Susanne Brouwer

■ Delayed Anticipatory Spoken Language Processing in Adults with Dyslexia— Evidence from Eye-tracking

It is now well established that anticipation of upcoming input is a key characteristic of spoken language comprehension. It has also frequently been observed that literacy influences spoken language processing. Here, we investigated whether anticipatory spoken language processing is related to individuals word reading abilities. Dutch adults with dyslexia and a control group participated in two eye-tracking experiments. Experiment 1 was conducted to assess whether adults with dyslexia show the typical language-mediated eye gaze patterns. Eye movements of both adults with and without dyslexia closely replicated earlier research: spoken language is used to direct attention to relevant objects in the environment in a closely time-locked manner. In Experiment 2, participants received instructions (e.g., Kijk naar de(COM) afgebeelde piano(COM), look at the displayed piano) while viewing four objects. Articles (Dutch het or de) were gender marked such that the article agreed in gender only with the target, and thus, participants could use gender information from the article to predict the target object. The adults with dyslexia anticipated the target objects but much later than the controls. Moreover, participants word reading scores correlated positively with their anticipatory eye movements. We conclude by discussing the mechanisms by which reading abilities may influence predictive language processing.

Interdependent processing and encoding of speech and concurrent background noise

Speech processing can often take place in adverse listening conditions that involve the mixing of speech and background noise. In this study, we investigated processing dependencies between background noise and indexical speech features, using a speeded classification paradigm (Garner, 1974; Exp. 1), and whether background noise is encoded and represented in memory for spoken words in a continuous recognition memory paradigm (Exp. 2). Whether or not the noise spectrally overlapped with the speech signal was also manipulated. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that background noise and indexical features of speech (gender, talker identity) cannot be completely segregated during processing, even when the two auditory streams are spectrally nonoverlapping. Perceptual interference was asymmetric, whereby irrelevant indexical feature variation in the speech signal slowed noise classification to a greater extent than irrelevant noise variation slowed speech classification. This asymmetry may stem from the fact that speech features have greater functional relevance to listeners, and are thus more difficult to selectively ignore than background noise. Experiment 2 revealed that a recognition cost for words embedded in different types of background noise on the first and second occurrences only emerged when the noise and the speech signal were spectrally overlapping. Together, these data suggest integral processing of speech and background noise, modulated by the level of processing and the spectral separation of the speech and noise.

How Native Prosody affects Pitch Processing during Word Learning in Limburgian and Dutch Toddlers and Adults

In this study, Limburgian and Dutch 2.5- to 4-year-olds and adults took part in a word learning experiment. Following the procedure employed by Quam and Swingley (2010) and Singh et al. (2014), participants learned two novel word-object mappings. After training, word recognition was tested in correct pronunciation (CP) trials and mispronunciation (MP) trials featuring a pitch change. Since Limburgian is considered a restricted tone language, we expected that the pitch change would hinder word recognition in Limburgian, but not in non-tonal Dutch listeners. Contrary to our expectations, both Limburgian and Dutch children appeared to be sensitive to pitch changes in newly learned words, indicated by a significant decrease in target fixation in MP trials compared to CP trials. Limburgian and Dutch adults showed very strong naming effects in both trial types. The results are discussed against the background of the influence of the native prosodic system.

Processing grammatical gender in Dutch: Evidence from eye movements

Previous research has demonstrated that grammatical gender in Dutch is typically acquired late. Most of this work used production data only, and consequently childrens knowledge of Dutch gender may have been underestimated. In this study, therefore, we examined whether 49 4- to 7-year-old Dutch-speaking children (and 19 adult controls) were able to use gender marking in the article preceding the object label during online sentence processing to (a) anticipate the upcoming object label or to (b) facilitate the processing of that label as it is presented. In addition, we investigated whether childrens online processing and production of gender marking on articles were related. In an eye-tracking task, participants were presented with sentences and visual displays with two objects, representing nouns of either the same gender (uninformative) or different genders (informative). Children were divided into a non-targetlike group and a targetlike group on the basis of their scores for neuter nouns in the production task. Our analyses examined whether participants could use gender marking anticipatorily (i.e., before the onset of the noun) and facilitatively (i.e., from noun onset). Results showed that Dutch-speaking adults and children who were successful in production used gender marking anticipatorily. However, children who did not systematically produce gender-marked articles used gender marking only facilitatively. These findings reveal that successful online comprehension may in part be possible before targetlike production is completely in place, but at the same time targetlike production may be a trigger for online comprehension to be completely successful.

Eye-Tracking and the Visual World Paradigm

This chapter will focus on the use of eye-tracking in the visual world paradigm. This method can be employed to investigate a number of language comprehension issues, and we will begin with a brief overview of the history of the method and some of the applications. More centrally, we will discuss how it can be used to assess the impact of cross-linguistic interference, proficiency levels, and age of onset in L2 acquisition and L1 attrition, with an introduction to the issues that are involved in designing a study using this technique. As a case in point, we present and discuss the specific experiment employed within the multi-task, multi-language and multi-lab study on which this book is based, with special attention to the issues for analysis that arise when data from multiple systems must be combined.