When we read or listen to language, we are faced with the challenge of inferring intended messages from noisy input. This challenge is exacerbated by considerable variability between and within speakers. Focusing on syntactic processing (parsing), we test the hypothesis that language comprehenders rapidly adapt to the syntactic statistics of novel linguistic environments (e.g., speakers or genres). Two self-paced reading experiments investigate changes in readers’ syntactic expectations based on repeated exposure to sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguities (so-called “garden path sentences”). These sentences typically lead to a clear expectation violation signature when the temporary ambiguity is resolved to an a priori less expected structure (e.g., based on the statistics of the lexical context). We find that comprehenders rapidly adapt their syntactic expectations to converge towards the local statistics of novel environments. Specifically, repeated exposure to a priori unexpected structures can reduce, and even completely undo, their processing disadvantage (Experiment 1). The opposite is also observed: a priori expected structures become less expected (even eliciting garden paths) in environments where they are hardly ever observed (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that, when changes in syntactic statistics are to be expected (e.g., when entering a novel environment), comprehenders can rapidly adapt their expectations, thereby overcoming the processing disadvantage that mistaken expectations would otherwise cause. Our findings take a step towards unifying insights from research in expectation-based models of language processing, syntactic priming, and statistical learning.

Recently, researchers have measured hand movements en route to choices on a screen to understand the dynamics of a broad range of psychological processes. We review this growing body of research and explain how manual action exposes the real-time unfolding of underlying cognitive processing. We describe how simple hand motions may be used to continuously index participants’ tentative commitments to different choice alternatives during the evolution of a behavioral response. As such, hand-tracking can provide unusually high-fidelity, real-time motor traces of the mind. These motor traces cast novel theoretical and empirical light onto a wide range of phenomena and serve as a potential bridge between far-reaching areas of psychological science – from language, to high-level cognition and learning, to social cognitive processes.

Since Saussure, the relationship between the sound and the meaning of words has been regarded as largely arbitrary. Here, however, we show that a probabilistic relationship exists between the sound of a word and its lexical category. Corpus analyses of nouns and verbs indicate that the phonological properties of the individual words in these two lexical categories form relatively separate and coherent clusters, with some nouns sounding more typical of the noun category than others and likewise for verbs. Additional analyses reveal that the phonological properties of nouns and verbs affect lexical access, and we also demonstrate the influence of such properties during the on-line processing of both simple unambiguous and syntactically ambiguous sentences. Thus, although the sound of a word may not provide cues to its specific meaning, phonological typicality, the degree to which the sound properties of an individual word are typical of other words in its lexical category, affects both word-and sentence-level language processing. The findings are consistent with a perspective on language comprehension in which sensitivity to multiple syntactic constraints in adulthood emerges as a product of language-development processes that are driven by the integration of multiple cues to linguistic structure, including phonological typicality.

Syntactic factors can rapidly affect behavioral and neural responses during language processing, however, the mechanisms that allow this rapid extraction of syntactically relevant information remain poorly understood. We address this issue using magnetoencephalography, and find that an unexpected word category (like The recently princess…) elicits enhanced activity in visual cortex as early as 120ms, as a function of the compatibility of a word's form with the form properties associated with a predicted word category. Since no sensitivity to linguistic factors has been previously reported for words in isolation at this stage of visual analysis, we propose that predictions about upcoming syntactic categories are translated into form-based estimates, which are made available to sensory cortices. This finding may be a key component to elucidating the mechanisms that allow the extreme rapidity and efficiency of language comprehension.

Through recording the streaming x, y coordinates of computer-mouse movements, we report evidence that visual context provides an immediate constraint on the resolution of syntactic ambiguity in the visual-world paradigm. This finding converges with previous eye-tracking results that support a constraint-based account of sentence processing, in which multiple partially-active syntactic alternatives compete against one another with the help of not only syntactic, semantic, and statistical factors, but also nonlinguistic factors such as visual context. Eye-tracking results in the visual-world paradigm are consistent with theories that posit limited interaction between context and syntax, but they are still consistent with related theories that allow immediate interaction but require serial pursuit of syntactic structures, such as the unrestricted race model. To tease apart the constraint-based and unrestricted-race accounts of sentence processing, the distribution of computer-mouse trajectories was analyzed for evidence of two populations of trials: those where only the correct parse was pursued and those where only the incorrect parse was pursued. We found no evidence of bimodality in the distribution of trajectory curvatures. Simulations with a constraint-based model produced trajectories that matched the human data. A nonlinguistic control study demonstrated the mouse-tracking paradigm's ability to elicit bimodal distributions of trajectory curvatures in certain experimental conditions. With effects of context posing a challenge for syntax-first models, and the absence of bimodality in the distribution of garden-path magnitude posing a challenge for unrestricted-race models, these converging methods support the constraint-based theory's account that the reason diverse contextual factors are able to bias one or another parse at the point of ambiguity is because those syntactic alternatives are continually partially-active in parallel, not discretely winnowed. Keywords Syntax; Continuous; Dynamical; Language and Vision InteractionWhat exactly is a garden-path? About three decades ago, the term was introduced to the psycholinguistic literature in describing what it feels like to have been led astray by syntactic preferences while reading a sentence. The reader reaches some later portion of the sentence, where the syntax and/or the semantics are no longer commensurate or sensible with how she's been parsing the sentence up to that point, and she feels as though she's has been "led down the garden-path." But is a garden-path due to the discrete computation of a mental representation that turns out to be inappropriate and must then be deleted and replaced by an alternative mental representation-as seen with discrete computing algorithms (e.g., Budiu & Anderson, 2004;Dietrich & Markman, 2003;Newell, 1990)? Or is a garden-path due to multiple partially-active mental representations simultaneously competing with one anotherSend correspondence to: Thomas Farmer, Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca...