Experimental filler design influences error correction rates in a word restoration paradigm

Abstract

Including fillers or distractors in psycholinguistic experiments has been standard for decades; yet, relatively little is known how the design of these items interacts with critical manipulations. In this paper, we ask about the role that contextual statistical information in filler items plays in determining if and how to correct a given error, and how grammatical expectations interact with context. We first replicate a speech restoration experiment conducted by Mack, J. E., C. Clifton, L. Frazier & P. V. Taylor. 2012. (Not) hearing optional subjects: The effects of pragmatic usage preferences. Journal of Memory and Language 67. 211–223, measuring usage preferences of null-subject constructions. Then we report two additional experiments in which we manipulated only the filler items, either having noise appear uniformly at random, or with a particular bias. Our results (1) demonstrate that listeners are sensitive to statistical patterns in the distribution of noise within the experiment, and (2) suggest that this paradigm can be used to investigate interaction between the mechanisms that govern grammatical preferences, and those that govern error correction processes.

Agreement attraction in grammatical sentences and the role of the task

“…More broadly, it also fits into the line of research demonstrating that the experimental setting-the amount, distribution, and composition of fillers intermixed with experimental materials-can qualitatively change the perception of experimental materials and therefore affect the outcomes of an experiment (Arehalli & Wittenberg, 2021;Hammerly et al, 2019).…”

Number Agreement Attraction in Czech and English Comprehension: A Direct Experimental Comparison

“…Laurinavichyute & von der Malsburg, 2022), but also the number of fillers. Possibly, task adaptation effects (Fine et al, 2013;Arehalli & Wittenberg, 2021;Laurinavichyute & von der Malsburg, 2023) may have influenced results of different studies to a different extent. Moreover, it is unlikely that more subtle differences in the methodologies of different experiments would have been replicated directly, for example, the wording of instructions, font sizes or the experimental software/platform.…”

Eventuality type predicts temporal order inferences in discourse comprehension

“…We used a single-trial, between-subjects design (see e. particularly the belief-estimation tasks). This choice was motivated by task adaptation effects that have been shown to emerge in a variety of experimental designs both due to the repetition of critical trials (e.g., Balota, Aschenbrenner, & Yap, 2018;Demberg & Sayeed, 2016;Fine, Jaeger, Farmer, & Qian, 2013;Hammerly, Staub, & Dillon, 2019;Ness & Meltzer-Asscher, 2021;Pregla, Lissón, Vasishth, Burchert, & Stadie, 2021), and the inclusion of filler trials (e.g., Cowart, 1997;Keller, 2000;Schütze & Sprouse, 2013), commonly employed within-subject design (Arehalli & Wittenberg, 2021; Laurinavichyute & von der Malsburg, under review, for discussion).…”