Psychology

Abstract: We analyzed how syntactic flexibility influences sentence production in two different languages �¢?? English and Russian. In Study 1, speakers were instructed to produce as many structurally different descriptions of transitive-event pictures as possible. Consistent with the syntactically more flexible Russian grammar, Russian participants produced more descriptions and used a greater variety of structures than their English counterparts. In Study 2, a different sample of participants provided single-sentence descriptions of the same picture materials while their eye-movements were recorded. In this task, English and Russian participants almost exclusively produced canonical SVO-active-voice structures. However, Russian participants took longer to plan their sentences, as reflected in longer sentence onset latencies and eye-voice spans for the sentence-initial Subject noun. This cross-linguistic difference in processing load diminished toward the end of the sentence. Stepwise GLM analyses showed that the greater sentence-initial processing load registered in Study 2 corresponded to the greater amount of syntactic competition from available alternatives (Study 1), suggesting that syntactic flexibility is costly regardless of the language in use.

Abstract: TEST is a novel taxonomy of knowledge representations based on three distinct hierarchically organized representational features: Tropism, Embodiment, and Situatedness. Tropic representational features reflect constraints of the physical world on the agentâ??s ability to form, reactivate, and enrich embodied (i.e., resulting from the agentâ??s bodily constraints) conceptual representations embedded in situated contexts. The proposed hierarchy entails that representations can, in principle, have tropic features without necessarily having situated and/or embodied features. On the other hand, representations that are situated and/or embodied are likely to be simultaneously tropic. Hence while we propose tropism as the most general term, the hierarchical relationship between embodiment and situatedness is more on a par, such that the dominance of one component over the other relies on the distinction between offline storage vs. online generation as well as on representation-specific properties.

Abstract: Three experiments investigated how perceptual, structural, and lexical cues affect structural choices during English transitive sentence production. Participants described transitive events under combinations of visual cueing of attention (toward either agent or patient) and structural priming with and without semantic match between the notional verb in the prime and the target event. Speakers had a stronger preference for passive-voice sentences (1) when their attention was directed to the patient, (2) upon reading a passive-voice prime, and (3) when the verb in the prime matched the target event. The verb-match effect was the by-product of an interaction between visual cueing and verb match: the increase in the proportion of passive-voice responses with matching verbs was limited to the agent-cued condition. Persistence of visual cueing effects in the presence of both structural and lexical cues suggests a strong coupling between referent-directed visual attention and Subject assignment in a spoken sentence.

Abstract: We investigated how conceptually informative (referent preview) and conceptually uninformative (pointer to referentâ??s location) visual cues affect structural choice during production of English transitive sentences. Cueing the Agent or the Patient prior to presenting the target event reliably predicted the likelihood of selecting this referent as the sentential Subject, triggering, correspondingly, the choice between active and passive voice. Importantly, there was no difference in the magnitude of the general Cueing effect between the informative and uninformative cueing conditions, suggesting that attentionally driven structural selection relies on a direct automatic mapping mechanism from attentional focus to the Subjectâ??s position in a sentence. This mechanism is, therefore, independent of accessing conceptual, and possibly lexical, information about the cued referent provided by referent preview.

Abstract: Two experiments analyzed how perceptually priming a referent with the help of a visual cue affects structural choice in transitive sentence production in English and Finnish. Participants described line drawings depicting transitive events after a visual cue attracted their attention to the location of either the agent or the patient. Performance of English speakers replicated previously reported results and provided further details about the nature of the perceptual priming effect on structural selection by directly comparing the speakersâ?? behaviour under explicit and implicit cueing conditions. Performance of Finnish speakers on an implicit visual cueing task did not show any signs of perceptually motivated structural selection. We conclude that salient referents universally prefer to map onto the Subjectâ??s position in transitive sentences. Virtual unavailability of such a mapping in Finnish due to the generally dispreferred status of the passive makes perceptually primed structural selection unlikely.

Abstract: To represent the complexity of a visually perceived event, viewers need to attend selectively to different aspects of the event and its associated entities. Spoken descriptions of such complex events must encode the corresponding perceptual properties. This review discusses how the speakerâ??s attentional focus on one of the referents in a given event influences the structural choice in languages with different degrees of word order flexibility. First, we will discuss whether English speakers prefer to map visually salient referents onto a prominent grammatical role (e.g., Subject) or to a prominent linear position in the sentence (e.g., the sentential starting point). Comparison of this evidence with research in free word-order languages (Russian and Finnish) suggests the existence of a mapping mechanism wherein perceptual salience predominantly affects grammatical-role assignment and, to a lesser extent, assignment of linear positions.

Abstract: In the two experiments reported here, we uncovered evidence for shared structural representations between arithmetic and language. Specifically, we primed subjects using mathematical equations either with or without parenthetical groupings, such as 80 â?? (9 + 1) Ã? 5 or 80 â?? 9 + 1 Ã? 5, and then presented a target sentence fragment, such as â??The tourist guide mentioned the bells of the church that . . . ,â?? which subjects had to omplete. When the mathematical equations were solved correctly, their structure influenced the noun phraseâ??for example, either â??the bells of the churchâ?? or â??the church,â?? respectivelyâ??that subjects chose to attach their sentence completion to. These experiments provide the first demonstration of cross-domain structural priming from mathematics to language. They highlight the importance of global structural representations at a very high level of abstraction and have potentially far-reaching implications regarding the domain generality of structural representations.

Abstract: Abstraction is instrumental for our understanding of how numbers are cognitively represented. We propose that the notion of abstraction becomes testable from within the framework of simulated cognition. We describe mental simulation as embodied, grounded, and situated cognition, and report evidence for number representation at each of these levels of abstraction.

Abstract: In this paper we present a cognitive robotic model capable of object manipulation (i.e. reaching and grasping) based on psychologi- cally plausible embodied cognition principles. Specically, the robotic simulation model is inspired by recent theories of embodied cog- nition, in which vision, action and semantic systems are linked together, in a dynamic and mutually interactive manner, within a connec- tionist architecture. We show how a psycho- logically plausible robotic model of embod- ied selection for action can be achieved by using human experimental data to constrain the temporal and dynamic properties of the robotic model.

Abstract: We report the results of a study that used perceptual priming paradigm to investigate how attentional focus on a referent influences structural choice in Russian sentence production. Experimental hypotheses were based on two previously reported findings. First, some sentence production studies using English demonstrated that perceptually priming a referent of a visual event improves its chances of assignment as the Subject of a sentence about this event and triggers the resulting choice between active and passive voice (Gleitman, et al., 2007; Tomlin, 1995, 1997). Second, a study by Ferreira (1996) showed that English speakers alternate between the structures easier and faster when they have a wider battery of structural alternatives available to them. Our data confirmed both findings with important detalization. First, Russian speakers were more likely to assign the sentential starting point but not the Subject to the perceptually primed referent alternating between the agent-initial and the patient-initial structural alternatives. This finding suggests that perceptual priming leads to the positional but not the preferential assignment of grammatical roles in Russian. Second, Russian speakers having a seemingly wider inventory of structural options than their English counterparts were more reluctant to alternate structure as a function of the perceptual prime. This tendency may result form the necessity to maintain early commitments to the case-marked noun forms, which effectively binds structural selection to a much smaller number of available alternatives than the normative grammar of Russian suggests.

Abstract: The debate about the place of linguistic theory in cognitive science encouraged by The Linguistic Review is a good example of communication between different research communities. In this follow-up paper we (1) clarify our theoretical and methodological positions, (2) propose a theoretical model for language production similar to Jackendoffâ??s Parallel Architecture, and (2) discuss emerging empirical evidence for this model. Our data suggest that perceptual, semantic, and syntactic information becomes available to the speaker in parallel providing competing production cues. Main architectural parameters of the proposed model are similar to Parallel Architecture, but we put a greater focus on the interface between language-specific and general cognitive domains. We view such interface as a regular mapping mechanism between the grammatical constraints imposed by the language system and the perceptual, semantic, and grammatical priming parameters available in the communicative environment.

Abstract: Attention plays an important role in critical aspects of the use of grammar and lexicon in human discourse. We explore methods for the activation of these operations during the choice of an adequate syntactic structure, referential control, and other grammatical operations, during the processing of word and sentence meaning and in the skill of reading. Neuroimaging has suggested separate systems for syntactic and semantic processing and has provided some details on the anatomy of attentional systems related to semantic analysis.

Abstract: How is the generation of a grammatical sentence implemented by the human brain? A starting place for such an inquiry lies in linguistic theory. nfortunately, linguistic theories illuminate only abstract knowledge representations and do not indicate how these representations interact with cognitive architecture to produce discourse. We examine tightly constrained empirical methods to study how grammar interacts with one part of the cognitive architecture, namely attention. Finally, we show that understanding attention as a neural network can link grammatical choice to underlying brain systems. Overall, our commentary supports a multilevel empirical approach that clarifies and expands the connections between cognitive science and linguistics thus advancing the interdisciplinary agenda outlined by Jackendoff.