Presentations

Abstract

A recurring criticism in the field of psycholinguistics and is the lack of ecological validity of experimental designs. For example, many experiments on sentence comprehension are conducted enclosed booths, where sentences are presented word by word on a computer screen. In addition, very often participants are instructed to make judgments that relate directly to the experimental manipulation. Thus, the contexts in which these processes are studied is quite restricted, which calls into question the generalizability of the results to more naturalistic environments. A possible solution to this problem is the use of virtual reality (VR) in psycholinguistic experiments. By immersing participants into a virtual environment, ecological validity can be increased while experimental control is maintained.
In the current experiment we combine electroencephalography (EEG) and VR to look at semantic processing in a more naturalistic setting. During the experiment, participants move through a visually rich virtual restaurant. Tables and avatars are placed in the restaurant and participants are instructed to stop at each table and look at the object (e.g. a plate with a steak) in front of the avatar. Then, the avatar will produce an utterance to accompany the object (e.g. “I think this steak is very nice”), in which the noun will either match (e.g. steak) or mismatch (e.g. mandarin) with the item on the table. Based on previous research, we predict a modulation of the N400, which should be larger in the mismatch than the match condition. Implications of the use of virtual reality for experimental research will be discussed.

Abstract

An important feature of language is that it enables human beings to refer to entities, actions and events in the external world. In everyday interaction, one can refer to concrete entities in the extra-linguistic physical environment of a conversation by using demonstratives such as this and that. Traditionally, the choice of which demonstrative to use has been explained in terms of the distance of the referent [1]. In contrast, recent observational studies in different languages have suggested that factors such as joint attention also play an important role in demonstrative choice [2][3]. These claims have never been tested in a controlled setting and across different languages. There-fore, we tested demonstrative choice in a controlled elicitation task in two languages that previously have only been studied observational-ly: Turkish and Dutch. In our study, twenty-nine Turkish and twenty-four Dutch partic-ipants were presented with pictures including a speaker, an address-ee and an object (the referent). They were asked which demonstra-tive they would use in the depicted situations. Besides the distance of the referent, we manipulated the addressee’s focus of visual atten-tion, the presence of a pointing gesture, and the sentence type. A re-peated measures analysis of variance showed that, in addition to the distance of the referent, the focus of attention of the addressee on the referent and the type of sentence in which a demonstrative was used, influenced demonstrative choice in Turkish. In Dutch, only the dis-tance of the referent and the sentence type influenced demonstrative choice. Our cross-linguistic findings show that in different languages, people take into account both similar and different aspects of triadic situations to select a demonstrative. These findings reject descrip-tions of demonstrative systems that explain demonstrative choice in terms of one single variable, such as distance. The controlled study of referring acts in triadic situations is a valuable extension to observa-tional research, in that it gives us the possibility to look more specifi-cally into the interplay between language, attention, and other con-textual factors influencing how people refer to entities in the world References: [1] Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [2] Diessel, H. (2006). Demonstratives, joint attention and the emergence of grammar. Cognitive Linguistics 17:4. 463–89. [3] Küntay, A. C. & Özyürek, A. (2006). Learning to use demonstratives in conversation: what do language specific strategies in Turkish reveal? Journal of Child Language 33. 303–320.

Abstract

Across the languages of a bilingual, translation equivalents can have the same orthographic form and shared meaning (e.g., TABLE in French and English). How such words, called identical cognates, are processed and represented in the bilingual brain is not well understood. I will present a study of late French-English bilinguals who processed identical cognates and control words in an L2 (English) lexical decision task. Both behavioral and electrophysiological data were collected. Reaction times to identical cognates were shorter than for non-cognate controls and depended on both English and French frequency. Cognates with a low English frequency showed a larger cognate advantage than those with a high English frequency. In addition, N400 amplitude was found to be sensitive to cognate status and both the English and French frequency of the cognate words. Theoretical consequences for the processing and representation of identical cognates are discussed.