Abstract The sample size necessary to obtain a desired level of statistical power depends in part on the population value of the effect size, which is, by definition, unknown. A common approach to sample-size planning uses the sample effect size from a prior study as an estimate of the population value of the effect to be detected in the future study. Although this strategy is intuitively appealing, effect-size estimates, taken at face value, are typically not accurate estimates of the population effect size because of publication bias and uncertainty. We show that the use of this approach often results in underpowered studies, sometimes to an alarming degree. We present an alternative approach that adjusts sample effect sizes for bias and uncertainty, and we demonstrate its effectiveness for several experimental designs. Furthermore, we discuss an open-source R package, BUCSS, and user-friendly Web applications that we have made available to researchers so that they can easily implement our suggested methods.

The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) with a novel preview manipulation was used to examine the extent of parafoveal processing of words to the right of fixation. Words n+1 and n+2 had either correct or incorrect previews prior to fixation (prior to crossing the boundary location). In addition, the manipulation utilized either a high or low frequency word in word n+1 location on the assumption that it would be more likely that n+2 preview effects could be obtained when word n+1 was high frequency. The primary findings were that there was no evidence for a preview benefit for word n+2 and no evidence for parafoveal-on-foveal effects when word n+1 is at least four letters long. We discuss implications for models of eye-movement control in reading.

We recorded Event-Related Potentials to investigate differences in the use of gender information during the processing of reflexive pronouns. Pronouns either matched the gender provided by role nouns (such as “king” or “engineer”) or did not. We compared two types of gender information, definitional information, which is semantic in nature (a mother is female), or stereotypical (a nurse is likely to be female). When they followed definitional role-nouns, gender-mismatching pronouns elicited a P600 effect reflecting a failure in the agreement process. When instead the gender violation occurred after stereotypical role-nouns the ERP response was biphasic, being positive in parietal electrodes and negative in anterior left electrodes. The use of a correlational approach showed that those participants with more “feminine” or “expressive” self sex-role descriptions showed a P600 response for stereotype violations, suggesting that they experienced the mismatch as an agreement violation; whereas less “expressive” participants showed an Nref effect, indicating more effort spent in linking the pronouns with the possible, although less likely, counter-stereotypical referent.

Three reading time experiments were conducted in order to examine the relative contributions of order of antecedents and semantic context to the resolution of temporarily ambiguous Chinese pronouns. These pronouns were ambiguous because each of them was preceded by two antecedents, both of which were likely candidates for coreference. The identity of the pronoun was revealed by subsequent disambiguating information that constrained the pronoun to one particular interpretation. Experiment 1 showed that reading of the disambiguating phrase was slower when the phrase confined the pronoun to the second rather than to the first antecedent. Experiment 2 produced the same effect of antecedent order (first vs. second antecedent) regardless of whether the target antecedent was an action-performing or an action-receiving entity. In Experiment 3, the order effect was eliminated by a biasing modifier inserted immediately before the pronoun. These results indicate that in a semantically neutral environment, the first-appearing antecedent is the preferred candidate for coreferencing the ambiguous Chinese pronoun. The interaction between order of antecedents and semantic context (in the form of preposed biasing modifiers) suggests that the initial comprehension of Chinese pronouns depends as much on contextual as on structural factors.

Includes index/Bibliography: p. 465-467

Discourse context may affect comprehension of a word in a text by facilitating lexical access or by facilitating integration of the target concept with the preceding text. In two experiments, we used eye tracking measures to examine contextual influence on the integration of role fillers in scripted narratives. In both experiments, context had an early influence on integration of role fillers. However, measures of post-target processing indicated that semantic knowledge continued to influence integration. The results are discussed in terms of several theories of contextual influence on reading. The data appear to support a two-stage model of processing: in the first stage, incoming text is linked to the contents of active memory; in the second stage, the link between the new and old information is evaluated.

Abstract The concerns of psycholinguists will look very familiar to people engaged in CL research. A major area of investigation in psycholinguistics is determining how a listener uses frequency and other experience-based information during on-line sentence understanding. This book gives computationalists a distinguished guide to the current issues in the field. It is very clear that psycholinguistics has been influenced by recent work in CL, and is ripe for further cross-fertilization. Many of the papers recognize that more rigorous modeling is called for and that these models will require insights from computational linguistics. I will highlight some of the issues that shape current debates, with particular emphasis on areas of common interest between psycholinguistics and CL. The major source of data in the theory of human sentence processing comes from the disambiguation of temporarily ambiguous sentences as in examples (1) and (2):

We investigated the effect of discourse context on the access of word meaning during reading. Target words were role names (e.g., electrician ) for which there was a gender stereotype (e.g., electricians are stereotypically male). Target sentences contained a reflexive pronoun that referred to the role name (e.g., The electrician taught herself . . .). Participants read these target sentences with or without paragraph context while their eye movements were monitored. In the absence of discourse context and in neutral discourse contexts, fixation times on the reflexive pronoun and immediately following the pronoun were inflated when the pronoun specified a gender that mismatched the stereotype, indicating that the gender stereotype was activated upon encountering the role name. When prior discourse context indicated the gender of the role-named character, this mismatch effect was eliminated. The mismatch effect indicates that gender stereotypes are automatically activated in the absence of disambiguating information. The lack of an effect when gender has previously been specified is consistent with the lexical reinterpretation model proposed by Hess, Foss, and Carroll (1995).

Subjects read passages of text in which the distance between a pronoun and its antecedent was varied. To complete pronoun assignment, a reader must access and integrate information from another portion of text in order to select an antecedent that matches the pronoun in number and gender. Out data suggest that although this process may be started when the pronoun is encoded, the assignment was not completed on the current fixation when the antecedent occurred some distance back in the text. The implications of the results for pronoun assignment are dicussed as well as the implications for the immediacy of processing.

Two eye-tracking studies addressed the processing of grammatical and stereotypical gender cues in anaphor resolution in German. The authors investigated pronominal (er ‘he’/sie ‘she’) and noun phrase (dieser Mann ‘this man’/diese Frau ‘this woman’) anaphors in sentences containing stereotypical role nouns as antecedents (Example: Oft hatte der Elektriker gute Einf01lle, regelm01ssig plante er/dieser Mann neue Projekte' Often had the electrician good ideas, regularly planned he/this man new projects'). Participants were native speakers of German (N=40 and N=24 in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). Results show that influences of grammatical gender occur in early stages of processing, whereas the influences of stereotypical gender appear only in later measures. Both effects, however, strongly depend on the type of anaphor. Furthermore, the results provide evidence for asymmetries in processing feminine and masculine grammatical gender and are discussed with reference to two-stage models of anaphor resolution.

Resolving links between subsequent referents (e.g., the car) and open discourse roles (as in Keith drove to London yesterday. The car kept overheating) is crucial for discourse understanding. This article investigates the contribution of lexical semantic factors (e.g., that drive implies using a vehicle) as compared to more general contextual factors in the on-line resolution of such links. We report an eye-tracking experiment that measures immediate and delayed effects of both kinds of information as readers resolve the reference. The results indicate that lexical information dominates the initial linking process with more general contextual influences emerging later. They are discussed in terms of the distinction between early bonding and subsequent resolution processes that has been proposed for other kinds of anaphoric interpretation (Sanford, Garrod, Lucas, & Henderson, 1983).

In an ERP experiment we investigated how the recruitment and integration of world knowledge information relate to the integration of information within a current discourse context. Participants were presented with short discourse contexts which were followed by a sentence that contained a critical word that was correct or incorrect based on general world knowledge and the supporting discourse context, or was more or less acceptable based on the combination of general world knowledge and the specific local discourse context. Relative to the critical word in the correct world knowledge sentences following a neutral discourse, all other critical words elicited an N400 effect that began at about 300 ms after word onset. However, the magnitude of the N400 effect varied in a way that suggests an interaction between world knowledge and discourse context. The results indicate that both world knowledge and discourse context have an effect on sentence interpretation, but neither overrides the other.

ABSTRACT Nine experiments involving young adults ( N68=68525) tested the roles of local (sentence) and global (discourse) contexts on lexical processing. Contextual material was presented auditorily, and naming times for the last (visually presented) word were collected. Experiment 1 tested the local contexts alone and found facilitation of naming latencies when local contexts were related to the target word. Subsequent experiments, using varying baseline conditions, found that globally related material affected naming latency in all cases, whereas the same locally related material that was used in the first study now had no facilitation effect. The globally related material had an immediate effect on naming times. The authors argue that the results are inconsistent with associatively based models and with various hybrid models of context effects and that a discourse-based model best accounts for the data. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Abstract Eye-movement-contingent display changes were used to control the visibility of characters during the reading of Chinese text. Characters outside a window of legible text were masked by dissimilar characters, and effects of viewing constraints were ascertained in several oculomotor measures. The results revealed an asymmetric perceptual span that extended 1 character to the left of the fixated character and 3 characters to its right. The size of right-directed saccades extended across 2 to 2 1/2 character spaces, indicating that the perceptual spans of successive fixations overlapped slightly and that some linguistic information was integrated across fixations. The relatively small spatial overlap of successive spans appears to reflect a text-specific process. However, the results also revealed substantial similarities in the coding of morphographic Chinese and alphabetic English texts, indicating that text-specific coding routines are subordinated to general coding principles.

The research investigated how word-specific gender stereotype information can be used during language comprehension. In a rating study, the gender stereotypes for 405 noun and noun compounds were assessed. From these norms, 32 words strongly stereotyped to refer mostly to males and 32 words strongly stereotyped to refer mostly to females were selected and used in a reading experiment. Comprehenders read pairs of sentences. The subject of the first sentence was a gender stereotyped word (e.g., executive or secretary). The subject of the second sentence was either the pronoun he or she. Reading time was significantly longer when gender of the pronoun mismatched the gender stereotype of the antecedent than when the genders of pronoun and antecedent matched. This gender mismatch effect occurred on the two regions immediately following the region containing the pronoun. The results indicated that word-specific gender stereotypes can influence coreference resolution of pronouns.

A discourse comprehension model is developed in which the initial processing is bottom-up. Word meanings are activated, propositions are formed, and inferences and elaborations are produced, regardless of the discourse context. A network of interrelated items is created which can be integrated into a coherent structure. (SLD)

We tested the effects of word length, frequency, and predictability on inspection durations (first fixation, single fixation, gaze duration, and reading time) and inspection probabilities during first-pass reading (skipped, once, twice) for a corpus of 144 German sentences (1138 words) and a subset of 144 target words uncorrelated in length and frequency, read by 33 young and 32 older adults. For corpus words, length and frequency were reliably related to inspection durations and probabilities, predictability only to inspection probabilities. For first-pass reading of target words all three effects were reliable for inspection durations and probabilities. Low predictability was strongly related to second-pass reading. Older adults read slower than young adults and had a higher frequency of regressive movements. The data are to serve as a benchmark for computational models of eye movement control in reading.

Although we usually have no trouble finding the right antecedent for a pronoun, the co-reference relations between pronouns and antecedents in everyday language are often ‘formally’ ambiguous. But a pronoun is only really ambiguous if a reader or listener indeed perceives it to be ambiguous. Whether this is the case may depend on at least two factors: the language processing skills of an individual reader, and the contextual bias towards one particular referential interpretation. In the current study, we used event related brain potentials (ERPs) to explore how both these factors affect the resolution of referentially ambiguous pronouns. We compared ERPs elicited by formally ambiguous and non-ambiguous pronouns that were embedded in simple sentences (e.g., “Jennifer Lopez told Madonna that she had too much money.”). Individual differences in language processing skills were assessed with the Reading Span task, while the contextual bias of each sentence (up to the critical pronoun) had been assessed in a referential cloze pretest. In line with earlier research, ambiguous pronouns elicited a sustained, frontal negative shift relative to non-ambiguous pronouns at the group-level. The size of this effect was correlated with Reading Span score, as well as with contextual bias. These results suggest that whether a reader perceives a formally ambiguous pronoun to be ambiguous is subtly co-determined by both individual language processing skills and contextual bias.

Abstract In linguistic theories of how sentences encode meaning, a distinction is often made between the context-free rule-based combination of lexical-semantic features of the words within a sentence ("semantics"), and the contributions made by wider context ("pragmatics"). In psycholinguistics, this distinction has led to the view that listeners initially compute a local, context-independent meaning of a phrase or sentence before relating it to the wider context. An important aspect of such a two-step perspective on interpretation is that local semantics cannot initially be overruled by global contextual factors. In two spoken-language event-related potential experiments, we tested the viability of this claim by examining whether discourse context can overrule the impact of the core lexical-semantic feature animacy, considered to be an innate organizing principle of cognition. Two-step models of interpretation predict that verb-object animacy violations, as in "The girl comforted the clock," will always perturb the unfolding interpretation process, regardless of wider context. When presented in isolation, such anomalies indeed elicit a clear N400 effect, a sign of interpretive problems. However, when the anomalies were embedded in a supportive context (e.g., a girl talking to a clock about his depression), this N400 effect disappeared completely. Moreover, given a suitable discourse context (e.g., a story about an amorous peanut), animacy-violating predicates ("the peanut was in love") were actually processed more easily than canonical predicates ("the peanut was salted"). Our findings reveal that discourse context can immediately overrule local lexical-semantic violations, and therefore suggest that language comprehension does not involve an initially context-free semantic analysis.

To establish a coherent representation of a text, what is being read must be in line with previous information in the text. Personal pronouns are among the most important devices to establish coherence between linguistic expressions. Previous studies have shown that world knowledge about gender stereotype plays an important role in pronoun resolution. In other words, comprehension processes will be interrupted when a pronoun mismatches the gender stereotype of its antecedent. However, it is still controversial about the time course of the influence of gender stereotype on pronoun resolution. For example, in some eye movement studies, the gender mismatch effect on reading appeared relatively earlier, while in other studies this effect emerged relatively late. It has been suggested that, among different studies, discrepancies in the distance between a pronoun and its antecedent might be a contributing factor to the controversy. The main purpose of the current study was to examine whether the effect of gender stereotype on pronoun comprehension could be modulated by the distance between the two critical words. In the experiment, 29 Chinese participants were asked to read 160 short passages, during which their eye movements were recorded. Each of these contained a personal pronoun congruent or incongruent with the gender stereotype of its antecedent, while the distance between the two critical words was manipulated to be either short or long. The results revealed that reading times increased when the gender of the pronoun mismatched with the gender stereotype of its antecedent. Interestingly, the location of the mismatching effect varied with the distance between critical words. Specifically, in the short distance condition the mismatch effect was observed on first fixation duration and the second second-pass reading times at the critical pronoun region, whereas in the long distance condition the effect appeared in the second-pass reading times at the region after the pronoun. In addition, the first fixation duration and the gaze durations of congruent sentences were significantly longer at the region following the pronoun in the short distance condition relative to the long one. In sum, our results clearly suggested that both gender stereotype and the distance between a pronoun and its antecedent can affect the comprehension of Chinese pronouns. These findings provide evidence for the interactive model of sentence comprehension.

Planning a study using the General Linear Univariate Model often involves sample size calculation based on a variance estimated in an earlier study. Noncentrality, power, and sample size inherit the randomness. Additional complexity arises if the estimate has been censored. Left censoring occurs when only significant tests lead to a power calculation, while right censoring occurs when only non-significant tests lead to a power calculation. We provide simple expressions for straightforward computation of the distribution function, moments, and quantiles of the censored variance estimate, estimated noncentrality, power, and sample size. We also provide convenient approximations and evaluate their accuracy. The results allow demonstrating that ignoring right censoring falsely widens confidence intervals for noncentrality and power, while ignoring left censoring falsely narrows the confidence intervals. The new results allow assessing and avoiding the potentially substantial bias that censoring may create.

An eye-movement reading experiment investigated whether the ease with which pronouns are processed is affected by the lexical frequency of their antecedent. Reading times following pronouns with infrequent antecedents were faster than following pronouns with frequent antecedents. We argue that this is consistent with a saliency account, according to which infrequent antecedents are more salient than frequent antecedents. The results are not predicted by accounts which claim that readers access all or part of the lexical properties of the antecedent during the processing of pronouns.

An eye-movement study was conducted to examine whether Chinese readers immediately activate and integrate related background information during discourse comprehension. Participants were asked to read short passages, each containing a critical word that fitted well within the local context but was inconsistent or neutral with background information from the early part of the passage. This manipulation of textual consistency produced reliable effects on both first-pass reading fixations in the target region and second-pass reading times in the pre-target and target regions. These results indicate that integration processes start very rapidly in reading text in a writing system with properties that encourage delayed processing, suggesting that immediate processing is likely a universal principle in discourse comprehension.

There have been a number of behavioral and neural studies on the processing of syntactic gender and number agreement information, marked by different morpho-syntactic features during sentence comprehension. By using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, the present study investigated whether the processing of semantic gender information and the processing of notional number information can be differentiated and to what extent they might interact during Chinese pronoun resolution. The pronoun (with singular form in Experiment 1 and with plural form in Experiment 2) in a sentence matched its antecedent or mismatched it with respect to either biological gender or notional number or both. While the number mismatch elicited a P600 effect starting from 550ms (for singular pronoun) or 400ms (for plural pronoun) post-onset of the pronoun, the gender mismatch elicited an earlier (for singular) and larger (for both singular and plural) P600 effect. More importantly, the double mismatch produced a P600 effect identical to the effect elicited by the single gender mismatch. These results demonstrate that biological gender information and notional number information are processed differentially and have different processing priorities during Chinese pronoun resolution.