Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T12:29:24.620Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Now or … later: Perceptual data are not immediately forgotten during language processing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2016

Klinton Bicknell
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL [email protected]://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/kbicknell/
T. Florian Jaeger
Affiliation:
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY [email protected]@mail.bcs.rochester.eduhttp://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/fjaeger/https://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/mtan/mtan.html Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0226 Department of Linguistics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0096.
Michael K. Tanenhaus
Affiliation:
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY [email protected]@mail.bcs.rochester.eduhttp://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/fjaeger/https://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/mtan/mtan.html Department of Linguistics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0096.

Abstract

Christiansen & Chater (C&C) propose that language comprehenders must immediately compress perceptual data by “chunking” them into higher-level categories. Effective language understanding, however, requires maintaining perceptual information long enough to integrate it with downstream cues. Indeed, recent results suggest comprehenders do this. Although cognitive systems are undoubtedly limited, frameworks that do not take into account the tasks that these systems evolved to solve risk missing important insights.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, J. R. (1990) The adaptive character of thought. Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Bard, E. G., Shillcock, R. C. & Altmann, G. T. M. (1988) The recognition of words after their acoustic offsets in spontaneous speech: Effects of subsequent context. Perception and Psychophysics 44:395408.Google Scholar
Bicknell, K. & Levy, R. (2010) A rational model of eye movement control in reading. In: Proceedings of the 48th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ed. Hajič, J., Carberry, S., Clark, S., & Nivre, J., pp. 1168–78. Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Bicknell, K., Tanenhaus, M. K. & Jaeger, T. F. (2015) Listeners can maintain and rationally update uncertainty about prior words. Manuscript submitted for publication.Google Scholar
Brown, M., Dilley, L. C. & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2014) Probabilistic prosody: Effects of relative speech rate on perception of (a) word(s) several syllables earlier. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Speech Prosody, Dublin, Ireland, May 20–23, 2014, ed. Campbell, N., Gibbon, D. & Hirst, D.. pp. 1154–58. Dublin.Google Scholar
Carney, A. E., Widin, G. P. & Viemeister, N. F. (1977) Noncategorical perception of stop consonants differing in VOT. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 62:961–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Connine, C. M., Blasko, D. G. & Hall, M. (1991) Effects of subsequent sentence context in auditory word recognition: Temporal and linguistic constraints. Journal of Memory and Language 30:234–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, N. H., Griffiths, T. L. & Morgan, J. L. (2009) The influence of categories on perception: Explaining the perceptual magnet effect as optimal statistical inference. Psychological Review 116:752–82.Google Scholar
Grosjean, F. (1985) The recognition of words after their acoustic offset: Evidence and implications. Perception and Psychophysics 38:299–10.Google Scholar
Howes, A., Lewis, R. L. & Vera, A. (2009) Rational adaptation under task and processing constraints: Implications for testing theories of cognition and action. Psychological Review 116:717–51.Google Scholar
Kleinschmidt, D. F. & Jaeger, T. F. (2015) Robust speech perception: Recognize the familiar, generalize to the similar, and adapt to the novel. Psychological Review 122:148203.Google Scholar
Kuperberg, G. & Jaeger, T. F. (2016) What do we mean by prediction in language comprehension? Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience 31:3259.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Levy, R. (2011) Integrating surprisal and uncertain-input models in online sentence comprehension: formal techniques and empirical results. In: Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Portland, OR, June 19–24, 2011, pp. 1055–65, ed. Matsumoto, Y. & Mihalcea, R.. Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Levy, R., Bicknell, K., Slattery, T. & Rayner, K. (2009) Eye movement evidence that readers maintain and act on uncertainty about past linguistic input. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106:21086–90.Google Scholar
Lewis, R. L., Shvartsman, M. & Singh, S. (2013) The adaptive nature of eye movements in linguistic tasks: How payoff and architecture shape speed-accuracy trade-offs. Topics in Cognitive Science 5:130.Google Scholar
Liberman, A. M., Harris, K. S., Hoffman, H. S. & Griffith, B. C. (1957) The discrimination of speech sounds within and across phoneme boundaries. Journal of Experimental Psychology 54:358–68.Google Scholar
McMurray, B., Tanenhaus, M. K. & Aslin, R. N. (2009) Within-category VOT affects recovery from “lexical” garden-paths: Evidence against phoneme-level inhibition. Journal of Memory and Language 60:6591.Google Scholar
Neumann, R., Rafferty, A. N. & Griffiths, T. L. (2014) A bounded rationality account of wishful thinking. In: Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Quebec City, Canada, July 2014, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada, pp. 1210–15, ed. Bello, P., Guarini, M., McShane, M., & Scassellati, B.. Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Pisoni, D. B. & Lazarus, J. H. (1974) Categorical and noncategorical modes of speech perception along the voicing continuum. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 55:328–33.Google Scholar
Pisoni, D. B. & Tash, J. (1974) Reaction times to comparisons within and across phonetic categories. Perception & Psychophysics 15:285–90.Google Scholar
Simon, H. A. (1982) Models of bounded rationality: Empirically grounded economic reason. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sperling, G. (1960) The information available in brief visual presentations. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 74:129.Google Scholar
Szostak, C. M. & Pitt, M. A. (2013) The prolonged influence of subsequent context on spoken word recognition. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics 75:15331546.Google Scholar