Department of Language and Culture, UiT - The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway.
PLoS One. 2022 Feb 25;17(2):e0264132. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0264132. eCollection 2022.
Sentence processing is known to be highly incremental. Speakers make incremental commitments as the sentence unfolds, dynamically updating their representations based on the smallest pieces of information from the incoming speech stream. Less is known about linguistic processing on the sub-word level, especially with regard to abstract grammatical information. This study employs the Visual World Paradigm to investigate the processing of grammatical aspect by Russian-speaking adults (n = 124). Aspectual information is encoded relatively early within the Russian verb which makes this an ideal testing ground to investigate the incrementality of grammatical processing on the sub-word level. Participants showed preference for pictures of ongoing events when they heard sentences involving Imperfective verbs, and for pictures of completed events when they heard sentences involving Perfective verbs. Crucially, the analysis of the participants' eye-movements showed that they exhibited preference for the target picture already before they heard the end of the verb. Moreover, the latency of this effect depended on where the aspectual information was encoded within the verb. These results indicate that the processing and integration of grammatical aspect information can happen rapidly and incrementally on a fine-grained word-internal level. Methodologically, the study draws together a set of analytical techniques which can be fruitfully applied to the analysis of effect latencies in a wide range of studies within the Visual World eye-tracking paradigm.
句子处理是高度增量式的。说话者会随着句子的展开逐步做出承诺，根据来自传入语音流的最小信息动态更新他们的表示。关于子词层面的语言处理，人们知之甚少，尤其是关于抽象语法信息。本研究采用视觉世界范式来研究俄语成年人（n=124）对语法体的处理。体信息在俄语动词中相对较早地编码，这使得它成为研究子词层面语法处理增量性的理想测试场所。参与者在听到涉及未完成动词的句子时更喜欢正在进行的事件的图片，而在听到涉及完成动词的句子时更喜欢完成的事件的图片。至关重要的是，对参与者眼动的分析表明，他们在听到动词结尾之前就已经对目标图片表现出了偏好。此外，这种效果的潜伏期取决于动词内部的体信息是如何编码的。这些结果表明，语法体信息的处理和整合可以在细粒度的词内层面上快速且增量地进行。在方法论上，该研究汇集了一系列分析技术，可以成功应用于视觉世界眼动追踪范式中广泛研究的效应潜伏期分析。
