Journal of memory and language最新文献

Language models that match reader experience are better predictors of reading times 与读者体验相匹配的语言模型可以更好地预测阅读时间

IF 3 1区心理学

Journal of memory and language Pub Date : 2025-10-03 DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2025.104677

Iza Škrjanec , Vera Demberg

{"title":"Language models that match reader experience are better predictors of reading times","authors":"Iza Škrjanec , Vera Demberg","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104677","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104677","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Humans differ in the language experience that they accumulate, due to differing interests, reading habits and profession. This experience can be expected to affect their linguistic expectations when reading texts from domains that are very familiar to them. The present article explores whether language models trained to match the experience of readers produce surprisal estimates that more accurately predict the reading times of those readers than the usually employed general language models. We use a German eye-tracking corpus of biology and physics students reading expository texts from these domains. We adapt a neural language model to the experience of these two groups of readers via two domain adaptation methods and varying amounts of training data. The evaluation against one early and two late reading measures suggests that aligning language models with the readers’ experience to predict the processing effort results in a better fit on late measures than using a model with a high linguistic accuracy. Our findings highlight the opportunities for exploring the cognitive plausibility of language models with respect to psychological constructs.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"146 ","pages":"Article 104677"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145221311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Predicting words across languages depends on language context: Evidence from visual world eye-tracking 跨语言预测单词依赖于语言语境：来自视觉世界眼球追踪的证据

IF 3 1区心理学

Journal of memory and language Pub Date : 2025-10-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2025.104701

Huanhuan Yin, Martin J. Pickering

{"title":"Predicting words across languages depends on language context: Evidence from visual world eye-tracking","authors":"Huanhuan Yin, Martin J. Pickering","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104701","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104701","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>There is good evidence that monolingual comprehenders can predict the form of upcoming words, and also that bilinguals often activate words from both languages in parallel during bottom-up language comprehension. But it is unclear whether bilinguals predict the form of upcoming words in the language that they are not hearing, and whether such predictions depend on whether or not they have recently encountered that language. We investigated these questions in two visual-world eye-tracking experiments by asking whether Mandarin Chinese (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals pre-activate Mandarin phonological representations of predictable words during English comprehension. Participants heard English sentences containing a highly predictable word while viewing a display. They fixated more on a competitor object whose Mandarin name was a homophone of the Mandarin translation of the predictable word than an unrelated object when both languages were used (Experiment 2) but not when just English was used (Experiment 1). Our findings suggest that bilinguals predict across languages when both languages are contextually relevant but not otherwise.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"146 ","pages":"Article 104701"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145221310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

A distinctive meaning makes a sentence memorable 一个独特的意思使一个句子令人难忘

IF 3 1区心理学

Journal of memory and language Pub Date : 2025-09-27 DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2025.104700

Thomas Hikaru Clark , Greta Tuckute , Bryan Medina , Evelina Fedorenko

{"title":"A distinctive meaning makes a sentence memorable","authors":"Thomas Hikaru Clark , Greta Tuckute , Bryan Medina , Evelina Fedorenko","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104700","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104700","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Prior work on visual memory has suggested that humans have a high-capacity but imperfect memory: image representations accumulate noise over time, which makes similar images confusable. This account – the <em>noisy representation hypothesis</em> – was recently extended to the verbal domain: in line with past evidence that words are encoded in memory by their meanings, it was shown that words with distinctive meanings are most memorable. Here, we leverage recent advances in natural language processing to ask whether the same holds true for compositional linguistic stimuli — sentences. In a recognition memory experiment with responses from 443 participants to 2500 six-word-long target sentences, we found that a sentence’s semantic distinctiveness – as estimated through contextual representations from a large language model – predicts the accuracy and speed of its recognition. These effects were observed for both intrinsic sentence memorability (distinctiveness of a sentence relative to a large corpus of sentences) and contextual memorability (distinctiveness relative to recently encountered sentences in the experiment), and cannot be reduced to properties of the sentence’s constituent words. Our findings suggest that sentence memorability, similar to image and word memorability, is related to meaning distinctiveness, thus extending the noisy representation hypothesis to compositional linguistic stimuli.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"146 ","pages":"Article 104700"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145155792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Task goals constrain the alignment in eye-movements and speech during interpersonal coordination 任务目标制约了人际协调过程中眼球运动和言语的一致性

IF 3 1区心理学

Journal of memory and language Pub Date : 2025-09-24 DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2025.104691

Alexia Galati , Rick Dale , Camila Alviar , Moreno I. Coco

{"title":"Task goals constrain the alignment in eye-movements and speech during interpersonal coordination","authors":"Alexia Galati , Rick Dale , Camila Alviar , Moreno I. Coco","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104691","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104691","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Collaborative task performance is assumed to benefit from interpersonal coordination between interacting individuals. Prominent views of language use and social behavior, including the Interactive Alignment Model (IAM; <span><span>Pickering & Garrod, 2004</span></span>), support this view by building on tasks that require monitoring a partner’s perspective (e.g., in route planning), proposing that behavioral alignment enables conceptual convergence. However, the role of alignment in tasks requiring complementarity (e.g., a “divide and conquer” strategy during joint visual search) remains underexplored. We address this gap by manipulating task goals (route planning vs. visual search) as forty dyads completed ten trials involving subway maps while their eye movements and speech were co-registered. We used Cross Recurrence Quantification Analysis (CRQA) to examine the temporal relationships between partners’ eye fixations and word sequences, generating measures that reveal similarity and dynamic coupling. Dyads exhibited more gaze alignment in route planning than visual search across a range of CRQA metrics. Gaze alignment also varied across the trial and related differently to accuracy: in visual search, greater alignment late in the trial predicted better performance. In speech, route planning prompted longer and more entropic word sequences, but lower overall recurrence than visual search. This finding suggests that the two modalities organize in a compensatory fashion to support distinct task demands. These results support a theoretical framework more general than IAM, in which interactive alignment emerges as a consequence of dynamic adaptation to task goals. Overall, task goals constrain how people coordinate behavior and offer insights into how collaborating partners distribute their multimodal contributions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"146 ","pages":"Article 104691"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145155791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

LLMs model how humans induce logically structured rules 法学硕士对人类如何归纳逻辑结构化规则进行建模

IF 3 1区心理学

Journal of memory and language Pub Date : 2025-09-12 DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2025.104675

Alyssa Loo , Ellie Pavlick , Roman Feiman

{"title":"LLMs model how humans induce logically structured rules","authors":"Alyssa Loo , Ellie Pavlick , Roman Feiman","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104675","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104675","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A central goal of cognitive science is to provide a computationally explicit account of both the structure of the mind and its development: what are the primitive representational building blocks of cognition, what are the rules via which those primitives combine, and where do these primitives and rules come from in the first place? A long-standing debate concerns the adequacy of artificial neural networks as computational models that can answer these questions, in particular in domains related to abstract cognitive function, such as language and logic. This paper argues that recent advances in neural networks – specifically, the advent of large language models (LLMs) – represent an important shift in this debate. We test a variety of LLMs on an existing experimental paradigm used for studying the induction of rules formulated over logical concepts. Across four experiments, we find converging empirical evidence that LLMs provide at least as good a fit to human behavior as models that implement a Bayesian probabilistic language of thought (pLoT), which have been the best computational models of human behavior on the same task. Moreover, we show that the LLMs make qualitatively different predictions about the nature of the rules that are inferred and deployed in order to complete the task, indicating that the LLM is unlikely to be a mere implementation of the pLoT solution. Based on these results, we argue that LLMs may instantiate a novel theoretical account of the primitive representations and computations necessary to explain human logical concepts, with which future work in cognitive science should engage.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"146 ","pages":"Article 104675"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145047508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Close enough isn’t good enough in word learning: successful cross-situational word mappings are semantically independent of previous mappings 在单词学习中，足够接近是不够的：成功的跨情景单词映射在语义上独立于之前的映射

IF 3 1区心理学

Journal of memory and language Pub Date : 2025-09-08 DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2025.104693

Alexander S. LaTourrette , Charles Yang , John Trueswell

{"title":"Close enough isn’t good enough in word learning: successful cross-situational word mappings are semantically independent of previous mappings","authors":"Alexander S. LaTourrette , Charles Yang , John Trueswell","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104693","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104693","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Children often encounter new words in referentially and semantically ambiguous environments. Thus, they will generally make many incorrect guesses about a word’s meaning before arriving at its correct meaning. Here, we asked whether these initial incorrect guesses might nevertheless be useful to learners by providing information about a word’s semantic neighborhood (e.g., if most guesses were food items, perhaps the word has a food-related meaning). To test this, we analyzed datasets from previous tasks in which adults guessed the word which caregivers uttered in interactions with their children. We first tested whether adults’ incorrect guesses are, indeed, semantically similar to the correct meaning. In Study 1, we established that learners’ incorrect guesses were semantically similar to the target word. We then asked whether adults successfully used these semantically similar guesses as “stepping-stones” to arrive at the correct meaning across exposures. Study 2 showed that overall, learners’ guesses were semantically consistent across exposures. However, this effect was small, and correct guesses were not judged to be similar to learners’ prior, incorrect guesses. Moreover, Study 3 revealed that semantically close-to-target guesses did not improve learners’ subsequent accuracy. Thus, even adult word learners fail to use semantic similarity in cross-situational word learning. Study 4 confirmed this result in a new word learning experiment: even for maximally similar meaning pairs, adults failed to generate thematically or taxonomically similar meanings across exposures. While learners’ incorrect guesses tend to be similar to the correct meaning, learners do not successfully use this information to learn words across exposures.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"146 ","pages":"Article 104693"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145011009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Corrigendum to “Individual differences in prospective and retrospective memory offloading” [J. Mem. Lang. 142 (2025) 104617 “前瞻性和回顾性记忆卸载的个体差异”[J]。Mem。Lang. 142 (2025) 104617

IF 3 1区心理学

Journal of memory and language Pub Date : 2025-08-30 DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2025.104692

Lauren L. Richmond , Lois K. Burnett , Julia Kearley , Sam J. Gilbert , Alexandra B. Morrison , B. Hunter Ball

引用次数: 0

Lexical tone is different and special: evidence from a speeded repeated production task 词汇语气的不同和特殊：证据来自于一个快速重复的生产任务

IF 3 1区心理学

Journal of memory and language Pub Date : 2025-08-16 DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2025.104690

Chuchu Li , Sin Hang Lau , Victor S. Ferreira

{"title":"Lexical tone is different and special: evidence from a speeded repeated production task","authors":"Chuchu Li , Sin Hang Lau , Victor S. Ferreira","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104690","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104690","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Priming experiments and speech error studies have found cross-linguistic differences in phonological encoding. Notably, the first selectable unit (the proximate unit) differs between English and Mandarin Chinese, with the former selecting segmental units like consonants (Cs) and vowels (Vs) first, while the latter selects syllables as a whole. Further, Mandarin Chinese is tonal, meaning the same syllable is a different word depending on the tone it is spoken with. However, it remains unclear how tone is represented and processed during phonological encoding in speech production – attached to the vowel or CV, or processed independently. Across three experiments, we investigated these questions by measuring how quickly speakers produced sequences of tone-bearing CV syllables. Unlike English, speed of production was not directly linked to plan reuse (see <span><span>Sevald & Dell, 1994</span></span>). Instead, speech rate was robustly faster when each CV was produced with only one tone (i.e., about equal speech rate for ba2 di1 da1 bi2 and ba1 ba1 ba1 ba1), compared to when a particular CV was produced with more than one tone (i.e., slower speech rate for ba1 ba2 ba1 ba2). We suggest that Mandarin speakers represent CVs as syllable “chunks,” integrating tone—a part of the structural frame with the CV (rather than a vowel), and producing the same CV with more than one tone in a sequence is difficult as a result of needing to reassign different tones to the same CV chunk.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"145 ","pages":"Article 104690"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144858438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Hierarchical prediction in toddlers: Semantic and phonological development 幼儿的等级预测：语义和语音发展

IF 3 1区心理学

Journal of memory and language Pub Date : 2025-08-14 DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2025.104688

Armando Quetzalcóatl Angulo-Chavira, Alejandra Mitzi Castellón-Flores, Natalia Arias-Trejo

{"title":"Hierarchical prediction in toddlers: Semantic and phonological development","authors":"Armando Quetzalcóatl Angulo-Chavira, Alejandra Mitzi Castellón-Flores, Natalia Arias-Trejo","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104688","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104688","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The predictive processing framework suggests that the brain generates semantic and phonological predictions to facilitate real-time language comprehension. While adults engage in both types of prediction, how these abilities develop in early childhood remains unclear. The present study explores the emergence of semantic and phonological predictions in toddlers aged 18, 24, and 30 months in three preferential looking experiments. Toddlers were presented with highly constrained sentence contexts paired with visual stimuli to assess their predictive abilities. Experiment 1 measured word prediction accuracy using predictable and unpredictable sentence conditions. Experiment 2 tested semantic prediction by introducing a semantic competitor, while Experiment 3 evaluated phonological prediction using phonologically similar competitors. Results showed that by 18 months, toddlers exhibited anticipatory looks toward the expected target. By 24 months, toddlers showed anticipatory looks toward not only the predictable target word but also toward semantically related items, and by 30 months, this pattern extended to phonologically related items. This developmental pattern—characterized by the earlier emergence of semantic relations followed by phonological relations—is consistent with the idea that semantic predictions provide a foundation for the subsequent development of phonological predictions. We discuss the data considering different prediction mechanisms, such as hierarchical predictive coding, prediction-by-production, and prediction through associations; we propose that these mechanisms are complementary components of a unified predictive system.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"145 ","pages":"Article 104688"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144841635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

A lifetime of reading experience facilitates the perception of crowded letters 一生的阅读经历有助于感知拥挤的字母

IF 3 1区心理学

Journal of memory and language Pub Date : 2025-08-13 DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2025.104689

Kurt Winsler, Steven J. Luck

{"title":"A lifetime of reading experience facilitates the perception of crowded letters","authors":"Kurt Winsler, Steven J. Luck","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104689","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104689","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Visual perception is ordinarily impaired for objects that are tightly crowded by other objects. This might be expected to make reading very difficult given that letters are tightly crowded together within words. However, a lifetime of reading experience may lead to changes in visual processing that reduce the effects of crowding on letters. Study 1 examined this hypothesis experimentally by comparing crowding thresholds (measured as the closest spacing that yields recognition accuracy of 82% correct) for upright letters, inverted letters, and Gabor patches in 60 experienced readers of English. We found that crowding thresholds were reduced for upright letters compared to other stimuli classes, especially for stimuli close to the fovea. In other words, experienced readers could tolerate closer spacing for highly familiar upright letters than for less familiar types of stimuli. Crowding thresholds were also reduced to the right of fixation, matching the left-to-right direction of English reading. Study 2 measured crowding in 250 observers and asked whether individual differences in proxies of reading experience were associated with reduced crowding. We found that higher scores on these proxy measures were associated with lower crowding thresholds for upright letters, especially in the right visual field. These results provide evidence that a lifetime of reading experience alters aspects of visual perception, such that upright letters can be perceived under more-crowded conditions than other stimuli. At a practical level, this means that deleterious effects of letter crowding are significantly reduced for experienced readers, which has implications for both models of visual crowding and reading.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"145 ","pages":"Article 104689"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144829503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0