Hierarchical structure priming from mathematics to two- and three-site relative clause attachment

Hysteresis in motor and language production

Hysteresis in motor planning and syntactic priming in language planning refer to the influence of prior production history on current production behaviour. Computational efficiency accounts of action hysteresis and theoretical accounts of syntactic priming both argue that reusing an existing plan is less costly than generating a novel plan. Despite these similarities across motor and language frameworks, research on planning in these domains has largely been conducted independently. The current study adapted an existing language paradigm to mirror the incremental nature of a manual motor task to investigate the presence of parallel hysteresis effects across domains. We observed asymmetries in production choice for both the motor and language tasks that resulted from the influence of prior history. Furthermore, these hysteresis effects were more exaggerated for subordinate production forms implicating an inverse preference effect that spanned domain. Consistent with computational efficiency accounts, across both task participants exhibited reaction time savings on trials in which they reused a recent production choice. Together, these findings lend support to the broader notion that there are common production biases that span both motor and language domains.

An Eye-Tracking Study of Structural Priming from Abstract Arithmetic to Chinese Structure NP1 + You + NP2 + Hen + AP

The present study attempted to explore the abstract priming effects from mathematical equations to Mandarin Chinese structure NP₁ + You + NP₂ + Hen + AP in an on-line comprehension task with the aim to figure out the mechanism that underlying these effects. The results revealed that compared with baseline priming conditions, participants tended to choose more high-attachment options in high-attachment priming conditions and more low-attachment priming options in low-attachment priming conditions. Such difference had reached a significant level, which provided evidence for the shared structural representation across mathematical and linguistic domains. Additionally, the fixations sequences during arithmetic calculations reflected those equations were processed hierarchically and could be extracted in parallel instead of being scanned in a sequentially left-to-right order. Our results have provided some evidence for the Representational Account.

The extended present: an informational context for perception

Several previous authors have proposed a kind of specious or subjective present moment that covers a few seconds of recent information. This article proposes a new hypothesis about the subjective present, renamed the extended present, defined not in terms of time covered but as a thematically connected information structure held in working memory and in transiently accessible form in long-term memory. The three key features of the extended present are that information in it is thematically connected, both internally and to current attended perceptual input, it is organised in a hierarchical structure, and all information in it is marked with temporal information, specifically ordinal and duration information. Temporal boundaries to the information structure are determined by hierarchical structure processing and by limits on processing and storage capacity. Supporting evidence for the importance of hierarchical structure analysis is found in the domains of music perception, speech and language processing, perception and production of goal-directed action, and exact arithmetical calculation. Temporal information marking is also discussed and a possible mechanism for representing ordinal and duration information on the time scale of the extended present is proposed. It is hypothesised that the extended present functions primarily as an informational context for making sense of current perceptual input, and as an enabler for perception and generation of complex structures and operations in language, action, music, exact calculation, and other domains.

Structural priming from simple arithmetic to Chinese ambiguous structures: evidence from eye movement

This article explores the domain generality of hierarchical representation between linguistic and mathematical cognition by adopting the structural priming paradigm in an eye-tracking reading experiment. The experiment investigated whether simple arithmetic equations with high (e.g., (7 + 2) × 3 + 1)- or low (e.g., 7 + 2 × 3 + 1)- attachment influence language users' interpretation of Chinese ambiguous structures (NP₁ + He + NP₂ + De + NP₃; Quantifier + NP₁ + De + NP₂; NP₁ + Kan/WangZhe + NP₂ + AP). On the one hand, behavioral results showed that high-attachment primes led to more high-attachment interpretation, while low-attachment primes led to more low-attachment interpretation. On the other hand, the eye movement data indicated that structural priming was of great help to reduce dwell time on the ambiguous structure. There were structural priming effects from simple arithmetic to three different structures in Chinese, which provided new evidence on the cross-domain priming from simple arithmetic to language. Besides attachment priming effect at global level, online sentence integration at local level was found to be structure-dependent by some differences in eye movement measures. Our results have provided some evidence for the Representational Account.

Attachment Preference in Auditory German Sentences: Individual Differences and Pragmatic Strategy

Relative clauses modify a preceding element, but as this element can be flexibly located, the point of attachment is sometimes ambiguous. Preference for this attachment can vary within languages such as German, yet explanations for differences in attachment preference related to cognitive strategies or constraints have been conflicting in the current literature. The present study aimed to assess the preference for relative clause attachment among German listeners and whether these preferences could be explained by strategy or individual differences in working memory or musical rhythm ability. We performed a sentence completion experiment, conducted post hoc interviews, and measured working memory and rhythm abilities with diagnostic tests. German listeners had no homogeneous attachment preference, although participants consistently completed individual sentences across trials according to the general preference that they reported offline. Differences in attachment preference were moreover not linked to individual differences in either working memory or musical rhythm ability. However, the pragmatic content of individual sentences sometimes overrode the general syntactic preference in participants with lower rhythm ability. Our study makes an important contribution to the field of psycholinguistics by validating offline self-reports as a reliable diagnostic for an individual's online relative clause attachment preference. The link between pragmatic strategy and rhythm ability is an interesting direction for future research.