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Thursday, March 15: Poster Abstracts
Integrating cross-domain information in predictions Ian R. Finlayson, Robin J. Lickley (Queen Margaret University), & Martin Corley (University of Edinburgh)
[email protected] Prediction; Visual world paradigm; English It is now widely accepted that language comprehension involves prediction. Upon hearing eat in the sentence “the boy will eat the cake”, listeners are more likely to look toward an edible object than upon hearing a verb that does not impose this restriction upon its theme, such as move (Altmann & Kamide, 1999). In addition to the prediction of semantic features of words (e.g. whether they need be edible), participants have been shown to predict syntactic (van Berkum et al., 2005) and phonological features (DeLong et al., 2005) given preceding contexts which produce completions with high cloze probabilities. In cases when a verb may be compatible with more than one potential referent, for example if hearing “the man will ride the motorcycle” with both a motorcycle and carousel visible, listeners may also combine information from other sources to refine their predictions, using pre-existing knowledge that a man may be more likely to ride a motorcycle than a carousel (Kamide et al., 2003). This finding demonstrate that predictions can be driven by the combined semantic information provided by multiple sources (the agent and the verb). What has so far not been investigated, however, is whether listeners can make predictions by combining information about two different linguistic domains, for example semantics and phonology. Using the visual world paradigm, we investigated the ability of listeners to predict phonological features of themes and to subsequently combine these with the predictions made from the semantic restrictions of verbs. We exploited a regularity in English where the indefinite article is realised differently depending on whether the word that follows begins with a consonant or vowel (a or an, respectively). If listeners are sensitive to this regularity when making predictions, we may expect that upon hearing a they will anticipate that the following word should begin with a consonant. Participants heard sentences where verbs and determiners were manipulated to place different restrictions (shown below), while viewing scenes containing the target (cake), a semantic competitor (apple; edible but vowel onset), a phonological competitor (pen; a consonant onset but inedible), and a distractor (accordion; inedible and vowel onset). Semantic & Phonological:
The boy will eat a cake
Semantic only:
The boy will eat his cake
Phonological only:
The boy will move a cake
Unrestricted:
The boy will move his cake
Relative to the onset of the verb, participants were faster to initiate saccades toward the target following a restrictive verb. They were also, independently, faster when the determiner placed phonological restrictions on the theme. Taken as a whole, our findings demonstrate that listeners can use regularities of the English indefinite article to predict phonological features of upcoming words, and that they are able to combine this with information from other linguistic domains, provided by other words in the sentence, in order to refine their predictions. References Altmann, G. T. M., & Kamide, Y. (1999). Incremental interpretation at verbs: Restricting the domain of subsequent reference. Cognition, 73(3), 247–264. DeLong, K. A., Urbach, T. P., & Kutas, M. (2005). Probabilistic word pre-activation during language comprehension inferred from electrical brain activity. Nature Neuroscience, 8(8), 1117–1121. Kamide, Y., Altmann, G. T. M., & Haywood, S. L. (2003). The time-course of prediction in incremental sentence processing: Evidence from anticipatory eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 49(1), 133–156. van Berkum, J. J. A., Brown, C. M., Zwitserlood, P., Kooijman, V., & Hagoort, P. (2005). Anticipating upcoming words in discourse: Evidence from ERPs and reading times. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31(3), 443.
