Stewart M. McCauley

Perception and Bias in the Processing of Compound versus Phrasal Stress: Evidence from Event-related Brain Potentials

Previous research using picture/word matching tasks has demonstrated a tendency to incorrectly interpret phrasally stressed strings as compounds. Using event-related potentials, we sought to determine whether this pattern stems from poor perceptual sensitivity to the compound/phrasal stress distinction, or from a post-perceptual bias in behavioral response selection. A secondary aim was to gain insight into the role played by contrastive stress patterns in online sentence comprehension. The behavioral results replicated previous findings of a preference for compounds, but the electrophysiological data suggested a robust sensitivity to both stress patterns. When incongruent with the context, both compound and phrasal stress elicited a sustained left-lateralized negativity. Moreover, incongruent compound stress elicited a centro-parietal negativity (N400), while incongruent phrasal stress elicited a late posterior positivity (P600). We conclude that the previous findings of a preference for compounds are due to response selection bias, and not a lack of perceptual sensitivity. The present results complement previous evidence for the immediate use of meter in semantic processing, as well as evidence for late interactions between prosodic and syntactic information.

Toward a unified account of comprehension and production in language development

Although Pickering & Garrod (P&G) argue convincingly for a unified system for language comprehension and production, they fail to explain how such a system might develop. Using a recent computational model of language acquisition as an example, we sketch a developmental perspective on the integration of comprehension and production. We conclude that only through development can we fully understand the intertwined nature of comprehension and production in adult processing.

Prospects for usage-based computational models of grammatical development: argument structure and semantic roles.

UNLABELLED The computational modeling of language development has enabled researchers to make impressive strides toward achieving a comprehensive psychological account of the processes and mechanisms whereby children acquire their mother tongues. Nevertheless, the fields primary focus on distributional information has lead to little progress in elucidating the processes by which children learn to compute meanings beyond the level of single words. This lack of psychologically motivated computational work on semantics poses an important challenge for usage-based computational accounts of acquisition in particular, which hold that grammatical development is closely tied to meaning. In the present review, we trace some initial steps toward answering this challenge through a survey of existing computational models of grammatical development that incorporate semantic information to learn to assign thematic roles and acquire argument structure. We argue that the time is ripe for usage-based computational accounts of grammatical development to move beyond purely distributional features of the input, and to incorporate information about the objects and actions observable in the learning environment. To conclude, we sketch possible avenues for extending previous approaches to modeling the role of semantics in grammatical development. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:489-499. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1295 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. CONFLICT OF INTEREST The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.