UofT at the 37th Annual Human Sentence Processing Conference

The University of Michigan’s Linguistics Department hosted the 37th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, held at Ann Arbor May 16th-18th. A full list of UofT participants can be found below.

UofT Linguistics presenters gave talks at this exciting conference, including Tiana Simovic of the Department of Psychology, her supervisor Dr. Craig Chambers, focusing on Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Science, and Wesley Orth, a Postdoctoral Fellow who completed his PhD at Northwestern University.

That presentation by Simovic and Chambers looked at how pragmatics (mental state reasoning) is involved in pronoun resolution, a relatively unexplored field.

At HSP 2023, they explored "how reasoning is involved in language processing." 

Orth's talk at the conference was a collaborative effort in relative clauses in Hungarian, a relatively understudied language. Unique properties of its structure allowed Orth and co. to test new hypotheses, testing variants which read to different reading behaviours, offering insights into the role of memory and prediction in processing. Their work will have an impact on tools for investigating such understudied languages.

Some posters from our UofT linguists included Dave Kush's poster on Active expectation in the processing of Urdu and Hindi correlative structures, in collaboration with Urwa Ali, Sanvi Dubey, Ishita Kumar, and Hayah Siddiqui. 

Their work developed a variant of the "violated expectation paradigm," used in work on expectations and prediction. Hypothesizing surprise if readers were presented with something other than a demonstrative pronoun at the start of a sentence after seeing a correlative, they measured reading time to gauge "surprise" in readers presented with a name at the start of a second sentence instead of a pronoun. Indeed, they found this surprise value. 

Future work will clarify whether these results show prediction of a pronoun as a subject of the next clause, or the pronoun as the first thing in the sentence - a challenging task due to Urdu and Hindi's flexible word order. 

Other posters included Ivan Bondoc’s on the subject relative clause advantage in Tagalog; Negative disjunctive sentences in child and adult Romanian: A preference for strong interpretations, co-authored by Lyn Tieu, assistant Professor in the French Department; and a poster on children’s interpretation of the hotly-debated ambiguous singular “they” by Anissa Baird, Nicole Hupalo, Mahnoor Khurram, and Emily Atkinson.

Notable alums presenting at the conference include Ailís Cournane, who earned her Master of Arts and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Toronto, and who now leads the Child Language Lab at New York University.

The Linguistics Department was proud to see so many of our own linguists forging new paths in their fields, and can't wait for HSP Conference #38!

Presentations and talks by UofT Linguists:

Talks:

Tiana Simovic and Craig Chambers: Pronoun Interpretation Highlights the Robustness of Social Perspective Reasoning

Sonny Wang and Craig Chambers: The Trait-Like Nature of Bridging and Instrument Inferences in Younger and Older Adults: An Individual Differences Study

Wesley Orth, Dávid Nemeskey, and Eszter Ronai: Hungarian relative clause processing: Diverging Results in L-maze and A-Maze

Posters by current UofT linguists:

Urwa Ali, Sanvi Dubey, Ishita Kumar, Hayah Siddiqui, Dave Kush: Active expectations in processing Urdu and Hindi correlative structures

Adina Camelia Bleotu, Lyn Tieu, Mara Panaitescu, Gabriela Bîlbîie, Anton Benz, Andreea Nicolae: Negative disjunctive sentences in child and adult Romanian: A preference for strong interpretations

Ivan Bondoc, Dave Kush: Animacy does not modulate the subject relative clause advantage in Tagalog

Anissa Baird, Nicole Hupalo, Mahnoor Khurram, Emily Atkinson: Children’s Interpretation of Ambiguous Singular "They"

Presentations by UofT Linguistics Alum: 

Maxime Tulling, Vishal Arvindam, Ailís Cournane: Maybe now, not later: online processing of possibility and negation in adults and 2-year-olds

Colloquium Talk: Prof. Matt Wagers (UCSC), Friday March 15

Prof. Matt Wagers (University of California Santa Cruz) will be delivering a colloquium talk this Friday. Please find below the details for the meeting and the abstract:

Title: (Re-)encoding Interference

Presenter: Prof. Matt Wagers

Time: Friday, March 15, 3:30pm-5:00pm

Abstract:  

Congratulations Prof. Emily Atkinson for Publication in Languages

Congratulations to faculty member Emily Atkison who has coauthored a new paper with Akira Omaki (University of Washington) entitled 'Adaptation of Gap Predictions in Filler-Gap Dependency Processing during Reading' in the journal Languages.

Abstract:

Syntactic adaptation effects have been demonstrated for an expanding list of structure types, but the mechanism underlying this effect is still being explored. In the current work on filler-gap dependency processing, we examined whether exposing participants to a less common gap location—prepositional object (PO) gaps—altered their gap predictions, and whether these effects would transfer across tasks when this input was presented in a quasi-naturalistic way (i.e., by reading stories). In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that comprehenders dampened their direct object (DO) gap predictions following exposure to PO gaps. However, Experiments 2A and 2B suggest that these adaptation effects did not transfer when the quasi-naturalistic exposure phase was presented as a separate task (Experiment 2A) and when they also needed to generalize from a syntactic to a semantic measure of direct object gap predictions (i.e., filled gap vs. plausibility mismatch sentences; Experiment 2B). Overall, these experiments add filler-gap dependency processing, as well as the gap predictions associated with it, to the growing list of structures demonstrating adaptation effects, while also suggesting that this effect may be specific to a singular experimental task environment.

The article is published open-access so anyone is free to read it!

UofT Publications in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics !

We are pleased to share that there are TWO UofT publications in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics! 

Cassandra Chapman (former Postdoctoral Fellow) and Keir Moulton (Faculty) have recently published "Second chances in antecedent retrieval: The processing of reflexives in two types of reconstruction environments." Here they investigate the phenomenon where reflexives in wh-predicate fronting constructions launch a search that is not structurally guided. They ask whether non-structurally guided retrievals of this sort result in comprehenders ever commit to ungrammatical antecedents. 

A great read for those interested in psycholinguistics! 

Elizabeth Cowper (Faculty Emirita) and Daniel Currie Hall (alum, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, N.S) have their paper "Morphosemantic features in Universal Grammar: What we can learn from Marshallese pronouns and demonstratives" published as well! They analyze Marshallese pronouns and demonstratives. Cowper and Currie Hall argue that both privative and binary morphosemantic features are necessary, and that these two types coexist in a single domain. 

A can't-miss paper for all our morphologists and semantics! 

Podcast on Computational Linguistics!

You have all probably binge-listened to the Gender in Language Podcasts from the JAL355 class, and we will we now share ANOTHER amazing listen from within the department! 

Frederick Gietz (PhD Candidate) was a guest on the Learn Real Good Podcast, a science-comedy podcast! His episode, "Teaching Semantics to Computers with Frederick Gietz" talks about teaching computers how to use verbs in the many complex ways humans do. As Gietz uses semantic and psychological theories to better understand language processing, he made for an excellent and engaging podcast guest! 

We highly recommend listening to his episode on your next daily walk! 

Human Sentence Processing Conference!

There was a STRONG UofT presence at the Human Sentence Processing Conference! 

Talks included: 

• "Sensitivity to prior context in referring expressions across the lifespan" from Abigayle Shekleton (University of Iowa), Daphna Heller (Faculty),  and Si On Yoo (University of Iowa)

• "Does real-time inferencing draw on the same resources as real-time perspective taking? An individual differences approach" from  Sonny R. Wang (Graduate Student) and Craig G. Chambers (Faculty)

• "Island-insensitivity in L2 Production" from Dave Kush (Faculty) and Anne Dahl (National Taipei University of Technology)

Cannot leave out the amazing posters that were presented: 

• "Active Cataphor Resolution Skips Some Positions" by Dave Kush (Faculty) and Brian Dillion (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

• "The icing on the cake. Or is it frosting? How group membership affects children's lexical choices"  by Thomas St. Pierre (Postdoctoral Fellow), Jiffa Jaffan (Graduate Student), Ethan Antidormi (McMaster University), Craig G. Chambers (Faculty) and Elizabeth K Johnson (Faculty)

• "What can an LSTM Language Model LEarn about Filler-Gap dependencies in Norwegian?" by Anastasia Kobzeva (National Taipei University of Technology), Suhas Arehalli (John Hopkins University), Tal Linzen (New York University) and Dave Kush (Faculty) 

• "Processing cataphors: mismatch effects reflect syntactic prediction"  by Anna Giskes (National Taipei University of Technology) and Dave Kush (Faculty) 

It is awesome to see so many UofT linguists in one place! 

New Publication on Language Dominance and Order of Acquisition in Translation Priming!

Rachel Soo (Undergrad and MA alum) and Philip Monahan (Faculty) have published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 

"Language dominance and order of acquisition affect auditory translation priming in heritage speakers" tests Cantonese heritage speakers and native speakers in an auditory translation priming paradigm. Their results suggest that both language dominance and order of language acquisition can help to explain translation priming findings and bilingual lexical processing. Soo and Monahan invite a rethinking of the role of both variables in bilingual lexical access for speakers with different language dominance profiles. 

Great job Soo and Monahan!! 

Soo, R., & Monahan, P. J. (2022). Language dominance and order of acquisition affect auditory translation priming in heritage speakers. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 17470218221091753.

Speech, Language and Learning Intervention Research Symposium

Arizona State University will be hosting the Speech, Language and Learning Intervention Research Symposium virtually on March 25th -26th 2022.  The focus will be on advancing interventions and exploring creative solutions to improve the quality of education for children with disabilities across culturally and linguistically diverse background. 

Esther Geva (Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at OISE) is a keynote speaker and will be presenting a talk entitled "Language and Literacy Skills Development of Typically and Atypically Developing Second Language Learners". 

For more information and registration, see their website which is linked above! 

Publication: Timing of brain entrainment to the speech envelope during speaking, listening and self-listening

 Alejandro Pérez (University of Cambridge), Matthew H. Davis (University of Cambridge), Robin A.A. Ince (University of Glasgow), Hanna Zhang (MA Student), Zhanao Fu (PhD Student), Melanie Lamarca  (MHSc. Speech Language Pathology, UofT ), Matthew A. Lambon Ralph (University of Cambridge), and Philip J. Monahan (Faculty) have teamed up to publish "Timing of brain entrainment to the speech envelope during speaking, listening and self-listening"! It has been published in Cognition.

This paper investigates the dynamics of speech envelope tracking during speech production, listening and self-listening. Their results describe a specific timeline for speech tracking in both speakers and listeners in line with the idea of a speech chain, therefore showing delays in communication.

Pérez, A., Davis, M.H., Ince, R.A., Zhang, Hanna., Fu, Z., Lamarce, M., Ralph, M.A.L., Monahan, P.J. (2022) Timing of brain entrainment to the speech envelope during speaking, listening and self-listening. Cognition, 224, 105051

SLUGS Academic Seminar!

SLUGS will be hosting an academic seminar this semester on the topic of psycholinguistics! Prof. Myrtro Grigorolou is the invited speaker. Prof. Grigorolou will be presenting on the topic of audience design in children.  Abstract posted below. 

The seminar will take place virtually on February 17th from 5:00pm - 6:00pm. The Zoom link will be provided after registration. 

Audience design in children 

 

ABSTRACT

On traditional views of speech planning, speakers design utterances to match their listeners’ particular informational needs (e.g., by telling listeners things they cannot see but need to know). However, not all choices in production are made for the sake of a specific listener. For instance, adults mention atypical instruments more often than typical instruments in stories (cf. stab someone with an ice pick vs. a knife) because atypical components are highly unpredictable for any ‘generic’ comprehender. Developmental research has focused on children’s ‘particular’ adjustments (mostly to a listener’s visual perspective) and has produced mixed findings. In this seminar, I will present a series of experiments exploring children’s ability to adjust their speech to generic and particular needs of their addressees and will sketch implications for current models of audience design. 

Virtual Event: Developmental Plasticity and Language Learning

University College is hosting Professor Elissa Newport for an exciting lecture as part of The Neil Graham Lecture series! Professor Newport is a Director at the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery, Departments of Neurology, Psychology, and Linguistics at Georgetown University.  

Newport will be speaking on Developmental Plasticity and Language Learning. Specifically discussing how children and adults learn languages when first exposed to them at varying ages, and the outcomes shown when children/adults have strokes to language areas of the brain. 

The event will take place Tuesday, February 1st 2022 from 4:30pm-6:30pm EST. Please RSVP by Thursday, January 27th 2022 to secure your spot! 

Research Groups: Week of June 21-25

Friday, June 25, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Cognitive Science of Language Group
Tiana Simovic (Ph.D., Department of Psychology): "What is the role of antecedent semantics in pronoun resolution?"

Pronoun resolution involves linking semantically impoverished expressions to entities in the comprehender's mental model of discourse. These entities have often been previously mentioned and are characterized as 'linguistic antecedents'. Past work has shown that pronouns need not 'match' antecedents with the same surface form (e.g., "I need a knife, where do you keep them?"), yet the notion of retrieval is often evoked in psychological frameworks. So, what exactly is the content of the relevant mental models? In this study, I explore whether the semantics of antecedent expressions are retrieved during real-time pronoun interpretation. Most generally, the results show that antecedent semantics are not relied on in any direct way, suggesting that frameworks that are less grounded in memory mechanisms may hold greater explanatory promise.

Congratulations, Paulina!

Congratulations to Paulina Łyskawa (MA 2015, now at the University of Maryland), who has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Arctic University of Norway to work on the project 'Experimental approaches to syntactic optionality' led by Bjørn Lundquist and Gillian Ramchand. Congratulations, Paulina - well-deserved!

New paper: Kang and Schertz (2021)

Yoonjung Kang (faculty) and Jessamyn Schertz (faculty) have a paper out in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 39(2): "The influence of perceived L2 sound categories in on-line adaptation and implications for loanword phonology."

Some propose that loanword adaptation is at its core non-native perception of foreign input (Boersma and Hamann 2009; Peperkamp et al. 2008; Silverman 1992). It has also been noted, however, that cross-language correspondences in loanwords are far more consistent than expected based on on-line perception by naïve monolinguals. There is also evidence that cross-language perception itself differs depending on adapters’ experience with the source language (henceforth, L2) (Bundgaard-Nielsen et al. 2011; Kwon 2017; Nomura and Ishikawa 2018). These findings suggest that cross-language perception is mediated by adapters’ knowledge of L2 sound structure, rather than a simple function of native language (L1) perception applied to L2 acoustic signals. The current study presents a direct test of the influence of L1 vs. L2 perceptual strategies on cross-language speech perception through a series of phonetic categorization experiments in three language modes: L1, L2, and L2L1 (cross-language). Results point to a distinct influence of listener’s L2 knowledge on cross-language perception: L2L1 mapping was well explained by listeners’ L2 perceptual strategies, and for those listeners who showed different perceptual patterns for L1 and L2, cross-language perception more closely mirrored L2 than L1 perception. By demonstrating that perceived L2 phonological categories shape cross-language perception, the study suggests a way to reconcile the perceptual view of loanword adaptation with the phonological regularity of established loanwords.

Research Groups: Friday, May 7

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Cognitive Science of Language Group
Yang Xu (faculty, Department of Computer Science): "Chaining and the growth of word meaning."

Natural language relies on a finite lexicon to express a potentially infinite range of meanings. This tension creates a funnel effect where meanings are compressed through a limited set of words. Prior work suggests that word meanings are structured for efficient compression. I describe recent development that extends this work to investigate the cognitive mechanisms in the dynamic growth of word meaning through time. I first present work that synthesizes cognitive linguistic theories of chaining with classic models of categorization to predict the historical extension of numeral classifiers for emerging referents. I then present evidence that similar models of chaining predict children’s spatial word generalization. Our findings suggest that an exemplar-based model of chaining may underlie the general mechanisms in word meaning growth. I discuss applications of this work to natural language processing and implications for research in lexicon evolution.

New paper: Paquette-Smith, Cooper, and Johnson (2020)

Melissa Paquette-Smith (Ph.D. 2018, Department of Psychology, now at the University of California, Los Angeles), Angela Cooper (former postdoc, Department of Psychology, now at BEworks) and Elizabeth Johnson (faculty) have a paper out in the Journal of Child Language, 48(2): "Targeted adaptation in infants following live exposure to an accented talker."

Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3). After video-based exposure, Canadian English-learning 15- to 18-month-olds failed to recognize familiar words spoken in an unfamiliar accent. However, after face-to-face interaction with a Mandarin-accented talker, infants showed enhanced recognition for words produced in Mandarin English compared to Australian English. Infants with live exposure to an Australian talker were not similarly facilitated, perhaps due to the lower vocabulary scores of the infants assigned to the Australian exposure condition. Thus, live exposure can facilitate accent adaptation, but this ability is fragile in young infants and is likely influenced by vocabulary size and the specific mapping between the speaker and the listener's phonological system.

Third Experimental Portuguese Workshop

With the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, we are co-hosting the Third Experimental Portuguese Linguistics Workshop on April 23 and 24. Unlike the previous one in 2019, the workshop will be online; however, it will still bring together researchers from all over the world. See the website for registration details.

New paper: Fu and Monahan (2021)

Zhanao Fu (Ph.D.) and Phil Monahan (faculty) have a paper out in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 15: "Extracting phonetic features from natural classes: A mismatch negativity study of Mandarin Chinese retroflex consonants."

How speech sounds are represented in the brain is not fully understood. The mismatch negativity (MMN) has proven to be a powerful tool in this regard. The MMN event-related potential is elicited by a deviant stimulus embedded within a series of repeating standard stimuli. Listeners construct auditory memory representations of these standards despite acoustic variability. In most designs that test speech sounds, however, this variation is typically intra-category: All standards belong to the same phonetic category. In the current paper, inter-category variation is presented in the standards. These standards vary in manner of articulation but share a common phonetic feature. In the standard retroflex experimental block, Mandarin Chinese speaking participants are presented with a series of 'standard' consonants that share the feature [retroflex], interrupted by infrequent non-retroflex deviants. In the non-retroflex standard experimental block, non-retroflex standards are interrupted by infrequent retroflex deviants. The within-block MMN was calculated, as was the identity MMN (iMMN) to account for intrinsic differences in responses to the stimuli. We only observed a within-block MMN to the non-retroflex deviant embedded in the standard retroflex block. This suggests that listeners extract [retroflex] despite significant inter-category variation. In the non-retroflex standard block, because there is little on which to base a coherent auditory memory representation, no within-block MMN was observed. The iMMN to the retroflex was observed in a late time-window at centro-parieto-occipital electrode sites instead of fronto-central electrodes, where the MMN is typically observed, potentially reflecting the increased difficulty posed by the added variation in the standards. In short, participants can construct auditory memory representations despite significant acoustic and inter-category phonological variation so long as a shared phonetic feature binds them together.

Myrto in Arts and Science News

Myrto Grigoroglou (faculty) has been interviewed for the Arts and Science News talking about her research and the roots of the modern subfield of language acquisition. Check it out!

Guest speaker for Spanish and Portuguese: Elena Nicoladis (University of Alberta)

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese, along with the Heritage Vowels and Agreement Project, is hosting a virtual talk by Elena Nicoladis, who is a faculty member in psychology at the University of Alberta. She primarily works on bilingual L1 acquisition, especially with respect to morphology and the lexicon, as well as adjacent areas of developmental psychology. Her talk, "Weak vocabulary = lots of gestures? Evidence from bilingual children," will be taking place virtually on Friday, March 19, from 2 PM to 3:30 PM. Registration can be found here.

Bilingual children often have lower scores on vocabulary tests within one language than monolingual children. Their cognitive development is, however, age-appropriate. Given that they have more complex thoughts than their language skills might allow them to convey, might they use gestures to help convey their message? Among monolinguals, gestures can be used to help construct the message a speaker wishes to communicate and access words to go along with that message. In this talk, I review evidence from some of my studies with bilingual children that address that question.