Thomas A. Farmer

Tracking the Continuity of Language Comprehension: Computer Mouse Trajectories Suggest Parallel Syntactic Processing.

Although several theories of online syntactic processing assume the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, the continuous and non-ballistic properties of computer mouse movements are exploited, by recording their streaming x, y coordinates to procure evidence regarding parallel versus serial processing. Participants heard structurally ambiguous sentences while viewing scenes with properties either supporting or not supporting the difficult modifier interpretation. The curvatures of the elicited trajectories revealed both an effect of visual context and graded competition between simultaneously active syntactic representations. The results are discussed in the context of 3 major groups of theories within the domain of sentence processing.

Native language experience influences the perceived similarity of second language vowel categories.

The dynamics of spoken word recognition are acutely sensitive to competition among similar-sounding words. Here, we take advantage of this sensitivity to examine the manner in which native Italian speakers who are late learners of English perceive English vowels. Native Italian speakers and native English speakers listened to recordings of naturally produced words (”pin,” ”pen,” and ”pan”) and used a computer mouse to select the matching stimulus from an array of two pictures. The same participants also performed a similarity judgment task. The perceptual similarity space for these vowel categories differed between groups, and these differences were also reflected in the dynamics of performance in the online measure. The results are largely interpretable in terms of models of second-language speech perception that predict performance from patterns of assimilation to native language categories. The results suggest, however, that there are also effects of graded differences in the perceptual similarity of categories as measured in native speakers of the target language.