The action dynamics of native and non-native speakers of English in processing active and passive sentences
This study investigates processing of passive and active constructions between native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) of
English using traditional on-line mechanisms such as response time in conjunction with techniques that capitalize on the parallel activation
of distributed mental representations during online syntactic processing. In the current study, hand motions captured by a mouse-tracking
system were used to index listeners’ cognitive processes while making commitments to different choice alternatives during the processing of
English passive and active structures. During data collection, 57 NNS and 43 NS carried out an aural forced-choice picture identification
task. Data analysis indicated differences and similarities between NS and NNS participants such that NS participants are faster at
responding to passive and active stimuli, travel less distance, and make fewer directional changes when compared to NNS participants.
However, all participants showed similar trends for passive processing, suggesting comparable difficulties in processing passive
constructions.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Syntactic processing of passive constructions
- 3.Language processing and action dynamics: Methodological advantages
- 4.Current study
- 5.Method
- 5.1Participants
- 5.2Materials and study design
- 5.3Apparatus and procedure
- 5.4Mouse-trajectory properties
- Latency time
- Motion time
- Velocity (max and max onset)
- Distance
- Area under the curve (AUC)
- Directional change
- 6.Data analyses
- 7.Results
- 8.Summary
- 9.Discussion
- 10.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Note
-
References
References
Abrams, R., & Balota, D.
(
1991)
Mental chronometry: Beyond reaction time.
Psychological Science, 21, 153–157.
Barca, L., & Pezzulo, G.
(
2012)
Unfolding Visual Lexical Decision in Time.
PLoS ONE, 7(4), e35932.
Bates, D., Maechler, M., & Bolker, B.
(
2014)
lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using s4 classes.
R package version 3.3.2.
Bates, E., & MacWhinney, B.
(
1989)
Functionalism and the Competition Model. (pp. 3–73) In
B. MacWhinney and
E. Bates (Eds.),
The Crosslinguistic Study of Sentence Processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University press.
Bencini, G., & Valian, V.
(
2008)
Abstract sentence representation in 3-year-olds: Evidence from language production and comprehension.
Journal of Memory and Language, 591, 97–113.
Benedet, M., Christiansen, J., & Goodglass, H.
(
1996)
A crosslinguistic study of grammatical morphology in Spanish and English speaking agrammatic patients.
Cortex, 341, 309–336,
Blanco-Gomez, M. L.
(
2002)
Hiding the agent in English and Spanish newspaper articles. In
J. Marin Arrese (Ed.).
Conceptualization of events in newspaper discourse. 9–30, Madrid: Universidad Complutense.
Bock, K.
(
1986)
Syntactic persistence in language production.
Cognitive Psychology, 181, 355–387.
Brown & P. Hagoort
Eds.
The neurocognition of language pp. 83 122 Oxford Oxford University Press
Coco, M. I., & Duran, N. D.
(
2016)
When expectations collide: Action dynamics reveal the interaction between stimulus plausibility and congruency.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 231, 1920–1931.
Coco, M. I. & Duran, N. D.
(
2015)
Mousetrack: Mouse-Tracking Measures from Trajectory Data. R package version 1.0.0
Cohen, J.
(
1988)
Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates.
Dale, R., Kehoe, C., & Spivey, M. J.
(
2007)
Graded motor responses in the time course of categorizing atypical exemplars.
Memory & Cognition, 35(1), 15–28.
Dale, R., Snyder, K., Mccall, R., & Sporns, O.
(
2008)
Exploring Action Dynamics as an Index of Paired-Associate Learning.
PLoS ONE, 3(3), e1728.
Dale, R., & Duran, N. D.
(
2011)
The cognitive dynamics of negated sentence verification.
Cognitive Science, 351, 983–996.
Duran, N. D., Dale, R., & McNamara, D. S.
(
2010)
The action dynamics of overcoming the truth.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 171, 486–491.
Duran, N. D., & Dale, R.
(
2014)
Perspective-taking in dialogue as self-organization under social constraints.
New Ideas in Psychology, 321, 131–146.
Diessel, H.
(
2004)
The acquisition of complex sentences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Farmer, T. A., Anderson, S. E., & Spivey, M. J.
(
2007)
Gradiency and visual context in syntactic garden-paths.
Journal of Memory & Language, 571, 570–595.
Ferreira, F.
(
2003)
The misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences.
Cognitive Psychology, 471, 164–203.
Freeman, J. B., & Ambady, N.
(
2010)
MouseTracker: Software for studying real-time mental processing using a computer mouse-tracking method,
Behavior Research Methods, 42 (1), 226–241.
Freeman, J. B., Dale, R., & Farmer, T. A.
(
2011)
Hand in motion reveals mind in motion.
Frontiers in Psychology, 21, 59.
Gold, J. I., & Shadlen, M. N.
(
2001)
Neural computations that underlie decisions about sensory stimuli.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 51, 10–16.
Hehman, E., Stolier, R. M., & Freeman, J. B.
(
2015)
Advanced mouse-tracking analytic techniques for enhancing psychological science.
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 18(3), 384–401.
Incera, S., & McLennan, C. T.
(
2016)
Mouse tracking reveals that bilinguals behave like experts.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 191, 610–620.
Johnson, P. C.
(
2014)
Extension of Nakagawa & Schielzeth’s R2GLMM to random slopes models.
Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 5(9), 944–946.
Kim, Y., & McDonough, K.
(
2016)
Prime Repetition and Korean EFL Learners’ Comprehension and Production of Passives.
International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 541, 319–346.
Kim, Y., & McDonough, K.
(
2008)
Learners’ production of passives during syntactic priming activities.
Applied Linguistics, 291, 149–154.
Koop, G. J., & Johnson, J. G.
(
2011)
Response dynamics: A new window on the decision process.
Judgment and Decision Making, 61, 750–758.
Kuperberg, G. R., Kreher, D. A., Sitnikova, T., Caplan, D. N., & Holcomb, P. J.
(
2007)
The role of animacy and thematic relationships in processing active English sentences: Evidence from event-related potentials.
Brain and language, 100(3), 223–237.
MacWhinney, B., & Bates, E.
(Eds.) (
1989)
The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Magnuson, J.
(
2005)
Moving hand reveals dynamics of thought.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102(29), 9995–9996.
Marinis, T.
(
2007)
On-line processing of passives in L1 and L2 children. In
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA), (pp. 265–276),
Belikova, A.,
Meroni, L., &
Umeda, M. (Eds.). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Marchman, V., Bates, E., Burkardt, A. & Good, A.
(
1991)
Functional constraints of the acquisition of the passive : Toward a model of the competence to perform.
First Language, 111, 65–92.
McKinstry, C., Dale, R., & Spivey, M. J.
(
2008)
Action Dynamics Reveal Parallel Competition in Decision Making.
Psychological Science, 19(1), 22–24.
Messenger, K., Branigan, H., & McLean, J.
(
2012)
Is children’s acquisition of the passive a staged process? Evidence from six and nine year olds’ production of passives,
Journal of Child Language, 391, 991–1016,
Mirman, D.
(
2014)
Growth Curve Analysis and Visualization Using R. Taylor & Francis.
Morett, L. M., & Macwhinney, B.
(
2012)
Syntactic transfer in English-speaking Spanish learners.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 161, 132–151.
O’Hora, D., Dale, R., Piiroinen, P. T., & Connolly, F.
(
2013)
Local dynamics in decision making: The evolution of preference within and across decisions.
Scientific Reports, 31, 1–9.
Song, J. H., & Nakayama, K.
(
2006)
Role of focal attention on latencies and trajectories of visually guided manual pointing.
Journal of Vision, 61, 982–995.
Song, J. H., and Nakayama, K.
(
2009)
Hidden cognitive states revealed in choice reaching tasks.
Trends in Cognitive Science, 131, 360–366.
Spivey, M. J., Grosjean, M., & Knoblich, G.
(
2005)
Continuous attraction toward phonological competitors.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1021, 10393–10398.
Spivey, M. J., & Dale, R.
(
2006)
Continuous dynamics in real-time cognition.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(5), 207–211.
Tabatabaeian, M., Dale, R., & Duran, N. D.
(
2015)
Self-serving dishonest decisions can show facilitated cognitive dynamics.
Cognitive Processing, 161, 291–300.
Tipper, S. P., Howard, L. A., & Houghton, G.
(
1998)
Action-based mechanisms of attention.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 3531, 1385–1393.
van der Wel, R. P. R. D., Sebanz, N., & Knoblich, G.
(
2014)
Do people automatically track others’ beliefs? Evidence from a continuous measure.
Cognition, 130(1), 128–133.
West, M.
(
1953)
A General Service List of English Words, London: Longman
Wojnowicz, M. T., Ferguson, M. J., Dale, R., & Spivey, M. J.
(
2009)
The Self-Organization of Explicit Attitudes.
Psychological Science, 20(11), 1428–1435.
Yu, Z., Wang, F., Wang, D., & Bastin, M.
(
2012)
Beyond reaction times: Incorporating mouse-tracking measures into the implicit association test to examine its underlying process.
Social Cognition, 30(3), 289–306.
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Ferguson, Ashley M., Jennifer M. Roche & Hayley S. Arnold
2019.
Social Judgments of Digitally Manipulated Stuttered Speech: An Evaluation of Self-Disclosure on Cognition.
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 62:11
► pp. 3986 ff.
Nuzzo, Regina L.
2020.
Principles for Writing about Quantitative Research.
PM&R 12:4
► pp. 420 ff.
Rivollier, Guillaume, Jean-Charles Quinton, Corentin Gonthier & Annique Smeding
2021.
Looking with the (computer) mouse: How to unveil problem-solving strategies in matrix reasoning without eye-tracking.
Behavior Research Methods 53:3
► pp. 1081 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.