Arnout W. Koornneef

Establishing reference in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective

The electrophysiology of language comprehension has long been dominated by research on syntactic and semantic integration. However, to understand expressions like he did it or the little girl, combining word meanings in accordance with semantic and syntactic constraints is not enough-readers and listeners also need to work out what or who is being referred to. We review our event-related brain potential research on the processes involved in establishing reference, and present a new experiment in which we examine when and how the implicit causality associated with specific interpersonal verbs affects the interpretation of a referentially ambiguous pronoun. The evidence suggests that upon encountering a singular noun or pronoun, readers and listeners immediately inspect their situation model for a suitable discourse entity, such that they can discriminate between having too many, too few, or exactly the right number of referents within at most half a second. Furthermore, our implicit causality findings indicate that a fragment like David praised Linda because... can immediately foreground a particular referent, to the extent that a subsequent he is at least initially construed as a syntactic error. In all, our brain potential findings suggest that referential processing is highly incremental, and not necessarily contingent upon the syntax. In addition, they demonstrate that we can use ERPs to relatively selectively keep track of how readers and listeners establish reference.

Establishing coherence relations in discourse: The influence of implicit causality and connectives on pronoun resolution

Many studies have shown that readers and listeners recruit verb-based implicit causality information rapidly in the service of pronoun resolution. However, since most of these studies focused on constructions in which because connected the two critical clauses, it is unclear to what extent implicit causality information affects the processing of pronouns embedded in other types of coherence relations. In an eye-tracking and completion study we addressed this void by varying whether because, but, and and joined a primary clause containing the implicit causality verb, with a secondary clause containing a critical gender-marked pronoun. The results showed that the claims made for implicit causality hold if the connective because is present (i.e., a reading time delay following a pronoun that is inconsistent with the implicit causality bias of the verb), but do not generalise to other connectives like but and and. This shows that the strength and persistence of implicit causality as a pronoun resolution cue depends on the coherence relation in which the verb, the antecedent and the pronoun appear.

3: Tracking the Preference for Bound-Variable Dependencies in Ambiguous Ellipses and Only-Structures

Linguistic accounts of anaphor resolution propose that a pronominal can either be resolved by a grammatical operation in logical syntax or through value assignment in the discourse . A consistent finding in offline studies on the interpretation of ambiguous VP-ellipses is that bound-variable dependencies have a privileged status. The online evidence, on the other hand, is almost absent. In two experiments (one questionnaire and one eye-tracking experiment) this chapter shows that the binding preference is not solely an offline phenomenon, but can be detected in real-time measures of language comprehension. Furthermore, and in contrast to an earlier claim, the binding preference of the language processor is not restricted to elliptic structures, but emerges in ambiguous structures with the only -operator as well. The implications of these results are discussed in the light of a linguistic model of anaphoric comprehension, that is, the Primitives of Binding framework (Reuland, 2001). Keywords: ambiguous VP-ellipses; anaphor resolution; binding preference; bound-variable dependencies; eye-tracking experiment; language processor; only -operator; questionnaire experiment

The influence of linguistic and cognitive factors on the time course of verb-based implicit causality

In three eye-tracking experiments the influence of the Dutch causal connective “want” (because) and the working memory capacity of readers on the usage of verb-based implicit causality was examined. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that although a causal connective is not required to activate implicit causality information during reading, effects of implicit causality surfaced more rapidly and were more pronounced when a connective was present in the discourse than when it was absent. In addition, Experiment 3 revealed that—in contrast to previous claims—the activation of implicit causality is not a resource-consuming mental operation. Moreover, readers with higher and lower working memory capacities behaved differently in a dual-task situation. Higher span readers were more likely to use implicit causality when they had all their working memory resources at their disposal. Lower span readers showed the opposite pattern as they were more likely to use the implicit causality cue in the case of an additional working memory load. The results emphasize that both linguistic and cognitive factors mediate the impact of implicit causality on text comprehension. The implications of these results are discussed in terms of the ongoing controversies in the literature—that is, the focusing-integration debate and the debates on the source of implicit causality.

On the Shallow Processing (Dis)Advantage: Grammar and Economy

In the psycholinguistic literature it has been proposed that readers and listeners often adopt a “good-enough” processing strategy in which a “shallow” representation of an utterance driven by (top-down) extra-grammatical processes has a processing advantage over a “deep” (bottom-up) grammatically-driven representation of that same utterance. In the current contribution we claim, both on theoretical and experimental grounds, that this proposal is overly simplistic. Most importantly, in the domain of anaphora there is now an accumulating body of evidence showing that the anaphoric dependencies between (reflexive) pronominals and their antecedents are subject to an economy hierarchy. In this economy hierarchy, deriving anaphoric dependencies by deep—grammatical—operations requires less processing costs than doing so by shallow—extra-grammatical—operations. In addition, in case of ambiguity when both a shallow and a deep derivation are available to the parser, the latter is actually preferred. This, we argue, contradicts the basic assumptions of the shallow–deep dichotomy and, hence, a rethinking of the good-enough processing framework is warranted.

Can We 'Read' the Eye-Movement Patterns of Readers? Unraveling the Relationship Between Reading Profiles and Processing Strategies.

In an eye-tracking experiment we examined the risky reading hypothesis, in which long saccades and many regressions are considered to be indicative of a proactive reading style (Rayner et al.xa0in Psychol Aging 21(3):448, 2006; Psychol Aging 24(3):755, 2009). We did so by presenting short texts—that confirmed or disconfirmed verb-based implicit causality expectations—to two types of readers: proactive readers (long saccades, many regressions) and conservative readers (short saccades, few regressions). Whereas proactive readers used implicit causality information to predict upcoming referents, and slowed down immediately when they encountered a pronoun that was inconsistent with these verb-based expectations, the conservative readers slowed down much later in the sentence. These findings were consistent with the predictions of the risky reading hypothesis and as such presented novel evidence for the general idea that the eye-movement profile of readers reveals valuable information about their processing strategy.

Processing of expository and narrative texts by low- and high-comprehending children

The present study investigated comprehension processes and strategy use of second-grade low- and high-comprehending readers when reading expository and narrative texts for comprehension. Results from think-aloud protocols indicated that text genre affected the way the readers processed the texts. When reading narrative texts they made more text-based and knowledge-based inferences, and when reading expository texts they made more comments and asked more questions, but also made a higher number of invalid knowledge-based inferences. Furthermore, low- and high-comprehending readers did not differ in the patterns of text-processing strategies used: all readers used a variety of comprehension strategies, ranging from literal repetitions to elaborate knowledge-based inferences. There was one exception: for expository texts, low-comprehending readers generated a higher number of inaccurate elaborative and predictive inferences. Finally, the results confirmed and extended prior research by showing that low-comprehending readers can be classified either as readers who construct a limited mental representation that mainly reflects the literal meaning of the text (struggling paraphrasers), or as readers who attempt to enrich their mental representation by generating elaborative and predictive inferences (struggling elaborators). A similar dichotomy was observed for high-comprehending readers.

Gazepath: An eye-tracking analysis tool that accounts for individual differences and data quality

Eye-trackers are a popular tool for studying cognitive, emotional, and attentional processes in different populations (e.g., clinical and typically developing) and participants of all ages, ranging from infants to the elderly. This broad range of processes and populations implies that there are many inter- and intra-individual differences that need to be taken into account when analyzing eye-tracking data. Standard parsing algorithms supplied by the eye-tracker manufacturers are typically optimized for adults and do not account for these individual differences. This paper presents gazepath, an easy-to-use R-package that comes with a graphical user interface (GUI) implemented in Shiny (RStudio Inc 2015). The gazepath R-package combines solutions from the adult and infant literature to provide an eye-tracking parsing method that accounts for individual differences and differences in data quality. We illustrate the usefulness of gazepath with three examples of different data sets. The first example shows how gazepath performs on free-viewing data of infants and adults, compared to standard EyeLink parsing. We show that gazepath controls for spurious correlations between fixation durations and data quality in infant data. The second example shows that gazepath performs well in high-quality reading data of adults. The third and last example shows that gazepath can also be used on noisy infant data collected with a Tobii eye-tracker and low (60 Hz) sampling rate.

Beginning readers might benefit from digital texts presented in a sentence-by-sentence fashion. But why?

Abstract The current digital era offers many possibilities to modify the layout of a text to optimize reading and improve comprehension. Here, we examined the idea that the visuo-spatial properties of segmented layouts support beginning readers by reducing the demands of basic eye-movement processes. In a series of self-paced reading experiments, text comprehension and reading speed of second- and third-grade pupils (Nu202f=u202f348) were assessed in a baseline condition (i.e., sentences continued on the same line as far as page width allowed) and three conditions with a segmented layout: (1) a discontinuous layout in which each sentence was presented on a new line of the page; (2) a reader-paced Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) layout in which the texts were presented sentence by sentence; (3) a reader-paced RSVP layout in which the texts were presented word by word. No advantages were observed for the discontinuous layout. However, at the expense of increased reading times, robust comprehension advantages emerged for the two RSVP layouts. The observed trade-off between speed and accuracy suggests that a RSVP-based layout induces more precise reading, rather than reducing the demands on basic decoding and oculomotor control processes. These findings will be discussed in the context of individual differences in reading skills and several high-potential digital applications that aim at enhancing the abilities of (beginning) readers (e.g., Spritz, BeeLine Reader).