TY - JOUR
T1 - Experimental filler design influences error correction rates in a word restoration paradigm
AU - Arehalli, Suhas
AU - Wittenberg, Eva
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Suhas Arehalli and Eva Wittenberg, published by De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston 2021.
PY - 2021/1/1
Y1 - 2021/1/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - error correction
KW - experimental design
KW - expletives
KW - filler structure
KW - psycholinguistics
KW - replication
KW - subject deletion
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85114677837&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1515/lingvan-2020-0052
DO - 10.1515/lingvan-2020-0052
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85114677837
SN - 2199-174X
VL - 7
JO - Linguistics Vanguard
JF - Linguistics Vanguard
IS - 1
M1 - 20200052
ER -