The Experts below are selected from a list of 1845 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Anne Christophe - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
-
learning Homophones in context easy cases are favored in the lexicon of natural languages
2018Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Laia Fibla, Annecaroline Fievet, Anne ChristopheAbstract:Abstract Even though ambiguous words are common in languages, children find it hard to learn Homophones, where a single label applies to several distinct meanings (e.g., Mazzocco, 1997 ). The present work addresses this apparent discrepancy between learning abilities and typological pattern, with respect to homophony in the lexicon. In a series of five experiments, 20-month-old French children easily learnt a pair of Homophones if the two meanings associated with the phonological form belonged to different syntactic categories, or to different semantic categories. However, toddlers failed to learn Homophones when the two meanings were distinguished only by different grammatical genders. In parallel, we analyzed the lexicon of four languages, Dutch, English, French and German, and observed that Homophones are distributed non-arbitrarily in the lexicon, such that easily learnable Homophones are more frequent than hard-to-learn ones: pairs of Homophones are preferentially distributed across syntactic and semantic categories, but not across grammatical gender. We show that learning Homophones is easier than previously thought, at least when the meanings of the same phonological form are made sufficiently distinct by their syntactic or semantic context. Following this, we propose that this learnability advantage translates into the overall structure of the lexicon, i.e., the kinds of Homophones present in languages exhibit the properties that make them learnable by toddlers, thus allowing them to remain in languages.
-
phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers
2017Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Alex De Carvalho, Isabelle Lin, Anne ChristopheAbstract:This study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers' syntactic analysis. French noun-verb Homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g., using the Homophone as a noun: [le bebesouris] [a bien mange] - [the baby mouse] [ate well] or using it as a verb: [le bebe] [sourita sa maman] - [the baby] [smiles to his mother], where brackets indicate prosodic phrase boundaries). Although both sentences start with the same words (le-bebe-/suʁi/), they can be disambiguated by the prosodic boundary that either directly precedes the critical word /suʁi/ when it is a verb, or directly follows it when it is a noun. Across two experiments using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, 28-month-olds (Exp. 1 and 2) and 20-month-olds (Exp. 2) listened to the beginnings of these test sentences while watching two images displayed side-by-side on a TV-screen: one associated with the noun interpretation of the ambiguous word (e.g., a mouse) and the other with the verb interpretation (e.g., a baby smiling). The results show that upon hearing the first words of these sentences, toddlers were able to correctly exploit prosodic information to access the syntactic structure of sentences, which in turn helped them to determine the syntactic category of the ambiguous word and to correctly identify its intended meaning: participants switched their eye-gaze toward the correct image based on the prosodic condition in which they heard the ambiguous target word. This provides evidence that during the first steps of language acquisition, toddlers are already able to exploit the prosodic structure of sentences to recover their syntactic structure and predict the syntactic category of upcoming words, an ability which would be extremely useful to discover the meaning of novel words.
-
preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis
2016Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Anne Christophe, Alex De CarvalhoAbstract:Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb Homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences ([la petite ferme] [est tres jolie] 'the small farm is very nice' vs. [la petite] [ferme la fenetre] 'the little girl closes the window'--brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). Although these sentences start with the same three words, ferme is a noun (farm) in the former but a verb (to close) in the latter case. The only difference between these sentence beginnings is the prosodic structure, that reflects the syntactic structure (with a prosodic boundary just before the critical word when it is a verb, and just after it when it is a noun). Crucially, all words following the Homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. Children successfully exploited prosodic information to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, in both an oral completion task (4.5-year-olds, Experiment 1) and in a preferential looking paradigm with an eye-tracker (3.5-year-olds and 4.5-year-olds, Experiment 2). These results show that both groups of children exploit the position of a word within the prosodic structure when computing its syntactic category. In other words, even younger children of 3.5 years old exploit phrasal prosody online to constrain their syntactic analysis. This ability to exploit phrasal prosody to compute syntactic structure may help children parse sentences containing unknown words, and facilitate the acquisition of word meanings.
-
Word Learning: Homophony and the Distribution of Learning Exemplars
2016Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Emmanuel Chemla, Anne ChristopheAbstract:How do children infer the meaning of a word? Current accounts of word learning assume that children expect a word to map onto exactly one concept whose members form a coherent category. If this assumption was strictly true, children should infer that a Homophone, such as “bat”, refers to a single superordinate category that encompasses both animal-bats and baseball-bats. The current study explores the situations that lead children to postulate that a single word form maps onto several distinct meanings, rather than a single superordinate meaning. Three experiments showed that adults and 5-year-old French children use information about the sampling of learning exemplars (and in particular the fact that they can be regrouped in two distinct clusters in conceptual space) to postulate homophony. This unexplored sensitivity and the very possibility of homophony are critically missing from current word learning accounts.
Alex De Carvalho - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
-
phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers
2017Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Alex De Carvalho, Isabelle Lin, Anne ChristopheAbstract:This study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers' syntactic analysis. French noun-verb Homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g., using the Homophone as a noun: [le bebesouris] [a bien mange] - [the baby mouse] [ate well] or using it as a verb: [le bebe] [sourita sa maman] - [the baby] [smiles to his mother], where brackets indicate prosodic phrase boundaries). Although both sentences start with the same words (le-bebe-/suʁi/), they can be disambiguated by the prosodic boundary that either directly precedes the critical word /suʁi/ when it is a verb, or directly follows it when it is a noun. Across two experiments using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, 28-month-olds (Exp. 1 and 2) and 20-month-olds (Exp. 2) listened to the beginnings of these test sentences while watching two images displayed side-by-side on a TV-screen: one associated with the noun interpretation of the ambiguous word (e.g., a mouse) and the other with the verb interpretation (e.g., a baby smiling). The results show that upon hearing the first words of these sentences, toddlers were able to correctly exploit prosodic information to access the syntactic structure of sentences, which in turn helped them to determine the syntactic category of the ambiguous word and to correctly identify its intended meaning: participants switched their eye-gaze toward the correct image based on the prosodic condition in which they heard the ambiguous target word. This provides evidence that during the first steps of language acquisition, toddlers are already able to exploit the prosodic structure of sentences to recover their syntactic structure and predict the syntactic category of upcoming words, an ability which would be extremely useful to discover the meaning of novel words.
-
preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis
2016Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Anne Christophe, Alex De CarvalhoAbstract:Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb Homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences ([la petite ferme] [est tres jolie] 'the small farm is very nice' vs. [la petite] [ferme la fenetre] 'the little girl closes the window'--brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). Although these sentences start with the same three words, ferme is a noun (farm) in the former but a verb (to close) in the latter case. The only difference between these sentence beginnings is the prosodic structure, that reflects the syntactic structure (with a prosodic boundary just before the critical word when it is a verb, and just after it when it is a noun). Crucially, all words following the Homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. Children successfully exploited prosodic information to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, in both an oral completion task (4.5-year-olds, Experiment 1) and in a preferential looking paradigm with an eye-tracker (3.5-year-olds and 4.5-year-olds, Experiment 2). These results show that both groups of children exploit the position of a word within the prosodic structure when computing its syntactic category. In other words, even younger children of 3.5 years old exploit phrasal prosody online to constrain their syntactic analysis. This ability to exploit phrasal prosody to compute syntactic structure may help children parse sentences containing unknown words, and facilitate the acquisition of word meanings.
Isabelle Dautriche - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
-
learning Homophones in context easy cases are favored in the lexicon of natural languages
2018Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Laia Fibla, Annecaroline Fievet, Anne ChristopheAbstract:Abstract Even though ambiguous words are common in languages, children find it hard to learn Homophones, where a single label applies to several distinct meanings (e.g., Mazzocco, 1997 ). The present work addresses this apparent discrepancy between learning abilities and typological pattern, with respect to homophony in the lexicon. In a series of five experiments, 20-month-old French children easily learnt a pair of Homophones if the two meanings associated with the phonological form belonged to different syntactic categories, or to different semantic categories. However, toddlers failed to learn Homophones when the two meanings were distinguished only by different grammatical genders. In parallel, we analyzed the lexicon of four languages, Dutch, English, French and German, and observed that Homophones are distributed non-arbitrarily in the lexicon, such that easily learnable Homophones are more frequent than hard-to-learn ones: pairs of Homophones are preferentially distributed across syntactic and semantic categories, but not across grammatical gender. We show that learning Homophones is easier than previously thought, at least when the meanings of the same phonological form are made sufficiently distinct by their syntactic or semantic context. Following this, we propose that this learnability advantage translates into the overall structure of the lexicon, i.e., the kinds of Homophones present in languages exhibit the properties that make them learnable by toddlers, thus allowing them to remain in languages.
-
phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers
2017Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Alex De Carvalho, Isabelle Lin, Anne ChristopheAbstract:This study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers' syntactic analysis. French noun-verb Homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g., using the Homophone as a noun: [le bebesouris] [a bien mange] - [the baby mouse] [ate well] or using it as a verb: [le bebe] [sourita sa maman] - [the baby] [smiles to his mother], where brackets indicate prosodic phrase boundaries). Although both sentences start with the same words (le-bebe-/suʁi/), they can be disambiguated by the prosodic boundary that either directly precedes the critical word /suʁi/ when it is a verb, or directly follows it when it is a noun. Across two experiments using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, 28-month-olds (Exp. 1 and 2) and 20-month-olds (Exp. 2) listened to the beginnings of these test sentences while watching two images displayed side-by-side on a TV-screen: one associated with the noun interpretation of the ambiguous word (e.g., a mouse) and the other with the verb interpretation (e.g., a baby smiling). The results show that upon hearing the first words of these sentences, toddlers were able to correctly exploit prosodic information to access the syntactic structure of sentences, which in turn helped them to determine the syntactic category of the ambiguous word and to correctly identify its intended meaning: participants switched their eye-gaze toward the correct image based on the prosodic condition in which they heard the ambiguous target word. This provides evidence that during the first steps of language acquisition, toddlers are already able to exploit the prosodic structure of sentences to recover their syntactic structure and predict the syntactic category of upcoming words, an ability which would be extremely useful to discover the meaning of novel words.
-
preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis
2016Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Anne Christophe, Alex De CarvalhoAbstract:Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb Homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences ([la petite ferme] [est tres jolie] 'the small farm is very nice' vs. [la petite] [ferme la fenetre] 'the little girl closes the window'--brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). Although these sentences start with the same three words, ferme is a noun (farm) in the former but a verb (to close) in the latter case. The only difference between these sentence beginnings is the prosodic structure, that reflects the syntactic structure (with a prosodic boundary just before the critical word when it is a verb, and just after it when it is a noun). Crucially, all words following the Homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. Children successfully exploited prosodic information to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, in both an oral completion task (4.5-year-olds, Experiment 1) and in a preferential looking paradigm with an eye-tracker (3.5-year-olds and 4.5-year-olds, Experiment 2). These results show that both groups of children exploit the position of a word within the prosodic structure when computing its syntactic category. In other words, even younger children of 3.5 years old exploit phrasal prosody online to constrain their syntactic analysis. This ability to exploit phrasal prosody to compute syntactic structure may help children parse sentences containing unknown words, and facilitate the acquisition of word meanings.
-
Word Learning: Homophony and the Distribution of Learning Exemplars
2016Co-Authors: Isabelle Dautriche, Emmanuel Chemla, Anne ChristopheAbstract:How do children infer the meaning of a word? Current accounts of word learning assume that children expect a word to map onto exactly one concept whose members form a coherent category. If this assumption was strictly true, children should infer that a Homophone, such as “bat”, refers to a single superordinate category that encompasses both animal-bats and baseball-bats. The current study explores the situations that lead children to postulate that a single word form maps onto several distinct meanings, rather than a single superordinate meaning. Three experiments showed that adults and 5-year-old French children use information about the sampling of learning exemplars (and in particular the fact that they can be regrouped in two distinct clusters in conceptual space) to postulate homophony. This unexplored sensitivity and the very possibility of homophony are critically missing from current word learning accounts.
Debra Jared - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
-
reading Homophone puns evidence from eye tracking
2017Co-Authors: Debra Jared, Sarah BainbridgeAbstract:We investigated how readers make sense of Homophone puns (e.g., The butcher was very glad we could meat up) by tracking their eye movements as they read. Comparison sentences included Homophone-error sentences in which the presented Homophone was also not correct (e.g., The lawyer was very glad we could meat up) and sentences in which the Homophone was correct for the context (e.g., The butcher was very glad to chop meat up for the stew). An effect of the frequency of the unpresented Homophone mate (e.g., meet) was found on first-pass reading times for Homophones, indicating that participants activated the meaning of the Homophone mate through shared phonology. First-fixation and gaze durations on the Homophones were longer in puns than in correct-context sentences, indicating that participants immediately noticed that the Homophone was incongruous with the adjacent context (e.g., glad we could meat) in puns, but total reading times did not differ, suggesting that the incongruity was quickly resolved. Immediate reading times on Homophone in puns and Homophone-error sentences did not differ, but total reading times did, suggesting that the impact of the critical context word (e.g., butcher) is delayed. Further analyses examined the resolution process in more detail. Ratings of the funniness of the puns were most strongly related to the strength of the association between the Homophone and the critical context word (e.g., butcher). Nous avons cherche a savoir comment un lecteur arrive a comprendre les Homophones comportant un jeu de mots (par ex. dans la phrase anglaise suivante : The butcher was very glad we could meat up) en suivant leurs mouvements oculaires pendant la lecture. (Le jeu de mots de se trouve dans le mot meat qui signifie « viande », son Homophone correspondant etant le mot meet qui signifie « se rencontrer ». Les enonces a comparer incluaient des phrases parmi lesquelles l’Homophone presente etait incorrect (par ex., The lawyer was very glad we could meat up) et des phrases parmi lesquelles l’Homophone etait correct par rapport au contexte (par ex., The butcher was very glad to chop meat up for the stew – traduction : « Le boucher etait heureux de couper la viande en vue de la preparation du ragout »). Un effet de la frequence de l’Homophone correspondant non presente (par ex., meet) a ete apercu au niveau du taux de lecture des Homophones, indiquant que les participants avaient active le sens de l’Homophone correspondant par phonologie partagee. La duree du premier regard/fixation sur les Homophones etait plus longue en presence de jeu de mots que dans les phrases comportant l’Homophone correct, indiquant que les participants constataient immediatement que l’Homophone ne concordait pas avec le contexte (par ex. glad we could meat) dans le cas des jeux de mots; cependant, le temps de lecture total ne differait pas, suggerant que la discordance etait rapidement resolue. Les temps de lecture immediats d’Homophones faisant partie de jeux de mots ou de phrases comportant un Homophone incorrect ne differaient pas alors que le temps de lecture de lecture total differait, suggerant que l’impact du mot-contexte critique (par ex., butcher) serait tardif. Des analyses plus poussees ont examine le processus de resolution de maniere plus detaillee. Les evaluations du degre d’humour des jeux de mots etaient le plus fortement liees a la force de l’association entre l’Homophone et le mot-contexte critique (par., butcher).
-
Skilled adult readers activate the meanings of high-frequency words using phonology: Evidence from eye tracking
2017Co-Authors: Debra Jared, Katrina O’donnellAbstract:We examined whether highly skilled adult readers activate the meanings of high-frequency words using phonology when reading sentences for meaning. A Homophone-error paradigm was used. Sentences were written to fit 1 member of a Homophone pair, and then 2 other versions were created in which the Homophone was replaced by its mate or a spelling-control word. The error words were all high-frequency words, and the correct Homophones were either higher-frequency words or low-frequency words—that is, the Homophone errors were either the subordinate or dominant member of the pair. Participants read sentences as their eye movements were tracked. When the high-frequency Homophone error words were the subordinate member of the Homophone pair, participants had shorter immediate eye-fixation latencies on these words than on matched spelling-control words. In contrast, when the high-frequency Homophone error words were the dominant member of the Homophone pair, a difference between these words and spelling controls was delayed. These findings provide clear evidence that the meanings of high-frequency words are activated by phonological representations when skilled readers read sentences for meaning. Explanations of the differing patterns of results depending on Homophone dominance are discussed.
-
the processing advantage and disadvantage for Homophones in lexical decision tasks
2013Co-Authors: Yasushi Hino, Yuu Kusunose, Stephen J. Lupker, Debra JaredAbstract:Studies using the lexical decision task with English stimuli have demonstrated that Homophones are responded to more slowly than nonhomophonic controls. In contrast, several studies using Chinese stimuli have shown that Homophones are responded to more rapidly than nonhomophonic controls. In an attempt to better understand the impact of homophony, we investigated Homophone effects for Japanese kanji words in a lexical decision task. The results indicated that, whereas a processing disadvantage emerged for Homophones when they have only a single homophonic mate (as in the English experiments), a processing advantage occurred for Homophones when they have multiple homophonic mates (as in the Chinese experiments). On the basis of these results, we discuss the nature of the processes that may be responsible for producing the processing advantages and disadvantages for Homophones.
-
Homophone effects in lexical decision.
2001Co-Authors: Penny M. Pexman, Stephen J. Lupker, Debra JaredAbstract:The role of phonology in word recognition was investigated in 6 lexical-decision experiments involving Homophones (e.g., MAID-MADE). The authors' goal was to determine whether Homophone effects arise in the lexical-decision task and, if so, in what situations they arise, with a specific focus on the question of whether the presence of pseudoHomophone foils (e.g., BRANE) causes Homophone effects to be eliminated because of strategic deemphasis of phonological processing. All 6 experiments showed significant Homophone effects, which were not eliminated by the presence of pseudoHomophone foils. The authors propose that Homophone effects in lexical decision are due to the nature of feedback from phonology to orthography.
Dominiek Sandra - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
-
from experiment to real life data social factors determine the rate of spelling errors on rule governed verb Homophones but not the size of the Homophone dominance effect
2020Co-Authors: Hanne Surkyn, Reinhild Vandekerckhove, Dominiek SandraAbstract:Abstract We examine unintentional spelling errors on verb Homophones in informal online chat conversations of Flemish adolescents. In experiments, these verb forms yielded an effect of Homophone dominance, i.e., most errors occurred on the lower-frequency form (Sandra et al., 1999). Verb Homophones are argued to require the conscious application of a spelling rule, which may cause a temporary overload of working memory resources and trigger automatic retrieval of the higher-frequency spelling from the mental lexicon. Unlike most previous research, we investigate Homophone intrusions in a natural writing context. Thus, we test the ‘ecological validity’ of psycholinguistic experiments. Importantly, this study relates these psycholinguistic constructs to different social variables in social media writing to test a prediction that directly follows from Sandra et al.’s account. Whereas social factors likely affect the error rates, they should not affect the error pattern: the number of working memory failures occurs at another processing level than the Homophone intrusions. Hence, the focus is on the interaction between Homophone dominance and the social variables. The errors for two types of verb Homophones reveal (a) an impact of all social variables, (b) an effect of Homophone dominance, and (c) no interaction between this effect and the social factors.
-
the dual role of Homophone dominance why Homophone intrusions on regular verb forms so often go unnoticed
2016Co-Authors: Nina Verhaert, Ellen Danckaert, Dominiek SandraAbstract:We investigated whether the effect of Homophone Dominance that has been reported for spelling errors on Dutch verb Homophones (Sandra, Frisson, & Daems, 1999) also occurs in perception. This effect was indeed observed: participants in a proofreading experiment overlooked more Homophone intrusions when the intruder was more dominant than the target form, irrespective of the inflectional ending. Participant groups whose grammatical awareness was better developed made fewer errors but also showed the effect of Homophone Dominance. The findings are explained in terms of a Computational and Similarity-Based Race model, in which a conscious and slow computational process in working memory, implementing the spelling rule, competes with an automatic and fast, frequency-sensitive process of lexical access. The presence of the effect in both spelling and reading explains why these errors on descriptively simple verb forms in Dutch are so persistent.
-
Homophone dominance at the whole word and sub word levels spelling errors suggest full form storage of regularly inflected verb forms
2010Co-Authors: Dominiek SandraAbstract:Two experiments and two corpus studies focus on Homophone dominance in the spelling of regularly inflected verb forms, the phenomenon that the higher-frequency Homophone causes more intrusion errors on the lower-frequency one than vice versa. Experiment 1 was a speeded dictation task focusing on the Dutch imperative, a verb form whose formation rule is poorly known. A clear-cut effect of Homophone dominance was found. This effect was equally strong when the target imperative was preceded by another imperative in the same sentence whose pronunciation reflected the spelling rule. Experiment 2 indicated that the effect of Homophone dominance cannot be reduced to an effect of recency. Language users cannot discriminate a recently seen verb form when shown the two Homophones. Instead, they choose the most frequent spelling pattern. In Corpus Study 1 a Google search on the world wide web revealed a sublexical effect of Homophone dominance in the spelling errors on regular past tense forms. Corpus Study 2 demonstrated the validity of the search method. The sublexical effect of Homophone dominance, involving units that cut across the stem-suffix boundary, lends itself naturally to a representational model of the connectionist or analogical processing tradition but is hard to reconcile with a rule-based account.