speakers, suggesting that English reading proficiency is best considered across a continuum of skill, ability, and experiences spanning L1 and L2 speakers alike. We end by...
In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds’ real-time... more
In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds’ real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to SVO or OVS sentences containing active accusative verbs (küssen “to kiss”) in Experiment 1 (N = 72), or dative object-experiencer verbs (gefallen “to like”) in Experiment 2 (N = 64). This was followed by the personal pronoun er or the demonstrative pronoun der. Interpretive preferences for er were most robust when high prominence cues (first mention, subject, proto-agent) were aligned onto the same entity; and the same applied to der for low prominence cues (second mention, object, proto-patient). These preferences were reduced in conditions where cues were misaligned, and there was evidence that each cue independently influenced performance. Crucially, individual variation in age predicted adult-like ...
Q: Do people wait until the PP/consider all possibilities alike after the pronoun; What causes the delay at the PP? ‐> Experiment 2 It is generally assumed that a prototypical pronoun refers to the most salient explicitly given... more
Q: Do people wait until the PP/consider all possibilities alike after the pronoun; What causes the delay at the PP? ‐> Experiment 2 It is generally assumed that a prototypical pronoun refers to the most salient explicitly given antecedent in the prior discourse. However, explicit antecedents are not necessary for an appropriate use of pronouns and can many times be absent. In such cases of Indirect Reference an anaphor may be associated with an IMPLICT ANTECEDENT via an inferred semantic or associative relation (part‐whole, token‐type, hyponymy, etc.) and/or its presence in the situation/environment (Gundel et al., 1993; Yule, 1982) . Moreover, finding an implicit antecedent can be as smooth as explicit reference when it is NUCLEAR – a defining semantic argument of a central predicate in the discourse, e.g., Fireman doing his job – Fire; Processing slows down only when it is PERIPHERAL – means or an instrument establishing the predicate, e.g., Fireman doing his job – Fire truck (...
This paper investigates instrumentally for the first time the binary vowel quantity opposition (short vs. long) in Yakut (or Sakha) on the basis of spontaneous production data from nine speakers. Acoustic measurements of vowels in... more
This paper investigates instrumentally for the first time the binary vowel quantity opposition (short vs. long) in Yakut (or Sakha) on the basis of spontaneous production data from nine speakers. Acoustic measurements of vowels in disyllabic words showed a significantly shorter duration of short vowels than their long counterparts. Furthermore, f0 maxima and f0 slope showed effects of both quantity and syllable number. The results suggest that pitch is an additional phonetic correlate of vowel quantity in Yakut, alongside with the robust durational difference between short and long vowels.
The present study investigated the comprehension of Finnish temporal structure by eight, ten, and twelve-year-old native Finnish school children. More precisely, a written questionnaire off-line experiment investigated the comprehension... more
The present study investigated the comprehension of Finnish temporal structure by eight, ten, and twelve-year-old native Finnish school children. More precisely, a written questionnaire off-line experiment investigated the comprehension of subordinating clause structures with the conjunctions ennen kuin 'befoe' and sen jalkeen kun 'after' as well as the comprehension of sentences with both referative and temporal converb constructions. The experiment showed that the performance of the eight-year-old group was significantly more error prone than the performance of the two older age groups in all structures investigated. They also showed a slow emergence of adult-like performance by the age of twelve in all sentences. Moreover, the results indicated that the youngest group relied on linearity significantly more than the other two groups in their interpretation of the experimental sentences. For the two other groups, the results showed that they relied significantly more on the grammatical interpretation of the sentences.
It has been argued in the linguistic literature that focus can highlight new or contrastive information (Kiss, 1998; Krifka, 2008). Moreover, focus may range from having narrow scope over one constituent to having broad scope over the... more
It has been argued in the linguistic literature that focus can highlight new or contrastive information (Kiss, 1998; Krifka, 2008). Moreover, focus may range from having narrow scope over one constituent to having broad scope over the whole sentence (Ladd, 1996). In the ...
The Gender Stereotype Effect in language comprehension refers to the increased processing load that occurs when comprehenders encounter linguistic information that is incongruent with their understanding of gender stereotypes; for... more
The Gender Stereotype Effect in language comprehension refers to the increased processing load that occurs when comprehenders encounter linguistic information that is incongruent with their understanding of gender stereotypes; for example, upon encountering the pronoun he in the sentence The maid answered the phone because he heard it ring. We investigate the Stereotype Effect using appropriateness and correctness ratings and ask whether it is modulated by individual differences in participants' personality and political ideology. Results from this study indicate that the Stereotype Effect can be replicated in an offline paradigm and that the Effect is specific to a discourse character's gender: sentences describing male agents fulfilling stereotypical female roles were rated lower in both appropriateness and correctness than sentences describing female agents fulfilling stereotypical male roles. Further, more open, conscientious, liberal, and empathetic individuals were mor...
Kun kuuntelemme puhetta tai luemme tekstiä, alamme välittömästi rakentaa koherenttia tulkintaa. Toisin kuin lukemisessa, puheen havaitsemisessa kuulija voi harvoin kontrolloida nopeutta, jolla hänelle puhutaan. Huolimatta hyvin nopeasta... more
Kun kuuntelemme puhetta tai luemme tekstiä, alamme välittömästi rakentaa koherenttia tulkintaa. Toisin kuin lukemisessa, puheen havaitsemisessa kuulija voi harvoin kontrolloida nopeutta, jolla hänelle puhutaan. Huolimatta hyvin nopeasta syötteestä - noin 4-7 tavua sekunnissa - ihmiset kykenevät tulkitsemaan puhetta hyvin vaivattomasti. Lauseen ymmärtämisen tutkimuksessa selvitetäänkin, miten tällainen nopea ja useimmiten vaivaton tulkintaprosessi tapahtuu, mitkä kognitiiviset prosessit osallistuvat reaaliaikaiseen tulkintaan ja millaista informaatiota missäkin vaiheessa prosessointia ihminen käyttää hyväkseen johdonmukaisen tulkinnan muodostamiseksi. Tämä kappale on katsaus lauseen ymmärtämisen prosesseihin ja niiden tutkimukseen. Käsittelemme lyhyesti prosessointimalleja, aikuisten ja lasten kielen suhdetta, lauseen sisäisten ja välisten viittaussuhteiden tulkintaa ja sensorisen ympäristön sekä motorisen toiminnan roolia lauseiden tulkintaprosessissa
Recent research suggests that an individual's disgust sensitivity affects language comprehension and correlates with political attitudes. Importantly, disgust sensitivity is not a stable measure and can be manipulated dynamically. We... more
Recent research suggests that an individual's disgust sensitivity affects language comprehension and correlates with political attitudes. Importantly, disgust sensitivity is not a stable measure and can be manipulated dynamically. We investigated the effect of the ongoing pandemic on language processing in a word rating and lexical decision study. Each participant was first exposed to either headlines portraying CoViD-19 as a serious disease or those downplaying it. The results showed an interaction between person-based factors, inherent word characteristics, and the participants' responses. After reading headlines emphasizing the threat of CoViD-19, easily disgusted participants considered the least disgusting words more disgusting. Further, political views played a role. More liberal participants rated the words lower for disgust in the downplayed condition but higher in the severe condition than their more conservative peers. The results of this study shed new light on ho...
The relationship between the ways in which words are pronounced and spelled has been shown to affect spoken word processing (Ziegler, Ferrand, & Montant, 2004) and a consistent relationship between pronunciation and spelling has been... more
The relationship between the ways in which words are pronounced and spelled has been shown to affect spoken word processing (Ziegler, Ferrand, & Montant, 2004) and a consistent relationship between pronunciation and spelling has been reported as a possible cause of unreduced pronunciations being easier to process than reduced counterparts (Ranbom & Connine, 2007) although reduced pronunciations occur more frequently. In the present study, we investigate the effect of pronunciation-to-spelling consistency for reduced and unreduced pronunciations in L1 and L2 listeners of a logographic language. More precisely, we compare L1 and L2 Japanese listeners to probe whether they use orthographic information differently when processing reduced and unreduced speech. Using pupillometry, the current study provides evidence that extends the hypothesis about the role of orthography in the processing of reduced speech. Orthographic realization matters in processing for L1 and L2 advanced listeners....
Solstad T, Daskalaki E, Järvikivi J. Expectations in language processing and production: an introduction to the special issue. Linguistics. 2021;59(2):319–331
The present study investigates individual differences in pupil dilation during standard word naming. We looked at (i) how individual subjects’ pupil size changes over the course of time and (ii) how well pupil size is predicted by the... more
The present study investigates individual differences in pupil dilation during standard word naming. We looked at (i) how individual subjects’ pupil size changes over the course of time and (ii) how well pupil size is predicted by the frequency of the stimuli. The time course of the pupil size was analysed with generalized additive modeling. The results show large individual variations in the pupil response pattern in this very simple task. Although, we see a pupil response to both stimulus onset and articulation onset and offset, both the amplitude of change and the direction of change differ substantially between subjects. This raises the question of what makes the pupil response functions so diverse, and one factor indicated by the frequency effect or the lack thereof might be shallow reading versus reading for content.
Two masked priming elements investigated the role of the system of stem allomorphs and the status of the nominative singular in lexical processing of Finnish inflected nouns. The results show that, first, free standing allomorphs... more
Two masked priming elements investigated the role of the system of stem allomorphs and the status of the nominative singular in lexical processing of Finnish inflected nouns. The results show that, first, free standing allomorphs significantly prime the corresponding nominative singular, e.g., 'saappaa-saapas'. Second, the results also show, that inflected nouns, e.g., 'sudelle', are equally strongly primed by the nominative singular, 'susi', than by an inflected form with a different stem, e.g., 'sutta'. We will argue that the stem allomorphs are separately represented at the form level and that the nominative singular does not enjoy a special status vis-a-vis other stem forms. The results are discussed in a decompositional framework that assumes separate levels of modality specific form representation and abstract lemma representation.
The question whether complex words, including pseudocomplex words (e.g., corn+er), are obligatorily segmented into existing morphemes (e.g., [24]) has been the topic of a large body of past morphological processing research. A recent line... more
The question whether complex words, including pseudocomplex words (e.g., corn+er), are obligatorily segmented into existing morphemes (e.g., [24]) has been the topic of a large body of past morphological processing research. A recent line of studies finds consistent effects of the whole-word already early on in the processing (e.g., [11,20]), challenging the obligatory decomposition view. In our current masked priming study with native speakers of English, participants showed facilitation for true morphological relations only as neither corner or cornet words produced significant priming. Additionally, frequency of the target and the prime affected processing of real and pseudo morphology differently.
Research shows that language processing mechanisms are permeable to the speaker's accent, but virtually no data exists on non-literal language. Our online rating study investigated whether accent-based biases could hinder making... more
Research shows that language processing mechanisms are permeable to the speaker's accent, but virtually no data exists on non-literal language. Our online rating study investigated whether accent-based biases could hinder making inferences from ironic speech. Ninety-six participants listened to dialogues between native and foreign-accented English speakers and rated them on several scales. We found that the ironic intent in the accented speech was missed significantly more often than in the native speech for all irony types. Importantly, participants' individual differences significantly affected the ratings and interacted with both accent and irony-type. More conservative participants were worse at detecting irony than their liberal peers but this effect was stronger for accented speech and a rarer irony type. In contrast, high empathy facilitated irony detection. The results demonstrate that interpersonal variation in personality and moral values affects language comprehen...
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Using a novel adaptation of the visual world eye-tracking paradigm we investigated children’s and adults’ online processing of reference in a naturalistic language context. Participants listened to a 5-minute long storybook while wearing... more
Using a novel adaptation of the visual world eye-tracking paradigm we investigated children’s and adults’ online processing of reference in a naturalistic language context. Participants listened to a 5-minute long storybook while wearing eye-tracking glasses. The gaze data were analyzed relative to the onset of referring expressions (i.e., full noun phrases (NPs) and pronouns) that were mentioned throughout the story. We found that following the mention of a referring expression there was an increase in the proportion of looks to the intended referent for both children and adults. However, this effect was only found early on in the story. As the story progressed, the likelihood that participants directed their eye gaze towards the intended referent decreased. We also found differences in the eye gaze patterns between NPs and pronouns, as well as between children and adults. Overall these findings demonstrate that the mapping between linguistic input and corresponding eye movements i...
We report on initial findings from a pupillometry study that investigated the influence of two extra-linguistic variables, namely Neuroticism and Disgust Sensitivity, on auditory language comprehension in adults. Results suggest that: (1)... more
We report on initial findings from a pupillometry study that investigated the influence of two extra-linguistic variables, namely Neuroticism and Disgust Sensitivity, on auditory language comprehension in adults. Results suggest that: (1) Language comprehension is influenced by extra-linguistic variables and individual differences; (2) the processing of different kinds of linguistic errors, as opposed to clashes with an individual’s value or belief system, are influenced by different extra-linguistic variables; and that (3) Disgust Sensitivity at least partially predicts pupillary responses to utterances clashing with an individual’s belief system. Results are discussed with regards to linguistic anticipation, cognitive effort and arousal, and resource allocation.
Using visual world eye-tracking, we examined whether adults (N = 58) and children (N = 37; 3;1–6;3) use linguistic focussing devices to help resolve ambiguous pronouns. Participants listened to English dialogues about potential referents... more
Using visual world eye-tracking, we examined whether adults (N = 58) and children (N = 37; 3;1–6;3) use linguistic focussing devices to help resolve ambiguous pronouns. Participants listened to English dialogues about potential referents of an ambiguous pronoun he. Four conditions provided prosodic focus marking to the grammatical subject or to the object, which were either additionally it-clefted or not. A reference condition focussed neither the subject nor object. Adult online data revealed that linguistic focussing via prosodic marking enhanced subject preference, and overrode it in the case of object focus, regardless of the presence of clefts. Children’s processing was also influenced by prosodic marking; however, their performance across conditions showed some differences from adults, as well as a complex interaction with both their memory and language skills. Offline interpretations showed no effects of focus in either group, suggesting that while multiple cues are processed...
Research suggests that listeners’ comprehension of spoken language is concurrently affected by linguistic and non-linguistic factors, including individual difference factors. However, there is no systematic research on whether general... more
Research suggests that listeners’ comprehension of spoken language is concurrently affected by linguistic and non-linguistic factors, including individual difference factors. However, there is no systematic research on whether general personality traits affect language processing. We correlated 88 native English-speaking participants’ Big-5 traits with their pupillary responses to spoken sentences that included grammatical errors, "He frequently have burgers for dinner"; semantic anomalies, "Dogs sometimes chase teas"; and statements incongruent with gender stereotyped expectations, such as "I sometimes buy my bras at Hudson's Bay", spoken by a male speaker. Generalized additive mixed models showed that the listener's Openness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism traits modulated resource allocation to the three different types of unexpected stimuli. No personality trait affected changes in pupil size across the board: less open partici...
ABSTRACT We often use pronouns like it or they without explicitly mentioned antecedents. We asked whether the human processing system that resolves such indirect pronouns uses the immediate visual-sensory context in multimodal discourse.... more
ABSTRACT We often use pronouns like it or they without explicitly mentioned antecedents. We asked whether the human processing system that resolves such indirect pronouns uses the immediate visual-sensory context in multimodal discourse. Our results showed that people had no difficulty understanding conceptually central referents, whether explicitly mentioned or not, whereas referents that were conceptually peripheral were much harder to understand when left implicit than when they had been mentioned before. Importantly, we showed that people could not recover this information from the visual environment. The results suggest that the semantic–conceptual relatedness of the potential referent with respect to the defining events and actors in the current discourse representation is a determining factor of how easy it is to establish the referential link. The visual environment is only integrated to the extent that it is relevant or acts as a fall-back when the referential search within the current discourse representation fails.
We investigated vowel quantity in Yakut (Sakha), a Turkic language spoken in Siberia by over 400,000 speakers in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation. Yakut is a quantity language; all vowel and consonant phonemes... more
We investigated vowel quantity in Yakut (Sakha), a Turkic language spoken in Siberia by over 400,000 speakers in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation. Yakut is a quantity language; all vowel and consonant phonemes have short and long contrastive counterparts. The study aims at revealing acoustic characteristics of the binary quantity distinction in vowels. We used two sets of data: (1) A female native Yakut speaker read a 200-word list containing disyllabic nouns and verbs with four different combinations of vowel length in the two syllables (short–short, short–long, long–short, and long–long) and a list of 50 minimal pairs differing only in vowel length; (2) Spontaneous speech data from 9 female native Yakut speakers (aged 19–77), 200 words with short vowels and 200 words with long vowels, were extracted for analysis. Acoustic measurements of the short and long vowels’ f0-values, duration and intensity were done. Mixed-effects models showed a significant durational difference between...
In recent years, evidence has emerged that readers may have access to the meaning of complex words even in the early stages of processing, suggesting that phenomena previously attributed to morphological decomposition may actually emerge... more
In recent years, evidence has emerged that readers may have access to the meaning of complex words even in the early stages of processing, suggesting that phenomena previously attributed to morphological decomposition may actually emerge from an interplay between formal and semantic effects. The present study adds to this line of work by deploying a forward masked priming experiment with both L1 (Experiment 1) and L2 (Experiment 2) speakers of English. Following recent research trends, we view morphological processing as a gradient process emerging over time. In order to model this, we used a large within-item stimulus design combined with advanced statistical methods such as generalised mixed models (GAMM) and quantile regression (QGAM). L1 GAMM analyses only showed priming for true morpho-semantic relations (the identity ‘bull’, inflected ‘bulls’ and derived conditions ‘bullish’), with no priming observed in the case of other relations (the pseudo-complex ‘bully’ or the stem-embed...
Misunderstood ironic intents may injure the conversation and impede connecting with others. Prior research suggests that ironic compliments, a rarer type of irony, are considered less ironic when spoken with a foreign accent. Using more... more
Misunderstood ironic intents may injure the conversation and impede connecting with others. Prior research suggests that ironic compliments, a rarer type of irony, are considered less ironic when spoken with a foreign accent. Using more ecologically-valid stimuli with natural prosodic cues, we found that this effect also applied to ironic criticisms, not just to ironic compliments. English native speakers (N = 96) listened to dialogs between Canadian English speakers and their foreign-accented peers, rating targets on multiple scales (irony, certainty in the speaker's intent, appropriateness, and offensiveness). Generalized additive mixed modelling showed that 1) ironic comments were rated lower for irony when foreign-accented, whereas literal comments were unaffected by accent; 2) the listener's political orientation, but not empathy or need for cognitive closure, modulated irony detection accuracy. The results are discussed in terms of linguistic expectations, social distance, cultural stereotypes, and personality differences.
One avenue for supporting the continued use and revitalization of endangered languages in the current, pervasively computerized world is the creation of computational models of the often rich and complex morphology of these languages.... more
One avenue for supporting the continued use and revitalization of endangered languages in the current, pervasively computerized world is the creation of computational models of the often rich and complex morphology of these languages. Such computational models can be used as a basis for creating a suite of reader’s and writer’s tools, including e.g. (1) an intelligent electronic dictionary that combines the computational model and a lexical database allowing for linking any inflected form with the appropriate dictionary entry, as well as the generation of word paradigms, (2) an intelligent computer-aided language learning application (ICALL) that allows for the dynamic generation of large numbers of exercises combining the entire core vocabulary (up to several thousand of the most common words) and a substantially smaller set of exercise templates, and (3) a spell-checker that supports adherence with one or more existing orthographical conventions, and thus the production of good-qu...

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An inconsistent relationship between the pronunciation and spelling of words in various languages has been shown to affect the rate at which listeners recognition spoken words (Ziegler et al., 1997; Ziegler and Ferrand, 1998). In English,... more
An inconsistent relationship between the pronunciation and spelling of words in various languages has been shown to affect the rate at which listeners recognition spoken words (Ziegler et al., 1997; Ziegler and Ferrand, 1998). In English, for example, the rhyme /-ʌk/ is consistently reflected in spelling as it has only one possible spelling (‘‘-uck” as in “luck”), but the rhyme /-ip/ is not, because it has two possible spellings:
‘‘-eap” or ‘‘-eep” as in “leap” or “keep.” As a result, the recognition of inconsistently spelled words, “leap” and “keep”, is slower than that of consistently spelled words, “luck” (Ziegler and Ferrand, 1998). This effect, called phonological-orthographic (PO) consistency, has been found in not only alphabetic languages but also logographic languages such as Chinese and Japanese. Unlike alphabetic languages, P-O consistency in logographic languages, has been measured based on homophone density, orthographic consistency, and frequency of phonological and orthographic neighbours (Chen et al., 2016; Hino et al., 2017).

These studies, it should be noted that, have focused exclusively on carefully pronounced words, namely, citation forms of words. This suggests that it is still unclear whether the P-O consistency effect applies only to the citation forms of words or generalizes to the reduced forms of words often found in conversational speech. In conversational speech, there are many instances of articulatory undershoot, leading
to the reduction of acoustic signals. For example, in English, yesterday /jEst@~deI/ may be pronounced as [jESeI] (Tucker, 2007), and in Japaneses, daigaku /daigaku/ ‘university’ could be produced as [daiakW] (Arai, 1999). This means that the pronunciation of many words in conversational speech is in fact inconsistent with the spelling due to this reduction. In the present study, we investigate how the P-O consistency
effect interacts with phonetic reduction in a logographic language. Specifically, we are interested in the time-course of the P-O consistency effect with reduced forms of Japanese words as indexed by pupil dilation.
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