Canada

Is the visual word recognition system sensitive to compound (e.g., SNOWBALL) and pseudocompound (e.g., CARPET) constituents? To answer this question, we employed red-blue anaglyphs glasses to parse red-blue colored (pseudo)compounds at the fovea—by hypothesis split along the vertical meridian—and allowing for the independent processing of word segments in the visual word form area. Seventy-one participants performed a visual masked lexical decision task with 133 millisecond stimuli presentations. Compounds and pseudocompounds were either split at the (pseudo)morpheme boundary (legally-split) or within a (pseudo)morpheme (illegally-split). We found a statistically significant interaction effect between word type and legality. Planned comparisons revealed an advantage in accuracy for legally-split compounds and pseudocompounds over their respective illegal splits. Furthermore, legally-split compounds elicited more accurate responses than legally-split pseudocompounds. In line with previous findings supporting a purely morpho-orthographic prelexical process with faster presentation times, these findings suggest a temporally distinct mechanism during visual word recognition.

CogSci 2022

Parsing Compounds and Pseudocompounds at the Fovea

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The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





technical paper

**Abstract:**

Learning to read is a critical skill; yet only a small portion of children in the United States are reading at or above grade level. Attention is one crucial process that affects the
acquisition of reading skills. The process involves selectively choosing task relevant information and requires monitoring competing demands. Many books for beginning readers include illustrations, but this design choice may require learners to split their attention between multiple sources of information. This study employed eye tracking to examine whether embedding text within illustrations in children’s e-books inadvertently induces attentional competition. The results showed that spatially separating illustrations from the text in beginning reader books reduces attentional competition and improves children’s reading comprehension. This study shows that changes to the design of books for beginning readers can help promote literacy development in children.

**List of authors and affiliations:**

Morgan Boyd: Carnegie Mellon University; Karrie E. Godwin: University of Maryland Baltimore County; Emma Gurchiek: Carnegie Mellon University; Anna Fisher: Carnegie Mellon University; Cassondra M Eng: Carnegie Mellon University

Low Spatial Proximity Between Text and Illustrations Improves Children’s Comprehension and Attention: An Eye Tracking Study

**Abstract:**

Readers rely on sentence context to generate predictions about the upcoming words so that processing of their visual forms is less necessary. Consequently, processing of  an orthographic neighbor of a strongly predicted word is facilitated by that context (as indicated by a reduced N400 ERP amplitude), regardless of the perceived item’s lexicality (i.e., whether it is a real word or a pseudoword). The current study investigated whether lexicality becomes important when the sentence context is less helpful in generating predictions. Our findings indicate that in weakly constraining sentences, the lexical status of a word impacts word recognition processes as indicated by a left anterior negativity, suggesting that readers rely on sublexical properties of words in the absence of strong expectations.

**List of authors and affiliations:**

Neslihan Caliskan: University of South Florida; Sara Milligan: University of South Florida; Elizabeth R Schotter: University of South Florida

The effect of orthographic relationships, lexical status and contextual constraint on visual word recognition: Evidence from event-related potentials

**Abstract:**

It was recently found that letter-shapes have a non-arbitrary relation with their canonical pronunciations, in multiple orthographies and quantified across the whole of each orthography: letters that look similar tend to have similar pronunciations. Similarly, there is phonosemantic systematicity at the word level: words that sound similar tend to have similar meanings. We investigated for the first time whether a similar systematicity exists in Chinese characters. We measured all the pairwise phonological distances and all the pairwise orthographic distances of the 58 Chinese pictographic characters that are taught to year 1 and 2 in Chinese primary schools. The correlation was tested between the two lists of distances and verified by a Mantel test. We found a significant negative correlation between characters and their segmental pronunciations: characters that look similar tend to have dissimilar segmental pronunciations. This contrasts with the positive correlations found in previous similar research with alphabetic writing. We conclude, first, that questions of systematicity in the Chinese writing system are tractable in the same terms and by the same methodology as that applied to alphabetic writing systems. Second, segment-based processing requires to be augmented by tones for there to be systematicity that is comparable to that found in alphabetic writing systems. Any non-arbitrary relation between letter shapes and sounds may help bootstrap the acquisition of literacy.

**List of authors and affiliations:**

Fiona Du: The University of Edinburgh; Hana Jee: The University of Edinburgh; Monica Tamariz: Hariot-Watt University; Richard Shillcock: The University of Edinburgh

Grapho-Syllabic Systematicity in Chinese: Chinese Pictographs Have a Non-Arbitrary relation with their Pronunciations

**Abstract:**

Some sentences are hard to read, and we don’t fully understand why. Memory-based and expectation-based constraints both attempt to explain sentence processing difficulties, and decades of sentence processing literature have found evidence in support of both theories. We further investigate theories of sentence processing by exploring subject- and object-extracted relative clause processing in Standard Arabic. We conducted a self-paced reading task and found that SRCs are easier to process than ORCs in Arabic, in line with expectation-based theories. A follow-up analysis of comprehension question answers revealed that when suggested with the possibility of a noisy interpretation, readers preferentially accept an SRC interpretation over an ORC interpretation. Our future research will explore these findings and test the threshold for acceptance of noisy interpretations.

**List of authors and affiliations:**

Nicole Dodd: University of California, Davis; Emily Morgan: UC Davis

Expectations and Noisy-Channel Processing of Relative Clauses in Arabic

The English use of "they" to refer to a singular referent that is non-specific or of unknown
gender dates back to the 1300s. Recently, "they" has emerged as the dominant pronoun
for individuals who identify as gender nonbinary, and a coherent subset of English
speakers (innovators) explicitly accept "they" when referring to a specific individual of
known gender ((i) “Sarah slept because they were tired”) in off-line judgments. The
present work examines whether on-line comprehension difficulty patterns with off-line
judgments. Using a maze-task, participants' read sentences like (i) containing “they” with
plural or singular subjects, or “he/she” with named subjects that matched or mismatched
in their typical gender. Gender mismatched evoked reading difficulty. Plural “they” also
caused difficulty, but significantly less. Innovators experienced less difficulty with singular
“they” than non-innovators, but still processed plural “they” faster than singular “they”.
This work suggests that the grammar of “they” may have yet to stabilize even for
innovative speakers.

Processing singular "they" is harder than plural "they", but does not cause referential failure

**Abstract:**

This visual world eye-tracking pilot study investigates the comprehension of register variants (Stelzen_colloquial vs. Beine_standard transl:.‘’legs’) in a German target sentence when this target sentence (mis)matches the formality of a preceding context sentence, given the object argument either matches or mismatches verb meaning constraints (e.g. Ich rasiere bald meine Beine/Stelzen/#Autos/#Karren, transt.: ‘I shave my legs_standard/legs_coll/#cars_standard/#cars_coll’). The aim of this study is to examine whether register congruence rapidly interacts with verb-argument semantic relations. LME results (n=9) show a main effect of verb-argument congruence but no main effect of formality-register congruence at the region between the verb onset and object-argument onset, indicating that verb-argument relations are computed and used rapidly in online language comprehension. These pilot results suggest that situation formality may indeed modulate verb-argument congruency processing, possibly indicating that standard language processing mechanisms interact closely with register representations.

**List of authors and affiliations:**

Angela Giovanna Patarroyo: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Katja Maquate: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Aine Ito: National University of Singapore; Pia Knoeferle: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Pia Knoeferle: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Pia Knoeferle: Charité

Investigating the real-time effect of register-situation formality congruence versus verb-argument semantic fit during spoken language comprehension

**Abstract:**

Little research to date has examined how listeners integrate cues to non-native speaker identity in real time sentence processing. Here, we examine listeners’ interpretation of the semantic and socio-pragmatic content of utterances produced by either a foreign accented speaker or a native speaker. Overall, our findings suggest that processing speed was slower in the presence of foreign accents. However, the extra perceptual demands of processing unfamiliar accents did not translate into listeners’ accuracy rates, and in certain sentence contexts, non-native speakers were also more likely to elicit higher semantic or pragmatic interpretation accuracy. Our findings show that non-native speaker identity plays an important role in listeners’ sentence interpretations.

**List of authors and affiliations:**

Martin Ho Kwan Ip: University of Pennsylvania; Anna Papafragou: Unversity of Pennsylvania

Integrating Non-Native Speaker Identity in Semantic and Pragmatic Processing

**Abstract:**

The study reported here examined the role of expertise in the composite face effect which constitutes better recognition of the top half of a face when in composite with a congruent vs. an incongruent (in terms of response required) bottom half. Experiment 1a (n=96) used prototype-defined artificial stimuli (checkerboards) to investigate the composite effect. The advantage of using these stimuli is that expertise can be fully controlled.  Experiment 1b (n=96) aimed to replicate the composite effect in face stimuli which served as a control and provided a direct comparison of the composite effect between face and checkerboard stimuli. A full experimental design including congruent/incongruent aligned and misaligned composites was used in both experiments to measure the composite effect. Experiment 1a revealed that the composite effect could not be obtained in checkerboard composites. Experiment 1b confirmed the robust composite face effect. We interpret our results as suggesting that expertise/perceptual learning does not contribute to the composite effect for faces.

**List of authors and affiliations:**

Emika Waguri: University of Exeter; IPL McLaren: University of Exeter; Ciro Civile: University of Exeter

Investigating the Composite Effect in Prototype-Defined Checkerboards vs. Faces

**Abstract:**

In recent evidence, classification training can elicit two qualitative patterns of generalization: one is exemplar-based such that close proximity to known members of a category best predicts membership in that category; the other involves inducing a global form of coherence in the mapping between input space and category membership.  Such global coherence is an abstraction about category membership – not in the form of clusters or prototypes, but grounded in regularities like categories alternating in input space (Kurtz & Wetzel, 2021) or one category having correlated feature values while the other is anti-correlated (Conaway & Kurtz, 2017). We investigate the extent to which categorization is driven by local match to exemplars versus conforming to global structural regularities using generalization items as critical tests: proximal to members of one category but conforming to the global regularity underlying the other.  Results are discussed in terms of implications for theoretical accounts of category learning.

**List of authors and affiliations:**

Josh C Glass: Binghamton University ; Kenneth Kurtz: Binghamton University

Local versus global coherence in the generalization of category training

We investigated how the properties of lexical items, which label object features, affect concept tokening. We addressed this issue by modeling data from three sources: (1) norms obtained from a dataset of 78,000 features to a set of pictures representing living and nonliving objects; (2) accuracy data from a picture-word priming congruency task with stimuli presented for 50-60 milliseconds; and (3) corpus data on the lexical properties of four different social usage count measures. We conducted two sets of analyses: one relying on sample count-based measures (i.e., measures based on the norming study: sample frequency, cue validity, feature distinctiveness), and a second relying on the social usage count-based measures (i.e., word frequency (WF), contextual diversity (CD), discourse contextual diversity (DCD), and user contextual diversity (UCD). Contrasting count and social usage-based measures allowed us to gain insight into the contribution of diverse semantic and socially oriented contextual measures of lexical items, and how they may affect concept tokening. Our results show that cue validity and feature distinctiveness were negative predictors of participants’ accuracy to congruency decisions—an effect which was more pronounced for distinctive features of living things. There was also a noticeable advantage for the UCD and DCD variables, over CD and WF. Overall, our results suggest that the conceptual system may be organized as a function of both, intrinsic properties of object features and usage based contextual measures of lexical items that label these features.

Parsing Compounds and Pseudocompounds at the Fovea

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Low Spatial Proximity Between Text and Illustrations Improves Children’s Comprehension and Attention: An Eye Tracking Study

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