Search for: All records

Abstract Recent studies have revealed great individual variability in cue weighting, and such variation is shown to be systematic across individuals and linked to differences in some general cognitive mechanism. The present study investigated the role of subcortical encoding as a source of individual variability in cue weighting by focusing on English listeners’ frequency following responses to the tense/lax English vowel contrast varying in spectral and durational cues. Listeners differed in early auditory encoding with some encoding the spectral cue more veridically than the durational one, while others exhibited the reverse pattern. These differences in cue encoding further correlate with behavioral variability in cue weighting, suggesting that specificity in cue encoding across individuals modulates how cues are weighted in downstream processes. 

Previous studies have shown that representationally complex referents are encoded slower into working memory (WM) but are retrieved faster (Hofmeister, 2011; Karimi & Ferreira, 2016). However, the cost of maintaining complex representations is still not well understood. Through two self-paced reading experiments, we investigated the cost of encoding, maintaining and retrieving complex representations in WM. While we replicated the facilitatory effect during retrieval, the slowdown during encoding was not consistent across our experiments. More critically, for the first time, our experiments demonstrated that maintaining complex representations in WM is less costly than maintaining their simple counterparts. Furthermore, we found that WM maintenance cost is reduced because complex target noun phrases are more distinct from other competing referents in WM than simple ones. Overall, our results showed that the semantic elaboration of complex representations can reduce maintenance cost and provided new perspectives into this understudied WM process. 

Two competing models attempt to explain the deaccentuation of antecedent nonidentical discourse-inferable material (e.g., Bach wrote many pieces for viola. He must have LOVED string instruments). One uses a single grammatical constraint to license deaccenting for identical and nonidentical material. The second licenses deaccenting grammatically only for identical constituents, whereas deaccented nonidentical material requires accommodation of an alternative antecedent. In three experiments, we tested listeners’ preferences for accentuation or deaccentuation on nonidentical inferable material in out-of-the-blue contexts, supportive discourse contexts, and in the presence of the presupposition trigger too. The results indicate that listeners by default prefer for inferable material to be accented, but that this preference can be mitigated or even reversed with the help of manipulations in the broader discourse context. By contrast, listeners reliably preferred for repeated material to be deaccented. We argue that these results are more compatible with the accommodation model of deaccenting licensing, which allows for differential licensing of deaccentuation on inferable versus repeated constituents and provides a principled account of the sensitivity of accentuation preferences on inferable material to broader contextual manipulations. 

A central question of language comprehension concerns the interaction between linguistic form and broader representations of discourse in the interpretation of context-sensitive expressions. This interaction is instantiated in the interpretation of verb phrase ellipsis, where previous work has shown that the linguistic antecedent and the broader context are both considered in resolution. Using a novel experimental paradigm, we investigated VPE interpretation in discourses where the antecedent and the broader context make different information available for inclusion in the interpretation of the ellipsis site. Our results point to a complex interaction between linguistic antecedents and the broader discourse context in interpretation, putting considerable constraints on the set of possible models for VPE resolution. This work contributes to a better understanding of both the connections between and the boundaries separating linguistic structure and mental models of discourse contexts. 

Abstract Recent studies have documented substantial variability among typical listeners in how gradiently they categorize speech sounds, and this variability in categorization gradience may link to how listeners weight different cues in the incoming signal. The present study tested the relationship between categorization gradience and cue weighting across two sets of English contrasts, each varying orthogonally in two acoustic dimensions. Participants performed a four‐alternative forced‐choice identification task in a visual world paradigm while their eye movements were monitored. We found that (a) greater categorization gradience derived from behavioral identification responses corresponds to larger secondary cue weights derived from eye movements; (b) the relationship between categorization gradience and secondary cue weighting is observed across cues and contrasts, suggesting that categorization gradience may be a consistent within‐individual property in speech perception; and (c) listeners who showed greater categorization gradience tend to adopt a buffered processing strategy, especially when cues arrive asynchronously in time.