Published Papers

Masked morphological priming and sensitivity to the statistical structure of form–to–meaning mapping in L2

Journal: 

Journal of Cognition

Date: 

April, 2022

This paper investigates masked orthographic and morphological priming in L1 Italian, L2 English readers, whose L2 proficiency profile was assessed with a wide battery of tests. Read more by clicking on the title or, to see what we found, check out our pre-print here

 

Implicit Statistical Learning in Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation

Journal: 

Cortex

Date: 

March, 2022

Humans capitalize on statistical cues to discriminate fundamental units of information within complex streams of sensory input. We sought neural evidence for this phenomenon by combining fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) and EEG recordings. Skilled readers were exposed to sequences of linguistic items with decreasing familiarity, presented at a fast rate and periodically interleaved with oddballs. Crucially, each sequence comprised stimuli of the same category, and the only distinction between base and oddball items was the frequency of occurrence of individual tokens within a stream. Frequency-domain analyses revealed robust neural responses at the oddball presentation rate in all conditions, reflecting the discrimination between two locally-emerged groups of items purely informed by token frequency. Results provide evidence for a fundamental frequency-tuned mechanism that operates under high temporal constraints and could underpin category bootstrapping. Concurrently, they showcase the potential of FPVS for providing online neural markers of implicit statistical learning.

A pre-print and all data and scripts related to this project are available here.

Knowledge of statistics or statistical learning? Readers prioritize the statistics of their native language over the learning of local regularities

Journal: 

Journal of Cognition

Date: 

March, 2022

A large body of evidence suggests that people spontaneously and implicitly learn about regularities present in the visual input. Although theorized as critical for reading, this ability has so far been demonstrated only for non-linguistic materials. We tested whether local statistical regularities are also extracted from materials that closely resemble one’s native language. In two experiments, Italian speakers saw a set of letter strings modelled on the Italian lexicon and guessed which of these strings were words in a fictitious language and which were foils.

The entropy of morphological systems in natural languages is modulated by functional and semantic properties

Journal: 

Journal of Quantitative Linguistics

Date: 

March, 2022

Experimental research has acknowledged the role of
morphological cues of gender and number in prediction, however it is not
clear whether the distribution of words in languages are structured to
systematically exploit them. In a study on Italian, we measured the
distributions of the nominal lexicon across the morphological features,
and found that they are optimized to sustain discrimination and
prediction processes. Though, in a subset of the lexicon denoting
animate referents, the semantic interpretability of the features

Letter chunk frequency does not explain morphological masked priming

Journal: 

Psychonomic Bulletin and Review

Date: 

November, 2021

Research on visual word identification has extensively investigated the role of morphemes, recurrent letter chunks that convey a fairly regular meaning (e.g., lead-er-ship). Masked priming studies highlighted morpheme identification in complex (e.g., sing-er) and pseudo-complex (corn-er) words, as well as in nonwords (e.g., basket-y). The present study investigated whether such sensitivity to morphemes could be rooted in the visual system sensitivity to statistics of letter (co)occurrence.

Form and function: a study on the distribution of the inflectional endings in Italian nouns and adjectives

Journal: 

Frontiers in Psychology - Special Issue: Implications of Psycho-computational Modelling for Morphological Theory

Date: 

October, 2021

Inflectional values, such as singular and plural, sustain agreementrelations between constituents in sentences, allowing sentence parsing and prediction in online processing. Ideally, these processes would be facilitated by a consistent and transparent correspondence between  the  inflectional values and their form: for example, the value of plural should always be expressed by the same ending, and that ending should only express plural. Experimental research reports higher processing costs in presence of a non-transparent relation between endings and values.

Multi-lab direct replication of Flavell, Beach and Chinsky (1966): Spontaneous verbal rehearsal in a memory task as a function of age

Journal: 

Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science

Date: 

April, 2021

This is a large-scale, multi-lab replication effort in which we assessed the original data by Flavell, Beach and Chinsky (1966) showing that older children (10yo) spontaneously verbalise during working memory tasks, contrary to younger children (5yo). The original pattern of results was largely upheld: older children were more likely to verbalize, and their memory spans improved. We confirmed that 5- and 6-year-old children who verbalized recalled more than children who did not verbalize. However, unlike Flavell et al., substantial proportions of our 5- and 6-year-old samples overtly verbalized at least sometimes during the picture memory task.

This work was led by Emily Elliott, Candice Morey and Angela AuBuchon, and involved 17 different labs. All data, analyses and the manuscript itself are available at the Open Science Framework.

Brain Network Reconfiguration for Narrative and Argumentative Thought

Journal: 

Communications Biology

Date: 

March, 2021

In this work, we test the neural basis of the understanding of narrative and argumentative thought via inter-subject correlational measures in fMRI. We find that both kinds of thought enhance functional couplings within the frontoparietal control system. However, while a narrative specifically implicates the default mode system, an argument specifically induces synchronization between the intraparietal sulcus and multiple perisylvian areas in the language system.

Does morphological structure modulate access to embedded word meaning in child readers?

Journal: 

Memory & Cognition

Date: 

March, 2021

In this paper, we ask whether children's ability to access the meaning of embedded words is modulated by morphology, and in particular by the presence of a pseudosuffix (e.g., CORN in CORNER vs. PEA in PEACE; Nation and Cocksey, 2009). We replicate N&C's results that children do access the meaning of embedded words quite early on (in 3rd grade here). We also find a morphological effect -- the effect is larger in CORNER than in PEACE -- but only in the error rates, not in response times. We take these data to suggest that there is access to semantic informaton for subword chunks early on during reading acquisition, at least when the task is semantic in nature (like it was in this experiment). Morphology seems to kick in more at the level of strategic decison making (i.e., errors) rather than in connection to the implicit information processing stream (i.e., RTs). For a similar experiment with adults, check out here.

The article is available online here https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01164-3 or as a PDF here https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/s13421-021-01164-3.pdf. The raw data and the analysis code are here.

 

No fruits without color: Cross-modal priming and eeg reveal different roles for different features across semantic categories

Journal: 

PLoS ONE

Date: 

March, 2021

In this study, we explore the effects of a manipulation of a visual sensory (i.e., color) or functional (i.e., orientation) feature on the consequential semantic processing of fruits and vegetables (and tools, by comparison), first at the behavioral and then at the neural level (ERP). Behaviourally, we observed a reduction in priming for color-modified natural entities and orientation-modified artificial entities. In the ERP data for natural entities, an N400 effect was observed for the color-modified condition compared relative to normal and orientation condition. Conversely, there was no significant difference between conditions for the artificial category. These findings provide strong evidence that color is an integral property to the categorization of fruits/vegetables, thus substantiating the claim that feature-based processing guides ­ as a function of semantic category.

The paper is now in production at PLoS ONE and will be availble at the journal soon.

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