Julie E. Boland

We present four experiments investigating adaptation to a regional grammatical structure through reading exposure, using both the needs + past participle construction (e.g., The car needs washed) and the double modal construction (e.g. You might could go there). In each experiment, participants read two stories containing informal dialogue. Half of the participants were exposed to one of the regional constructions and half were not. Those readers exposed to the regional constructions adapted, gradually reading the novel constructions faster over 9 to 15 exemplars. The degree to which the exposed group learned the construction was tested in two ways. In the first two experiments, learning was measured by comparing reading times to acceptable and unacceptable variants of the novel constructions. Readers did not learn either the verb tense rule for the needs construction (Experiment 1) or a simple ordering rule for double modal constructions (Experiment 2). Similarly, in Experiments 3 and 4, metalinguistic judgments used to test learning revealed that participants had failed to acquire the regional grammar of either novel construction. These experiments suggest that the adaptation effects reflect learning some general properties of the experimental stimuli, not learning the syntactic constructions themselves.

Bilinguals often codeswitch between languages mid-sentence. Do incongruent codeswitches, which follow the word order of only one language, occur? If so, how do bilinguals comprehend them, given the clash in grammaticality? First, we demonstrated that incongruent codeswitches occur, based on a corpus analysis of Spanish-English speech. Then, we measured bilinguals’ assessments of congruent codeswitches (Experiment 1) and incongruent codeswitches (Experiment 2) using an offline rating task. This task was sensitive to codeswitching costs and grammaticality. More importantly, the ratings for incongruent codeswitches supported the Current Word hypothesis, which predicts that codeswitches follow the word order of the language of the current word, but not the Matrix Language hypothesis (Myers-Scotton, 2002). These results can be understood within a bilingual comprehension theory in which activation spreads from words in the input to language-independent grammatical structures, leading bilinguals to make language-independent predictions about the syntactic category of upcoming words.

Small, variable transmission delays over Zoom disrupt the typical rhythm of conversation, leading to delays in turn initiation. This study compared local and remote (Zoom) turn transition times using both a tightly controlled yes/no Question and Answer (Q&A) paradigm (Corps et al., 2018) and unscripted conversation. In the Q&A paradigm (Experiment 1), participants responded yes/no as quickly as possible to prerecorded questions. Half of the questions were played over Zoom and half were played locally from their own computer. Local responses had an average latency of 297 ms, whereas remote responses averaged 976 ms. These large increases in transition times over Zoom are far greater than the estimated 30-70 ms of audio transmission delay, suggesting disruption of automated mechanisms that normally guide the timing of turn initiation in conversation. In face-to-face conversations (Experiment 2), turn transition times averaged 135 ms, but transition times for the same dyads over Zoom averaged 487 ms. We consider the possibility that electronic transmission delays disrupt neural oscillators that normally synchronize on syllable rate, at around, 150-300 ms per cycle (Wilson & Wilson, 2005), and enable interlocutors to effortlessly and precisely time the initiation of their turns. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

While the use of they as a singular pronoun with an indefinite antecedent has been available for centuries, singular they is increasingly being used to refer to specific individuals. Here, we present two experiments investigating the factors underlying oral and written production of this newer usage. We asked participants to create narratives about different individuals of varying gender presentation. The presence of a description containing a pronoun—they, she, or he—was also varied. We examined the role of familiarity with individuals whose personal pronoun is they and with LGBTQ+ communities broadly in the production of singular they. We found that familiarity was a better predictor of variation than age or gender, two variables traditionally associated with language change. Furthermore, modeling the use of they significantly increased its production. Thus, singular specific they can be—and is—acquired both through familiarity with LGBTQ+ individuals, as well as through direct exposure to a textual prompt.

Although bilingual individuals know 2 languages, research suggests that the languages are not separate in the mind. This is especially evident when a bilingual individual switches languages midsentence, indicating that mental representations are, to some degree, overlapping or integrated across the 2 languages. In 2 eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the nature of this integration during reading to examine whether incremental grammatical predictions generated by Spanish-English bilinguals (Experiment 1, N = 50) and Spanish-as-a-second-language learners (Experiment 2, N = 50) are languagespecific or language-independent. As participants in same-language and mixed-language pairs performed a 2-string lexical-decision task, we measured eye fixation times on nouns in grammatical (determinernoun) and ungrammatical (adverb-noun) contexts. In Experiment 1, bilingual participants read nouns faster following determiners than they read adverbs in both same- and mixed-language pairs, indicating that grammatical predictability in this context is language-independent. Surface-string bigram frequencies are unlikely to account for the results because the grammatical predictability effect was just as large for mixed-language (very low bigram frequency) as same-language (higher bigram frequency) pairs, and the effect was not modulated by the code-switching experience of participants. Experiment 2 found a similar, though nonsignificant, pattern for Spanish-language learners. When the data for Experiments 1 and 2 were combined, the effect of grammaticality did not interact with language congruency, participant group, or language proficiency, suggesting that both bilingual participants and language learners generated language-independent predictions. Our results support a bilingual model in which languageindependent syntactic representations are involved in word-by-word, incremental syntactic processing, even within the most basic grammatical constituents.

We report 2 self-paced reading experiments investigating the longevity of structural priming effects in comprehending reduced relative clauses among adult Chinese-speaking learners of English. Experiment 1 showed that structural priming occurred both when prime and target sentences were immediately adjacent and when they were separated by 1 or 2 filler sentences of unrelated structures. Moreover, the magnitude of the priming effect held constant across different lag conditions. Experiment 2 replicated the persistent priming effect and ruled out the possibility that the effect was due to verb repetition priming. Taken together, the current results suggest that recent experience with a given structure can have relatively long-lived facilitation effect on the language-processing system in second-language learners. As such, structural priming may serve as a learning mechanism for second-language speakers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).