No abstract

Readers sometimes fail to notice word transposition errors, reporting a sentence with two transposed words to be grammatical (the transposed-word effect). It has been suggested that this effect implicates parallel word processing during sentence reading. The current study directly assessed the role of parallel word processing in failure to notice word transposition errors, by comparing error detection under normal sentence presentation conditions and when words are presented serially at 250 ms/word. Extending recent results obtained with serial presentation of Chinese sentences (Liu, Li, Cutter, Paterson, & Wang, Cognition 218: 104922, 2022), in Experiment 1 we found a transposed-word effect with serial presentation of English sentences. In Experiment 2, we replicated this finding with task instructions that allowed responding at any time during the presentation of the sentence; this result indicates that the transposed-word effect that appears with serial word presentation is not due to a late process of reconstruction of short-term memory. Thus, parallel word processing is not necessary for a transposed-word effect in English. Like Liu et al. ( 2022), we did find that the transposed-word effect was statistically larger with parallel presentation than with serial presentation; we consider several explanations as to why this is so.

Most readers have had the experience of initially failing to notice an omission or repetition of a function word, or a transposition of two adjacent words. In the present article, we review recent research investigating this phenomenon. We emphasize that failure to notice such errors is of substantial theoretical interest, given what we have learned about how systematically and incrementally readers inspect and process text. We endorse the idea that a process of rational inference may play a critical role, while we cast doubt on the idea that failure to notice errors arises from parallel processing of multiple words. We review a number of recent studies from our own laboratory that have investigated the relationship between eye movements during reading and noticing, or failing to notice, an error. While the conclusions from these studies are broadly consistent with a rational inference account, we find that when readers fail to notice an error, their eye movements generally show no indication that the error was registered at all. On its surface, this finding may be viewed as inconsistent with the idea that the rational inference process that enables readers to overlook errors is genuinely post‐perceptual. We suggest a mechanism by which eye movement control models could account for this finding.

Prediction has been proposed as an overarching principle that explains human information processing in language and beyond. To what degree can processing difficulty in syntactically complex sentences - one of the major concerns of psycholinguistics - be explained by predictability, as estimated using computational language models? A precise, quantitative test of this question requires a much larger scale data collection effort than has been done in the past. We present the Syntactic Ambiguity Processing Benchmark, a dataset of self-paced reading times from 2000 participants, who read a diverse set of complex English sentences. This dataset makes it possible to measure processing difficulty associated with individual syntactic constructions, and even individual sentences, precisely enough to rigorously test the predictions of computational models of language comprehension. We find that the predictions of language models with two different architectures sharply diverge from the reading time data, dramatically underpredicting processing difficulty, failing to predict relative difficulty among different syntactic ambiguous constructions, and only partially explaining item-wise variability. These findings suggest that prediction is most likely insufficient on its own to explain human syntactic processing.

Aims: With language characteristics shown to be a factor mediating bilinguals’ metalinguistic awareness, the present study attempts to give a clearer picture of the impact of language characteristics, avoiding confounds such as exposure opportunities and language experiences, which previous studies with comparisons made between monolinguals and bilinguals were subject to. Design: Two groups of bilinguals speaking the same first language (L1) but different second languages (L2s) were tested for their performance on a morphosyntactic awareness task. Other confounds (L1 proficiency and nonverbal intelligence) were statistically controlled. Data and Analysis: After five outliers were deleted, data from 22 Chinese–English bilinguals and 20 Chinese–Southern Min bilinguals were analyzed, by mainly using analyses of covariance. Findings: The results showed that, with nonverbal intelligence and Chinese proficiency controlled for, Chinese–English bilinguals scored significantly higher than their counterparts only on the past tense suffix task, one tested feature in which Chinese and English differ but which both Chinese and Southern Min lack. They did not, however, differ on the other contrasting feature, present suffix, probably due to its inconsistent presence in English. The two groups showed no difference on subject–object–verb and inflectional negation features that both their L1s and L2s lack. Originality: Unlike the metalinguistic awareness measure (grammatical error detection and correction) commonly used in previous studies, our task was adapted into a version using an unlearned third language (L3) (Japanese), which could reflect children’s cross-language transfer of metalinguistic knowledge. Besides, our metamorphological awareness measure was focused on inflectional morphology, whose influence on the bilingual advantage should be important but has yet received scant attention in the earlier literature. Significance: The overall results cross-validated the important role of language characteristics in bilinguals’ development of metalinguistic awareness and suggested that the metamorphological awareness is likely to facilitate bilinguals’ learning of an L3.