Unified syntax in the bilingual mind

Atten Percept Psychophys

Dufau

2021

Self Cite

We investigated the extent to which accuracy in word identification in foveal and parafoveal vision is determined by variations in the visibility of the component letters of words. To do so we measured word identification accuracy in displays of three three-letter words, one on fixation and the others to the left and right of the central word. We also measured accuracy in identifying the component letters of these words when presented at the same location in a context of three three-letter nonword sequences. In the word identification block, accuracy was highest for central targets and significantly greater for words to the right compared with words to the left. In the letter identification block, we found an extended W-shaped function across all nine letters, with greatest accuracy for the three central letters and for the first and last letter in the complete sequence. Further analyses revealed significant correlations between average letter identification per nonword position and word identification at the corresponding position. We conclude that letters are processed in parallel across a sequence of three three-letter words, hence enabling parallel word identification when letter identification accuracy is high enough.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Letter and word identification in the fovea and parafovea

Scaltritti

Atten Percept Psychophys

Dufau

2021

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“…The results obtained with the post-cued RPVP paradigm suggest that some form of elementary syntactic representation can be extracted from very briefly presented sequences of words. This suggests that participants in these experiments were processing several words in parallel and associating parts-of-speech to these words to construct an initial “good enough” syntactic structure that could then constrain ongoing word identification processes (Declerck et al, 2019). However, participants in those studies only had to identify one word, and it is possible that benefits in word identification could have been driven by the syntactic compatibility of one or two adjacent words (e.g., determiner-noun vs. noun-determiner) rather than the grammaticality of the entire sequence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the time it takes to judge grammaticality

Mirault

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

2020

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The presentation duration of five-word sequences was varied and participants were asked to judge their grammaticality. The five-word sequences were presented for a variable duration randomly selected between 50 and 500 ms with 50-ms steps and were immediately followed by a masking stimulus. Half of the sequences were correct sentences which were randomly intermixed with ungrammatical sequences formed of the same words in scrambled order. We measured the proportion of correct responses for each presentation duration in the grammatical and ungrammatical conditions, and calculated sensitivity and bias from these measures. Both the sensitivity measure ( d′) and the probability correct responses to grammatical and ungrammatical sequences increased as the stimulus duration increased, with a d′ of 2 and an average percent correct close to 87% for the grammatical sequences already attained at 300 ms. The rate of increase in performance diminished beyond 300 ms. Grammatical decision times were faster and more accurate for the grammatically correct sequences, thus indicating that participants were not responding by detecting illegal word combinations in the ungrammatical sequences. On the basis of these findings, we provide an upper estimate of 300 ms as the time it takes to access reliable syntactic information from five-word sequences in French, and we discuss the implications of this constraint for models of reading.

“…Children were more accurate in identifying a word in a briefly presented and backward‐masked four‐word sequence when that sequence was grammatically correct compared with ungrammatical scrambled versions of the same four words. This is evidence that children of this age and reading ability have already acquired mechanisms for the rapid identification of words in multi‐word sequences and the computation of some form of syntactic structure most likely on the basis of the parts‐of‐speech associated with word identities (see e.g., Declerck, Wen, Snell, Meade, & Grainger, 2020). In future research it will be interesting to investigate how differences in word‐order constraints across different languages might impact on the sentence superiority effect and its emergence during reading development.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The sentence superiority effect in young readers

Massol

2020

Developmental Science

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The sentence superiority effect observed with skilled adult readers has been taken to reflect parallel processing of word identities and the rapid construction of a preliminary syntactic structure. Here we examined if such processing is already present in primary school children in Grade 3 (average age 8.9 years). Children saw sequences of four horizontally aligned words presented simultaneously for 500 ms and followed by a post‐mask and post‐cue indicating the position for report of one of the four words. Word identification was more accurate in grammatically correct sequences compared with ungrammatical scrambled sequences of the same words, and this sentence superiority effect did not interact with position. This replicates the pattern found in prior research with adults and suggests that parallel word processing and the associated efficiency in syntactic processing arealready in place in Grade 3. We also found that accuracy in identifying words, independently of the surrounding context, correlated with reading age. This points to efficient word‐in‐sequence identification as one key ingredient of the process of becoming a skilled reader.