Experimental filler design influences error correction rates in a word restoration paradigm

Suhas Arehalli, Eva Wittenberg*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

Including fillers or distractors in psycholinguistic experiments has been standard for decades; yet, relatively little is known how the design of these items interacts with critical manipulations. In this paper, we ask about the role that contextual statistical information in filler items plays in determining if and how to correct a given error, and how grammatical expectations interact with context. We first replicate a speech restoration experiment conducted by Mack, J. E., C. Clifton, L. Frazier & P. V. Taylor. 2012. (Not) hearing optional subjects: The effects of pragmatic usage preferences. Journal of Memory and Language 67. 211-223, measuring usage preferences of null-subject constructions. Then we report two additional experiments in which we manipulated only the filler items, either having noise appear uniformly at random, or with a particular bias. Our results (1) demonstrate that listeners are sensitive to statistical patterns in the distribution of noise within the experiment, and (2) suggest that this paradigm can be used to investigate interaction between the mechanisms that govern grammatical preferences, and those that govern error correction processes.

Original languageEnglish
Article number20200052
JournalLinguistics Vanguard
Volume7
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2021
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • error correction
  • experimental design
  • expletives
  • filler structure
  • psycholinguistics
  • replication
  • subject deletion

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