Analysing data from the psycholinguistic visual-world paradigm: Comparison of different analysis methods

Sex differences in social brain neural responses in autism: temporal profiles of configural face-processing within data-driven time windows

Face-processing timing differences may underlie visual social attention differences between autistic and non-autistic people, and males and females. This study investigates the timing of the effects of neurotype and sex on face-processing, and their dependence on age. We analysed EEG data during upright and inverted photographs of faces from 492 participants from the Longitudinal European Autism Project (141 neurotypical males, 76 neurotypical females, 202 autistic males, 73 autistic females; age 6-30 years). We detected timings of sex/diagnosis effects on event-related potential amplitudes at the posterior-temporal channel P8 with Bootstrapped Cluster-based Permutation Analysis and conducted Growth Curve Analysis (GCA) to investigate the timecourse and dependence on age of neural signals. The periods of influence of neurotype and sex overlapped but differed in onset (respectively, 260 and 310 ms post-stimulus), with sex effects lasting longer. GCA revealed a smaller and later amplitude peak in autistic female children compared to non-autistic female children; this difference decreased in adolescence and was not significant in adulthood. No age-dependent neurotype difference was significant in males. These findings indicate that sex and neurotype influence longer latency face processing and implicates cognitive rather than perceptual processing. Sex may have more overarching effects than neurotype on configural face processing.

What eye and hand movements tell us about expectations towards argument order: An eye- and mouse-tracking study in German

Previous research on real-time sentence processing in German has shown that listeners use the morphological marking of accusative case on a sentence-initial noun phrase to not only interpret the current argument as the object and patient, but also to predict a plausible agent. So far, less is known about the use of case marking to predict the semantic role of upcoming arguments after the subject/agent has been encountered. In the present study, we examined the use of case marking for argument interpretation in transitive as well as ditransitive structures. We aimed to control for multiple factors that could have influenced processing in previous studies, including the animacy of arguments, world knowledge, and the perceptibility of the case cue. Our results from eye- and mouse-tracking indicate that the exploitation of the first case cue that enables the interpretation of the unfolding sentence is influenced by (i) the strength of argument order expectation and (ii) the perceptual salience of the case cue. PsycINFO code: 2720 Linguistics & Language & Speech.

Fine-grained differences in gender-cue strength affect predictive processing in children: Cross-linguistic evidence from Russian and Bulgarian

We tested predictive gender agreement processing in adjective-noun phrases by 45 4- to 6-year-old Russian- and Bulgarian-speaking children using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm. Russian and Bulgarian are closely related languages that have three genders but differ in the nature and number of gender cues on adjectives. Analysis of the proportion and time course of looks to the target noun showed that only Bulgarian children used gender cues to predict the upcoming noun. We argue that the cross-linguistic difference in the gender cue strength is revealed through the operation of economy, transparency, and interdependence in a gender complexity matrix. The documented advantage for Bulgarian children in gender agreement processing and acquisition underscores the need for a comparative language acquisition approach to typologically close languages.

Online eye tracking and real-time sentence processing: On opportunities and efficacy for capturing psycholinguistic effects of different magnitudes and diversity

Online research methods have the potential to facilitate equitable accessibility to otherwise-expensive research resources, as well as to more diverse populations and language combinations than currently populate our studies. In psycholinguistics specifically, webcam-based eye tracking is emerging as a powerful online tool capable of capturing sentence processing effects in real time. The present paper asks whether webcam-based eye tracking provides the necessary granularity to replicate effects-crucially both large and small-that tracker-based eye tracking has shown. Using the Gorilla Experiment Builder platform, this study set out to replicate two psycholinguistic effects: a robust one, the verb semantic constraint effect, first reported in Altmann and Kamide,  Cognition 73(3), 247-264 (1999), and a smaller one, the lexical interference effect, first examined by Kukona et al. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(2), 326 (2014). Webcam-based eye tracking was able to replicate both effects, thus showing that its functionality is not limited to large effects. Moreover, the paper also reports two approaches to computing statistical power and discusses the differences in their outputs. Beyond discussing several important methodological, theoretical, and practical implications, we offer some further technical details and advice on how to implement webcam-based eye-tracking studies. We believe that the advent of webcam-based eye tracking, at least in respect of the visual world paradigm, will kickstart a new wave of more diverse studies with more diverse populations.

Modulating Complex Sentence Processing in Aphasia Through Attention and Semantic Networks

PURPOSE

Lexical processing impairments such as delayed and reduced activation of lexical-semantic information have been linked to syntactic processing disruptions and sentence comprehension deficits in individuals with aphasia (IWAs). Lexical-level deficits can also preclude successful lexical encoding during sentence processing and amplify the processing costs of similarity-based interference during syntactic retrieval. We investigate whether two manipulations to engage attention and pre-activate semantic features of a target (to-be-retrieved) noun will (a) boost lexical activation during initial lexical encoding and (b) facilitate syntactic dependency linking through improved resolution of interference in IWAs and neurologically unimpaired age-matched controls (AMCs).

METHOD

Eye-tracking-while-listening with a visual world paradigm was used to investigate whether semantic and attentional manipulations modulated initial lexical processing and downstream syntactic retrieval of the direct-object noun in object-relative sentences.

RESULTS

In the attention and semantic manipulations, the AMC group showed no changes in initial lexical access levels; however, gaze patterns revealed clear facilitations in dependency linking and interference resolution. In the IWA group, the attentional cue increased and maintained activation of N1 with modest facilitations in dependency linking. In the semantic condition, IWA results showed a greater degree of facilitation during dependency linking.

CONCLUSIONS

The results suggest that attention and semantic activation are parameters that may be manipulated to strengthen encoding of lexical representations to facilitate retrieval (i.e., dependency linking) and mitigate similarity-based interference. In IWAs, these manipulations may help to reduce lexical processing deficits that can preclude successful encoding.

Segmentation of Spoken Overlapping Ambiguity Strings in Chinese: An Eye-Tracking Study

PURPOSE

Using the printed-word paradigm with eye tracking, this study conducted three experiments to examine (a) how multiple words in spoken overlapping ambiguity strings (OASs) are activated, (b) how word frequency influences the word segmentation of spoken OASs, and (c) whether the multiple words in spoken OASs are activated competitively or independently.

METHOD

In this study, participants listened to a four-character spoken OAS (ABCD) and were presented with a visual display composed of a semantic associate of the "middle word" (BC; Experiments 1 and 2) or the "left word" (AB; Experiment 3) and two distractors. In Experiment 1, the word frequency of the middle words was manipulated to be higher than that of the neighbor words. In Experiment 2, the word frequency of the middle words was manipulated to be either higher or lower than that of the neighbor words. In Experiment 3, participants listened to either spoken OASs (ABCD) or spoken unambiguous strings (ABEF).

RESULTS

In Experiment 1, we observed a significant semantic competition effect; that is, more fixations fell on the semantic competitors than on distractors, suggesting that the semantic information of the middle words in the spoken OASs was activated. In Experiment 2, the semantic competition effect was only observed in the high-frequency condition and was absent in the low-frequency condition. In Experiment 3, the results showed significant semantic competition effects for the left words under both conditions, and the observed effect was similar between the ambiguity condition and the control condition.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings show that multiple words in spoken OASs are all activated and the activation level is modulated by word frequency. In addition, multiple words in the spoken OASs may be processed independently during spoken comprehension.