Parsing for Position

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Abstract

Abstract. Monitoring tasks have long been employed in psycholinguistics, and the end-of-clause effect is possibly the better-known result of using this technique in the study of parsing. Recent results with the tone-monitoring task suggest that tone position modulates cognitive load, as reflected in reaction times (RTs): the earlier the tone appears in a sentence, the longer the RTs. In this study, we show that verb position is also an important factor. In particular, changing the time/location at which verb–noun(s) dependencies are computed during the processing of a sentence has a clear effect on cognitive load and, as a result, on the resources that can be devoted to monitoring and responding to a tone. This study is based on two pieces of evidence. We first report the acceptability ratings of six word orders in Spanish and then present monitoring data with three of these different word orders. Our results suggest that RTs tend to be longer if the verb is yet to be processed, pointing to the centrality of a sentence’s main verb in parsing in general.

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Additive effects of word frequency and stimulus quality: the influence of trial history and data transformations.

Andrew J Aschenbrenner, Melvin Yap, David Balota (2013)

A counterintuitive and theoretically important pattern of results in the visual word recognition literature is that both word frequency and stimulus quality produce large but additive effects in lexical decision performance. The additive nature of these effects has recently been called into question by Masson and Kliegl (in press), who used linear mixed effects modeling to provide evidence that the additive effects were actually being driven by previous trial history. Because Masson and Kliegl also included semantic priming as a factor in their study and recent evidence has shown that semantic priming can moderate the additivity of word frequency and stimulus quality (Scaltritti, Balota, & Peressotti, 2012), we reanalyzed data from 3 published studies to determine if previous trial history moderated the additive pattern when semantic priming was not also manipulated. The results indicated that previous trial history did not influence the joint influence of word frequency and stimulus quality. More important, and independent of Masson and Kliegl's conclusions, we also show how a common transformation used in linear mixed effects analyses to normalize the residuals can systematically alter the way in which two variables combine to influence performance. Specifically, using transformed, rather than raw reaction times, consistently produces more underadditive patterns.