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Wednesday, April 21, 2021
Video recording of my talk at Stanford (April 20, 2021)
Tuesday, April 20, 2021
New paper in Cognitive Science (open access): A Computational Evaluation of Two Models of Retrieval Processes in Sentence Processing in Aphasia
An exciting new paper by my PhD student Paula Lissón
Download from here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cogs.12956
Code and data: https://osf.io/kdjqz/
Title: A Computational Evaluation of Two Models of Retrieval Processes in Sentence Processing in Aphasia
Authors: Paula Lissón, Dorothea Pregla, Bruno Nicenboim, Dario Paape, Mick L. van het Nederend, Frank Burchert, Nicole Stadie, David Caplan, Shravan Vasishth
Abstract:
Can sentence comprehension impairments in aphasia be explained by difficulties arising from dependency completion processes in parsing? Two distinct models of dependency completion difficulty are investigated, the Lewis and Vasishth (2005) activation‐based model and the direct‐access model (DA; McElree, 2000). These models' predictive performance is compared using data from individuals with aphasia (IWAs) and control participants. The data are from a self‐paced listening task involving subject and object relative clauses. The relative predictive performance of the models is evaluated using k‐fold cross‐validation. For both IWAs and controls, the activation‐based model furnishes a somewhat better quantitative fit to the data than the DA model. Model comparisons using Bayes factors show that, assuming an activation‐based model, intermittent deficiencies may be the best explanation for the cause of impairments in IWAs, although slowed syntax and lexical delayed access may also play a role. This is the first computational evaluation of different models of dependency completion using data from impaired and unimpaired individuals. This evaluation develops a systematic approach that can be used to quantitatively compare the predictions of competing models of language processing.
Sunday, April 18, 2021
New paper (to appear in Open Mind):
A postdoc in our lab, Dario Paape, has had a paper accepted in the MIT Press open access journal Open Mind, which is one of the few serious open access journals available as an outlet for psycholinguists (another is Glossa Psycholinguistics). Unlike many of the so-called open access journals out there, Open Mind is a credible journal, not least because of its editorial board (the editor in chief is none other than Ted Gibson). The review process was as or more thoughtful and more thorough than I have experience in journals like Journal of Memory and Language (definitely a notch over Cognition). I am hopeful that we as a community can break free from these for-profit publishers and move towards open access journals like Open Mind and Glossa Psycholinguistics.
Download preprint from here: https://psyarxiv.com/2ztgw/
Title: Does local coherence lead to targeted regressions and illusions of grammaticality?