1,720,990 research outputs found
Gay vs. Straight sounding voices: How do people perceive them?
No full textSulpizio S, Fasoli F, Maass A, Paladino MP, Vespignani F, Eyssel FA. Gay vs. Straight sounding voices: How do people perceive them? Presented at the Marie Curie Initial Training Network Language, Cognition and Gender (ITN LCG), Final Conference, Bern
L’utilizzo di potenziali evento-relati rende obsoleta la tecnica della lettura autosomministrata nello studio del parsing frasale?
No full textModelli generativi e sintassi generativa
No full textIn this short paper we present the results of four experiments assessing various degree of morphosyntactic and semantic linguistic competence in three very large language models (LLMs), namely davinci (GPT-3/ChatGPT), davinci-002 and davinci-003 (GPT-3.5 with different training options). We focused on (i) acceptability, (ii) complexity and (iii) coherence judgments on 7-point Likert scales and on (iv) syntactic development by means of a forced choice task. The datasets used are taken from available test-sets presented in shared tasks by the NLP community or from linguistic tests. The results suggest that, despite a rather good performance overall, these LLMs cannot be considered competence models since they do not qualify neither as descriptively nor explanatorily adequate
Attachment and concord of temporal adverbs: Evidence from eye movements
Full text linkThe present study examined the processing of temporal adverbial phrases such as "last week," which must agree in temporal features with the verb they modify. We investigated readers' sensitivity to this feature match or mismatch in two eye-tracking studies. The main aim of this study was to expand the range of concord phenomena which have been investigated in real-time processing in order to understand how linguistic dependencies are formed during sentence comprehension (Felser et al., 2017). Under a cue-based perspective, linguistic dependency formation relies on an associative cue-based retrieval mechanism (Lewis et al., 2006; McElree, 2006), but how such a mechanism is deployed over diverse linguistic dependencies remains a matter of debate. Are all linguistic features candidate cues that guide retrieval? Are all cues given similar weight? Are different cues differently weighted based on the dependency being processed? To address these questions, we implemented a mismatch paradigm (Sturt, 2003) adapted for temporal concord dependencies. This paradigm tested whether readers were sensitive to a temporal agreement between a temporal adverb like last week and a linearly distant, but structurally accessible verb, as well as a linearly proximate but structurally inaccessible verb. We found clear evidence that readers were sensitive to feature match between the adverb and the linearly distant, structurally accessible verb. We found no clear evidence on whether feature match with the inaccessible verb impacted the processing of a temporal adverb. Our results suggest syntactic positional information plays an important role during the processing of the temporal concord relation
Does the linguistic identity of the speaker modulate speech prediction?
Full text linkIntroduction: It is a matter of debate if linguistic prediction involves only (pre-)activation of lexical-semantic representations or also phonological and phonetic ones. We will capitalize on the fact that foreign speakers usually make phonological errors to investigate if speaker identity (native-vs-foreign) is used to tune specific phonological predictions.
Methods: Participants (N=48) will be recruited to read sentence fragments in which the last word will be produced by a native or a foreign speaker. They will have to perform a lexical decision task on the word presented auditorily, which could be predictable or not. Speaker identity (native-vs-foreign) may or may not be anticipated by the face of the speaker.
Expected Results: The effect of predictability on lexical decision times should be larger when the speaker identity is cued.
Conclusions: If linguistic prediction takes into account phonological variability across groups we can conclude that it involves not only lexical-semantic processes.
Take home messages: We care about the speaker identity and linguistic prediction can be instantiated at a phonological level
Widening agreement processing: a matter of time, features and distance
No full textExisting psycholinguistic models typically describe agreement relations as monolithic phenomena amounting to mechanisms that check mere feature consistency. This eye-tracking study aimed at widening this perspective by investigating the time spent reading subject-verb (number, person) and adverb-verb (tense) violations on an inflected verb during sentence comprehension in Spanish. Results suggest that (i) distinct processing mechanisms underlie the analysis of subject-verb and adverb-verb relations, (ii) the parser is sensitive to the different interpretive properties that characterise the person, number and tense features encoded in the verb (i.e. anchoring to discourse for person and tense interpretation, as opposed to anchoring to cardinality information for number), and (iii) the (local, distal) position of the agreement controller with respect to the verb affects the interpretation of these dependencies. An account is proposed that capitalises on the importance of enriching current sentence processing formalizations using a feature and relation-based approach
Brain potentials differentiate compositional and non-compositional processing of Multi-Word Expressions: The case of idioms.
No full textIt is widely accepted that the meanings and the forms of Multi Word Expressions (MWEs) are stored in the mental lexicon (e.g., [1,2]). To comprehend these over-learned expressions the combination of single words meanings might not be readers’ most effective strategy. In the present study we used ambiguous idioms (e.g., land on someone’s feet) that have both a conventional meaning and a semantically well-formed literal interpretation, to isolate and compare the cognitive operations at play during compositional and non-compositional processing of the same sequences of words.
The strings were inserted in different contexts: an Idiomatic Context Condition (IC) (1); a Literal Context Condition (LC) (2); a Control Condition (CC) where the last word of the idiom string was embedded in a literal sentence (3). The predictability of the last word of the idiom strings was equally very high across conditions.
In Experiment 1, we recorded Event-Related Potentials (ERPs). We assumed that processing idiomatic configurations of words [3] involves recognition [4] and whole meaning integration processes. Therefore we expected that the recognition of the idiomatic strings should be facilitated in IC compared to LC and this could be reflected in a larger P300 effect. The integration of the idiomatic meaning in the sentential context might be reflected in N400 effects, [5]) or, alternatively, in P600 effects [6] if additional inferences based on vocabulary information are needed to preserve sentence coherence. The ERP waveforms showed an early positive effect (P300-like) on the penultimate word of the expression in IC. The processing of the last constituent was also influenced by the previous context: a late positive effect was observed on the last idiomatic constituent in IC compared to CC.
To test whether the literal meaning of the idioms was computed even in idiomatic contexts [3] we ran a cross-modal lexical decision times experiment (Experiment 2) in which the visual target was either related or unrelated to the literal meaning of the last constituent of the idiom string. The results showed that regardless of context the literal meaning of the last constituent of the expression was still available at the offset of the idiom string. This suggests that the meanings of the constituent words are activated even when the idiom has been recognized as a conventional expression. Overall, our results show that idiom comprehension processes differ from literal processing: idioms need to be first recognized as such and recognition is easier when idioms are inserted in idiomatic contexts. At the end of the expression the conventional meaning is integrated into the sentence and because of the local ambiguity of the string readers might need to draw additional inferences to preserve sentence coherence, retrieving and integrating the conventional meaning of the expression
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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