Advanced Experimental Psychology II UNIT III : LANGUAGE PROCESSING

TASKS AND PARADIGMS:

The goal of experimental psychologists who study language

processing is to discover how the complex processes of the mind
operate when language is understood. To accomplish this goal,
researchers have developed a number of tasks and paradigms to
observe, record, interepret, and predict the activity of the mind,
such as -

1. Reaction Time Measures

2. Processing Time and Other Measures for Assessing Comprehension

3. Rapid Serial Visual Presentation

4. Phoneme Restoration

5. Eye Movements

6. Physiological Measures

In this section we discuss each of the above six class of tasks

and paradigms used to study language comprehension processes along
with their strengths and weaknesses.

1. Reaction Time Measures :

Reaction Time (RT) measures are most common procedure generally

used to examine the relative time course of a process. Reaction
is defined as the interval between the presentation of a stimulus
and the onset of the subject’s subsequent response. This interval
is typically measured with a high degree of precision (e.g.,
milliseconds). Response types in such studies vary from simply
naming the stimulus to making a more complete decision, such
as deciding whether two words are related in meaning to one
another.

a. Naming, Lexical Decision, and Categorization :

* In the naming task subjects are asked to articulate a

word or a pronouncable nonword, and reaction times are
measured from presentation of the stimulus to the onset
of the named response.

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* In the lexical decision task, subjects must decide

whether a letter string is a word (e.g., desk) or a
nonword (e.g., dosk), with reaction times measured from
the presentation of the letter string to the onset of
the word/nonword response.

* In the categorization task, subjects must judge whether

a given word belongs to some predetermined category (is
it a living thing ?).

* Naming and Lexical Decision tasks have been used most

frequently in studies than the Categorization tasks.

* When factors such as word length and syntactic class

are controlled, naming and lexical decision times for
high frequency (more common) words are shorter than
those for low frequency (less common) words.

* One problem with such tasks is that overall response

time is not simply a measure of word identification
because both naming and lexical decision times also
include the time it takes for a subject to formulate
and initiate the appropriate response for the task
(i.e. an articulation or manual press of a button).

* The naming task simply permits the subject to pronounce

a string of letters based on grapheme-to-phoneme
conversion rules without necessarily requiring that
word meaning be accessed, e.g., most people can formulate
a pronounciation for blicket even though no corresponding
meaning exists in the dictionary.

* In the lexical decision task, subjects may be able to

judge whetehr letter string is a word by simply basing
their decision on the familiarity of the letter string
rather than on the actual identification of the word.

* This does not necessarily mean that these tasks are

insensitive to semantic properties of words; quite the
contrary, naming and lexical decision tasks have been

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shown to exhibit effects of word frequency and

familiarity which would be unlikely unless some aspect
of word meaning was assessed.

* Despite these limitations, response times in these tasks

may be used to classify the upper limits of the time
course for word recognition.

* Many researchers have used naming and lexical decision

tasks in conjunction with other tasks to determine
whether the patterns of reaction times converge.

b. Priming and Masking :

* Two methodologies which are often used with naming and

lexical decision are priming and masking.

* Priming involves presentation of a sequence of two

words : a prime then a target. Subjects are asked to
make a decision regarding the target word, and their
response time is measured.

* When the prime is semantically related to the target

(e.g., dog followed by cat), subjects respond more
quickly than when the prime is not semantically related
to the target (e.g., pen followed by cat). This indicates
that the relationship between prime and target words
influences processing time on the target.

* Masking examines word identification time by limiting

the exposure of a stimulus. For example, a word dog is
presented for 60ms and then disappears and is replaced
by a pattern mask consisting of either a series of Xs,
random letters, or letter-like shapes. Although reaction
time is often measured in masking studies, the more
common procedure is to measure accuracy.

* Masking helps to examine the time course of lexical

processing.

* Masking studies suggest that subjects may extract

information from words that are presented for such a

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brief duration (e.g., less than 30 ms) without being

aware of it.

* Masked priming has been used to shed light on the early

stages of word comprehension. In this paradigm, subjects
look at a fixation target; then a mask is presented and
is followed by the brief presentation of a prime word,
which is then followed by a target word (presented for
about 200 ms) that is in turn followed by another mask.
Although subjects are generally unable to identify the
prime word, it still has an effect on their report of
the target word.

c. Dual Tasks and Phoneme Monitoring :

* The dual-task paradigm is often used to study attentional

processes, and it follows two basic assumptions : (a)
that subject have a limited processing capacity and (b)
that different cognitive activities may make use of
different processing resources. For example, subjects
may be asked to read sentences while listening for a
tone. If subjects’ response times are slower when
performing two tasks simultaneously as compared to
performing a single task (e.g., simply reading
sentences), this would be evidence that both tasks are
drawing on the same cognitive resources. Furthermore,
the rate of slowdown may also indicate the degree of
resource usage.

* Phoneme monitoring is used to study speech comprehension,

and it involves listening to auditorily presented
sentences while monitoring for a particular phoneme
(e.g., to detect the /b/ sound while listening to the
sentence “The emperor went to the royal baths”. Thus,
the two tasks are to comprehend the sentence and to
press a button when the target phoneme is detected. The
idea is that if contextual or lexical processing prior
to the target word (e.g., baths) is difficult, detecting
a target phoneme should take longer. For example,

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subjects are slower to detect a phoneme when the target

word is preceded by an ambiguous word.

* Phoneme monitoring is an example of dual-task paradigm.

It is used -

a. to determine the basic units of speech perception,

b. to study processing complexity of sentence contexts,

c. lexical ambiguity,

d. attentional issues

* Data emerging from phoneme monitoring tasks are often

affected by a number of extraneous variables, such as -

a. frequency of targets across sentence stimuli

b. the discriminability of the phoneme,

c. target word length,

d. frequency of the target word in which the phoneme

to be detected is located

d. Speed Accuracy Tradeoff :

* These are a set of techniques which put subjects under

various types of speed contraints.

* One variation of technique involves training subjects

to respond immediately to the presentation of a signal
that occur at various times after the end of a sentence.
Accuracy of a decision made about a sentence increases
as the response deadline increases. The parameters of
the function with which accuracy increases as the
response deadline increases can reveal information about
processing activities.

* One limitation with this technique is that it may induce

strategies that are specific to the demands of the
task.

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2. Processing Time and Other Measures for Assessing Comprehension

:

The reaction time measures just discussed are most commonly

used when the unit of interest is a single stimulus (e.g. a
word). Researchers interested in examining a reader’s
comprehension of larger units, such as sentences or sentence
phrases, use a variety of processing time methodologies. In
such methods characteristics of text are manipulated to infer
selected attributes of comprehension process. In these tasks
subjects, may be asked to read a paragraph or sentece while
elapsed reading times are recorded so that paragraph reading
time or sentence reading time is measured. Similarly, subject
may be given a limited amount of time to read a portion of text
while error rates are recorded.

a. Self-Paced Reading and Listening :

* If an experimenter is interested in how long it takes a

subject to read a particular segment of text, measuring
overall reading times for sentences or paragraph may be
too imprecise.

* In self-paced reading task, the experimenter controls

the amount of text that the subject can see at any one
time, and the size of the segment (e.g., a word or
phrase) available to the subject is generally a function
of the topic under investigation. When the subject has
finished reading one segment, he or she pushes a button,
and the next segment of text is presented. When only
one words is presented at a time, the procedure yields
a procesing time measure for each word in the text.

* In a variation of this task, called the “stops making

sense” task, subjects advance word by word through a
sentence as long as it makes sense; when the sentence
no longer makes sense, or becomes ungrammatical, subjects
push a different button.

* One problem with the self-paced reading task is that it

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does not mimic natural reading. Reading times in the

self-paced reading paradigm are slower (about half as
fast) than those in more natural reading tasks because
subjects must press a button to read subsequent segments
of text.

* Because it takes longer to press a button manually than

it does to move the eyes, words stay on the screen for
about 400 ms in this task, compared with average eye-
fixation times of approximately 250 ms in natural
reading.

* Given that reading in the self-paced paradigm is slower

in general, one possibility is that subjects may develop
different comprehension strategies.

* More recently, self-paced listening paradigms have been

developed to study speech perception. As in the reading
situation, the listener pushes a button to get the next
word or segment of discourse. simimallar concerns
regarding strategic effects also apply to this paradigm.

* This task is used to measure higher order cognitive

comprehension processes in reading.

3. Rapid Serial Visual Presentation :

Natural silent reading involves moving the eyes to successive

segments of test; hence the reader controls how quickly text
is read. By contrast, in the rapid serial visual presentation
(RSVP) task, the experimenter controls the rate at which text
is presented. In this paradigm, the subject sits in front of a
computer screen while new words are presented one at a time for
various durations (e.g., 50 to 400 ms). Studies using this
technique have found that readers can comprehend short passages
of text that are presented at rates of up to 1,200 words per
minute, with a new word being presented every 50 ms.
Interestingly, when each word is presented for 250 ms, reading
comprehension in the RSVP task is often better than it is in
natural reading. However, this paradigm has critical limitations.

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Although comprehension performance is high for short passages

of text, it begins to suffer as the amount of text increases.
This is partially because RSVP reading prevents readers from
looking back at misunderstood portions of text (during normal
reading, readers move their eyes back to previously read text
on approximately 10% of all eye fixations). Moreover, RSVP
reading is also mentally taxing for sujects, as it requires
their constant attention to text. This task is used to measure
higher order cognitive comprehension processes in reading.

4. Phoneme Restoration :

The phoneme restoration effect is an auditory illusion that

arises when part of an utterance is replaced by an extraneous
sound, such as a cough or white noise. In such instances,
listenres often perceptually fill in (restore) the missing
phoneme and report that they heard the complete utterance.
Early studies using this method found that psychoaccoustic
factors related to the nature of the replacement sound (e.g.,
amplitude and quality) affected the probability of detecting
the missing phoneme. Subsequent studies have used the restoration
effect to examine the extent to which lexical and higher-level
representations can influence speech perception. Samuel (1996)
notes that although effects emerging from the phoneme restoration
paradigm are real, the paradigm is sensitive to small changes
in methodology (e.g., differences in the syllabic length of
the carrier word, in the phonological class of the replaced
segment, and in the quality of the replacing sound). This taks
is largely used to measure lower-order peceptual processing in
listening in comparison to higher order comprehension process.

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5. Eye Movements :

In a typical eye-tracking experiment, subjects read sentences

presented on a computer monitor while their eye movements are
recorded. Researchers then look at patterns of readers’ eye
movements and note, for example, how long readers’ eyes remain
fixated on words or phrases within sentences, how far their
eyes move from fixation to fixation, or how frequently their
eyes regress back to reread text.

Eye movements have been used to study a variety of language

comprehension processes. Data from eye-tracking studies have
been found to reflect moment-to-moment cognitive processes.
One early findings was that where readers look and how long
they look there is directly related to the ease or difficulty
of cognitive processing. For example, when extraneous factors
are controlled, fixation times are longer for lower-frequency
words (which are less likely to be encountered during reading)
that for higher-frequency words (which are more likely to be
encountered). Eye movements have also been used to examine the
effects of lexical ambiguity, morphological complexity,
discourse processing, semantic relatedness, phonological
processing, syntactic disambiguation, and the perceptual span.

a. Eye-Movement Contingent Display Changes :

In this paradigm, text displayed on a computer screen is

manipulated as a function of where the eyes are fixated. As
readers’ eyes move across a line of text, letters or words
may be modified in foveal, parafoveal, or peripheral
locations, thus allowing the experimenter to control the
nature and amount of information available to the reader.
Three variations of this method are :

1. Moving window paradigm :

In this paradigm, as readers move their eyes across the

text, upon each fixation, text is exposed within an
experimenter-defined window while all text outside of

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the window is altered in some way (e.g., all of letters

might be replaced by Xs). Wherever the reader looks,
the text within the window is available. The logic of
the paradigm is that when the window is as large as the
region from which information can normally be obtained,
reading will proceed as smoothly as when there is no
window (normal text). Using this technique, researchers
have determined the size of the perceptual span in
reading. For example,

Normal Text :

John composed a new song for the children.

Moving Window :

xxxx xxxxxxxd a new song for the xxxxxxxx

2. Boundary Paradigm :

In this paradigm, characteristics of a target word in a

particular location within a sentence may be manipulated.
For example, in the above normal text sentence, when
readers’ eyes move past the space between new and tune,
the target word tune would change to song. In this
manner, researchers can examine the types of information
(e.g., orthographic, phonological, semantic) that
readers obtained from the target word prior to fixation
upon it. Indeed, readers do process a target word more
quickly (preview benefit) when they have had a preview
of that word.

3. Fast Priming Paradigm :

In this paradigm a prime word is briefly presented for

a very short duration (i.e., less than 50 ms) and is
immediately replaced by a target word. Primes may be
related in meaning to target words (tune-song), but
they may also be phonolgocially related (e.g., bat-
cat) or orthographically related (e.g., bench-beach).
This paradigm has been to examine the time course of

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word processing.

An advantage of using eye-movement measures over reaction

time and processing-time measures is that they allow
researchers to study comprehension processes in a more
natural setting. One disadvantage of reaction-time and
processing-time measures is that they may result in the
formulation of task-specific strategies or may simply slow
the reading process. In the eye-movement paradigm, readers
are free to read text as they would during normal reading.
Moreover, eye movement meausres are flexible, allowing
researchers to examine both fine-grained and coarse-grained
language comprehension processes.

b. Eye Movements and Listening :

Studies have demonstrated that when subjects listen to a

narrative while a scene depicting objects in the narrative
is presented in front of them, their eyes tend to move to
those objects that are mentioned in the narrative. This
technique, often called the head-mounted eye-tracking
technique, allows researchers to make inferences about on-
line speech comprehension.

6. Physiological Measures :

In the past 20 years, researchers have developed a number of

physiological measures to study cognitive processes. These
measures range from simply recording heart rates to recording
more complex physiological activity, such as changes in brain
activity. Researchers hope that using such measures enable
them to accomplish two major goals : (a) to locate language
comprehension regions (or pathways) in the brain and (b) to
examine more closely the time course of cognitive activity
within the brain. Although there are many physiological measures,
in this section we focus only on those measures that involve
examining activity in the brain.

a. Event-Related Potential (ERP):

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ERP involves measuring electrical events in the brain using

electrodes placed on the scalp. By averaging electrical
potential over a number of trial, researchers hope to time-
lock brain activity to a particular sensory event(e.g.,
the presentation of a word stimulus). The voltages associated
with brain activity vary in both polarity and magnitude
over time, resulting in a series of electrical peaks and
valleys. For example, when subjects are presented with a
semantic incongruity, a relatively large negative potential
(i.e., a valley) occurs about 400 ms after the presentation
of the stimulus (this is termed an N400 wave).

One advantage of using ERPs is that they allow experimenters

to examine more directly the time course of language
comprehension processes within the brain itself. On the
other hand, there is no guarantee that the ERP activity
being meausred is the direct result of a particular cognitive
process, as opposed to being the result of later (e.g.,
memory) processing. Although ERPs have very good temporal
resolution, much of the research has focused on late-occuring
waves. One problem for reading is that because various
effects occur within 250ms (as evidenced by eye-movement
data), the events reflected in the late-occuring ERP signal
take place after the relavant processing activities have
occurred. Therefore, if a certain effect shows up during
an eye fixation (less than 250-300 ms), examining the same
effect in the N400 does not seem to provide direct information
about the time course of the effect. Thus, it may be
worthwhile to examine ERP waves that occur earlier than
has typically been the case.

b. Positron-Emission Tomography (PET) :

PET scan involves the ingestion of a small amount of

radioactive material that may be traced to measure blood
flow in the brain; cognitive activity is indexed by changes
in blood flow to active parts of the brain. Studies using
PET scans have found that many different parts of the brain

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are involved in language comprehension (including parts of

the left temporal, parietal, and frontal cortices).

This complexity is perhaps the greatest disadvantage to

the PET methodology. It is not surprising that language
comprehension involves the coordination of a number of
brain systems, but the metabolic activity measured by PET
scans may also reflect processing not directly related to
language. For example, researchers have found increased
metabolic activity in brain systems that are not specific
to language processing per se. Specifically, studies
examining reading processes have found increased metabolic
activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is normally
associated with sustained attentional processing, as well
as in the contralateral cerebellum, which is thought to be
involved in the rapid shifting of attention.

c. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Functional Magnetic

Resonance Imaging (fMRI) :

Both MRI and fMRI are based on framework similar to that of

a PET scan - namely, that sensory, motor, and cognitive
tasks produce a localized increase in neural activity that
gives rise to subsequent increases in blood flow. In very
general terms, MRI is based on how cells that are relatively
rich or poor in oxygen response to magnetic field; fMRI
reflects changes in blood flow while a subject is engaged
in a cognitive task. Researchers using MRI technology to
examine language processes are typically interested in
localizing language comprehension functions in the brain.
For example, in a baseline condition an experimenter may
present subjects with a word and simply require the subject
to look at the word. In another condition, subjects may be
asked to decide whether the word represents a living thing.
Differences in neural activity between two conditions can
then be used to determine the region in the brain used in
processing aspects of word meaning.

One advantage of the MRI/fMRI paradigm is that it is

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relatively noninvasive, representing little health risk to

subjects (especially compared with PET scans, which involve
the ingestion of potentially harmful radioactive materials).
In addition, these techniques permit the experimenter to
collect hundreds (or even thousands) of images from a single
subject, with highly accurate spatial resolution. Because
many hospitals have MRI facilities, the technology is also
becoming increasingly available to psycholinguists.

The MRI/fMRI paradigm suffers from several disadvantages,

however. The most significant limitation is that temporal
resolution is relatively poor (e.g., although it may only
take about 250 ms to recognize a word, an fMRI can only
acquire data in about 2-3 s), thus prohibiting any clear
examination of the time course of language processing.
However, some scientists have also begun to combine the
temporal resolution of ERPs with the spatial resolution of
fMRIs. In addition, as mentioned earlier in reference to
PET scans, much brain activity is only indirectly related
to language functions, so localizing areas that are specific
to language comprehension can be difficult.

****

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