Jonathan Mirault

Social interaction is argued to play a crucial role for grounding abstract knowledge, yet empirical evidence is scarce. To investigate whether social interaction affects the processing of abstract words, 60 French speakers semantically categorized the degree of socialness and concreteness of words either individually or in dyads. When judging the socialness of words, dyads showed a processing advantage for abstract social words that was absent in individual performance. In contrast, when judging the concreteness of words, dyads were less accurate for abstract social words than individuals, confirming that social interaction renders these words more concrete. Dividing the dyads by their level of social engagement based on gaze patterns revealed that the effects were driven by the more cooperative dyads. The findings demonstrate that language processing is distinct between interactive and isolated contexts, where social interaction and engagement dynamically shape the interpretation of abstract concepts.

The present study provides a test of the influence of bottom-up visual cues on transposed-word effects. In a speeded grammatical decision task, two adjacen

Commentpouvonsnousliredesphrasessansespaces ou losrque des lerttes au sien des mots snot invresées ? Dans cette thèse, nous présentons sept articles de recherche qui se répartissent sur différentes strates théoriques allant de l’étude de l’identification des mots de la phrase au traitement des informations orthographiques en passant par l’obtention des structures syntaxiques lors de présentations rapides de phrases. Les résultats obtenus démontrent clairement un traitement spatial et temporel suivant une logique parallèle, en cascade et interactive, des informations issues de plusieurs mots, mais également l’adaptation de ces patterns de lecture en fonction de la difficulté de la lecture (lorsdelalecturesansespaceparexemple). L’un des éléments clefs pour répondre à notre problématique de départ repose sur le fait que le mot est à la phrase ce que la lettre est au mot. Nous avons également observé que l’encodage des informations visuelles spatiotopiques était bruité ce qui venait ajouter du crédit à l’hypothèse du traitement parallèle des informations et enfin, nous avons décrit comment l’accès aux représentations syntaxiques était modulée en fonction du temps de présentation des phrases et comment l’accès à ces représentations pouvait se faire à partir de 300 ms.

In the present study, we investigated transposed-word (TW) effects in the grammatical decision task with auditory stimuli presented at a slow speech rate. We hypothesized that slowing the rate of presentation of speech stimuli should diminish TW effects under the assumption that the encoding of word-order information should be more precise in these conditions. Evidence that this might indeed be the case had already been seen in the visual modality with the serial presentation of word sequences yielding less pronounced TW effects. In these visual studies, the effects were mainly significant in error rates and not in response times (RTs) possibly because serial presentation enhances the precision of word-order encoding. Here, we observed significant TW effects in both RTs and error rates. The present results therefore demonstrate that a slower speech rate does not eliminate TW effects in RTs. These results contradict the hypothesis that a slower speech rate might enhance word-order encoding and further suggest that it is not the serial presentation of stimuli per se that is the only reason for why TW effects are typically not found in RTs in studies that have used serial presentation procedures in the visual modality.

We examine whether information lying above and below a line of text being read can impact on reading fluency. We did so by placing length-matched flankers above and below each word in a sequence of words. We found that identical flankers facilitated sentence reading, compared with syntactically correct different text flankers, in both reading-for-meaning (Experiment 1) and grammatical decisions (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 replicated the same text facilitation in grammatical decisions and found no significant difference between different word and nonword distractors. Experiment 4 tested for an impact of case matching across targets and flankers and found a significantly greater same text facilitation when targets and flankers were in the same case. These results suggest that the same text facilitation effect might well be driven by crowding mechanisms that are more sensitive to vertically aligned information when reading horizontally aligned text.

It is harder to decide that a sequence of words is ungrammatical when the ungrammaticality is created by transposing two words in a correct sentence (e.g., he wants green these apples), and it is harder to judge that two ungrammatical word sequences are different when the difference is created by transposing two words (e.g., green want these he apples-green these want he apples). In two experiments, we manipulated the relative length of the transposed words such that these words were either the same length (e.g., then you see can it) or different lengths (e.g., then you create can it). The same-length and different-length conditions were matched for syntactic category and word frequency. In Experiment 1 (speeded grammatical decision) we found no evidence for a modulation of transposed-word effects as a function of the relative length of the transposed words. We surmised that this might be due to top-down constraints being the main driving force behind the effects found in the grammatical decision task. However, this was also the case in Experiment 2 (same-different matching with ungrammatical sequences of words) where syntactic constraints were minimized. Given that skilled readers can read sentences composed of words of the same length, our results confirm that word length information alone is not used to encode the order of words in a sequence of words, and especially concerning the order of adjacent words in foveal/parafoveal vision. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Bilinguals activate both of their languages as they process written words, regardless of modality (spoken or signed); these effects have primarily been documented in single word reading paradigms. We used eye-tracking to determine whether deaf bilingual readers (n = 23) activate American Sign Language (ASL) translations as they read English sentences. Sentences contained a target word and one of the two possible prime words: a related prime which shared phonological parameters (location, handshape or movement) with the target when translated into ASL or an unrelated prime. The results revealed that first fixation durations and gaze durations (early processing measures) were shorter when target words were preceded by ASL-related primes, but prime condition did not impact later processing measures (e.g., regressions). Further, less-skilled readers showed a larger ASL co-activation effect. Together, the results indicate that ASL co-activation impacts early lexical access and can facilitate reading, particularly for less-skilled deaf readers.

In this study, we re-examined the facilitation that occurs when auditorily presented monosyllabic primes and targets share their final phonemes, and in particular the rime (e.g., /vɔʀd/–/kɔʀd/). More specifically, we asked whether this rime facilitation effect is also observed when the two last consonants of the rime are transposed (e.g., /vɔʀd/–/kɔʀd/). In comparison to a control condition in which the primes and the targets were unrelated (e.g., /pylt/–/kɔʀd/), we found significant priming effects in both the rime (/vɔʀd/–/kɔʀd/) and the transposed-phoneme “rime” /vɔdʀ/–/kɔʀd/ conditions. We also observed a significantly greater priming effect in the former condition than in the latter condition. We use the theoretical framework of the TISK model (Hannagan et al., 2013) to propose a novel account of final overlap phonological priming in terms of activation of both position-independent phoneme representations and bi-phone representations.

When asked to decide if an ungrammatical sequence of words is grammatically correct or not, readers find it more difficult to do so (longer response times