Journal of memory and language最新文献

{"title":"Memory retrieval and prediction interact in sentence comprehension: An experimental evaluation of a cue-based retrieval model","authors":"Elise Oltrogge ,&nbsp;João Veríssimo ,&nbsp;Umesh Patil ,&nbsp;Sol Lago","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104651","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104651","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Memory retrieval and prediction are typically studied separately, so little is known about their interaction. To address this gap, we studied a construction known to simultaneously trigger antecedent retrieval and possessee prediction processes: German possessive pronouns. We examined the comprehension of possessive pronouns using eye-tracking and computational modeling. Specifically, we chose an existing cue-based retrieval model that formalized prediction as a memory retrieval process. We used the model to generate predicted fixation patterns for a novel linguistic configuration, which replaced the possessive pronoun with an indefinite determiner. This allowed maintaining the prediction process—as German determiners agree in gender with a following noun—while effectively removing the antecedent retrieval process—as indefinite determiners, unlike pronouns, do not presuppose but rather introduce a new discourse referent. The eye-tracking results showed that participants’ predictions were affected by similarity-based interference, a well-known marker of memory processes. However, the timecourse of the novel determiner condition was different than predicted by the computational model. To better capture the behavioral data, we extended the model by introducing a process motivated by the semantics of indefinite determiners. Our results support the claim that linguistic predictions can be formalized as feature-driven processes that operate on representations shared by predictive and retrieval mechanisms.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"144 ","pages":"Article 104651"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144166685","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}

{"title":"Serial position effects in spoken word production are determined by previous context: Evidence from aphasia","authors":"Andrew Olson ,&nbsp;Claudia Galluzzi ,&nbsp;Ivana Bureca ,&nbsp;Cristina Romani","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104652","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104652","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Organising and producing a <em>sequence</em> of events is a basic human cognitive capacity. It occurs across a wide variety of domains including speech, writing, memory, planning and almost every type of skilled action. Errors involving sequences have been widely studied and often present two kinds of profiles: performance either declines across positions or it declines and then improves in the final positions (a U-shaped pattern). Studies of errors in aphasia have also reported these patterns with letters (in spelling) or phonemes (in speech). Another pattern, with more difficulty initiating speech, has been reported in apraxia of speech. Contrasting declines and increases in performance, however, have not been described in studies using the same methodology and evidence of performance linearly improving is very limited. We document all three patterns using statistical models in a case series of 23 people with aphasia (PwA) who make speech errors when repeating single words. We found that the declining pattern and the U-shape patterns occurred across patients, independent of whether their main impairment was a phonological impairment or apraxia of speech. Only people with apraxia of speech, however, showed the inverse pattern of linearly improving performance. Upward and downward patterns were not the consequence of a general factor like severity. Importantly, further exploration with statistical models revealed that phoneme position in the word was not, in fact, the dominant factor determining the visual patterns. Instead, performance was determined by either the number of previous errors (for declining performance) or the number of previous phonemes correct (for improving performance). Errors were almost never governed by serial position or word length <em>per se</em>. Our results support an important role for evolving context in the serial production mechanisms supporting single word production and we discuss implications for current models of speech production and, more generally, for models of serial performance. We suggest that temporary retention of novel sequences may rely more on an explicit representation of position, while stored articulatory representations may benefit from a contextual format (of the chaining type) where activation of previous units helps to support retrieval of units further along in the sequence.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"144 ","pages":"Article 104652"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144138452","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}

{"title":"Bigger is not always better: The importance of human-scale language modeling for psycholinguistics","authors":"Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox ,&nbsp;Michael Y. Hu ,&nbsp;Aaron Mueller ,&nbsp;Alex Warstadt ,&nbsp;Leshem Choshen ,&nbsp;Chengxu Zhuang ,&nbsp;Adina Williams ,&nbsp;Ryan Cotterell ,&nbsp;Tal Linzen","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104650","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104650","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>When trained to place high probability on a training corpus, neural network language models can learn a surprising amount about language. Recent work has demonstrated that large performance improvements can arise from simply increasing, i.e., scaling, the size of the corpora they are trained on and the number of parameters in those models. Accordingly, many contemporary systems are trained on trillions of words. While largely beneficial to performance on language applications, scaling has several downsides for both computational psycholinguistics and natural language processing research. We discuss the scientific challenges presented by the scaling paradigm, as well as the benefits that would result from language models that can learn from human-scale data. In the second half of this paper, we report on findings from a recent effort to bring about human-scale language model pretraining: the first iteration of the BabyLM Challenge, a shared task organized by the authors that invited participants to train a language model on 100 million words or less. The challenge produced several concrete best practices for practitioners interested in small-scale language modeling. For cognitive scientists, the challenge demonstrated that robust linguistic generalizations can be learned by models trained on a human-scale dataset, though this is not yet achieved through cognitively plausible mechanisms. Furthermore, it established a population of “BabyLMs” that are all effective at data-efficient language learning. Studying such models can help us identify hypotheses for the computational mechanisms that underlie human language acquisition.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"144 ","pages":"Article 104650"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144124437","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}

{"title":"Uncovering patterns of semantic predictability in sentence processing","authors":"Cassandra L. Jacobs ,&nbsp;Ryan J. Hubbard ,&nbsp;Loïc Grobol ,&nbsp;Kara D. Federmeier","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104653","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104653","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Psycholinguistic researchers often collect cloze probabilities in order to measure the predictability of upcoming words but have largely discarded the variability in the structure of responses people provide. This variability in the semantic structure of responses may be important for understanding selection during language production; however, it has proven difficult to model the semantic variability of participants’ responses, and thus upcoming semantic uncertainty. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) permit us to approximate the degree of semantic variability in cloze responses, but most methods are restricted to symbolic or hand-crafted meaning representations. We show in two studies that Bayesian Gaussian mixture models can cluster LLM representations of participants’ responses and produce coherent, taxonomically similar clusters. We apply these clustering algorithms to response time data in a serial cloze task and show that the semantic structure of cloze responses influences how quickly people are able to provide a response. We show clear effects of semantic competition on production speed. In addition to providing novel operationalizations of what semantic competition might look like in the cloze task, we explain how this clustering method is extensible to other datasets and applications of interest to researchers of semantic processing in psycholinguistics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"144 ","pages":"Article 104653"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144124438","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}

{"title":"The interplay of animacy and thematic role in structural persistence","authors":"Kumiko Fukumura","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104643","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104643","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Models of human sentence production often propose a clear distinction between syntactic and semantic processes. We examined this assumption by investigating the interaction between animacy and thematic roles in active–passive structural priming. Study 1 found that the active or passive structure of a preceding sentence (<em>prime</em>) influenced structural choice in a subsequent sentence (<em>target</em>). This priming effect increased when the prime and target sentences shared the same animacy features in their thematic roles, which affected the persistence of the prime subject’s animacy. While verb repetition enhanced active–passive priming, the persistence of the prime subject’s animacy was not affected by lexical repetition. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that repeated animacy features in the thematic roles increase the likelihood of preserving both the thematic role order of the prime (e.g., maintaining the agent-first order in <em>It was the thief that chased the lorry</em>) and its argument structure (e.g., assigning the agent as the subject) in English cleft constructions. In Japanese declarative sentences, where particles indicate the sentential topic, the repeated animacy features strengthened argument structure persistence but not the persistence of thematic role order. These findings suggest that thematic role animacy repetition boosts structural priming by reinforcing thematic emphasis.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"144 ","pages":"Article 104643"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144108075","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}

{"title":"Fluid intelligence correlates with working memory capacity for both real-world objects and simple-feature stimuli","authors":"Yong Hoon Chung,&nbsp;Kaira K. Shlipak,&nbsp;Viola S. Störmer","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104648","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104648","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Previous research has shown that individual differences in visual working memory performance strongly correlate with measures of fluid intelligence. In these studies, visual working memory was assessed using simple feature stimuli, such as oriented lines or colored squares, as traditionally done. However, recent studies have shown that working memory performance is higher for meaningful stimuli (i.e., real-world objects) relative to simple features. How does working memory capacity for real-world objects relate to fluid intelligence? To test this, participants (103 young adults) completed different visual working memory tasks that used images of real-world objects or simple colored circles as well as fluid and crystallized intelligence tests. The results showed reliable correlations between all working memory tasks and fluid intelligence scores, and no significant differences between these correlations across stimulus types. Interestingly, fluid intelligence scores were correlated with the difference in working memory performance between real-world objects and colored circles, suggesting that the increase in working memory capacity for meaningful stimuli relates to fluid intelligence abilities. Working memory performance was not reliably correlated with crystallized intelligence in any of the tasks. Collectively, these findings suggest that maintaining real-world objects and colored circles largely rely on shared cognitive processes that may, in part, underlie individual differences in fluid intelligence.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104648"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144070420","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}

{"title":"Dissociable frequency effects attenuate as large language model surprisal predictors improve","authors":"Byung-Doh Oh ,&nbsp;William Schuler","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104645","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104645","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recent psycholinguistic modeling work using surprisal from Transformer-based language models has reported separable effects of frequency and predictability on real-time processing difficulty. However, it has also been shown that as Transformer-based language models become larger and are trained on more data, they are able to predict low-frequency words more accurately, which has a deleterious effect on fit to reading times. This article examines the impact of this property of language models on the dissociability of frequency effects and predictability effects in naturalistic reading. Regression results show robust positive effects of language model size and training data amount on the ability of word frequency to explain variance in held-out reading times as the contribution due to surprisal declines, which suggests a strong compensatory relationship between frequency and language model surprisal. Additionally, an analysis of the learning trajectories of low-frequency tokens reveals that the influence of model size is strongest on the prediction of tokens that are not part of a bigram sequence observed earlier in the context that models can readily copy, which suggests that limitations in model size create pressures toward learning more general associations. Taken together, these results suggest that the observed frequency effects may be due to imperfect estimates of predictability, and may disappear entirely as better-fitting language models are discovered. This further highlights the importance of exploring additional language models as models of human sentence processing.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104645"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143943651","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}

{"title":"Planning competing values of a single phonological feature vs. planning values for multiple features","authors":"Kevin D. Roon ,&nbsp;D.H. Whalen","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104642","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104642","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We tested the hypothesis that phonological planning takes longer when two possible utterances differ in incompatible, inherently mutually exclusive values of a single feature (e.g., voiced vs. unvoiced, a dental vs. alveolar tongue-tip constriction) compared to when two possible utterances differ in values for features that are not inherently mutually exclusive (e.g., a tongue-tip constriction vs. a labial constriction). Verbal acoustic latencies from a cue-response task were analyzed. When the mutually exclusive feature value was voicing in plosive-intial utterances, latencies were in fact shorter than when articulator was unknown, contra expectation. When the mutually exclusive feature value was voicing in fricative-intial utterances, there was no reliable difference in latencies. When the mutually exclusive feature value was tongue-tip constriction location, latency differences were as expected, albeit marginally. These results suggest that the notion of inherently mutually exclusive feature values requires further refinement, and may depend on specific aspects of phonological representation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104642"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143906278","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}

{"title":"Orthographic-Semantic consistency effects in lexical decision: What types of neighbors are responsible for the Effects?","authors":"Yasushi Hino ,&nbsp;Debra Jared ,&nbsp;Stephen J. Lupker","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104646","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104646","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recent research (e.g., Marelli &amp; Amenta, 2018; Siegelman, Rueckl, Lo, Kearns, Morris &amp; Compton, 2022) has demonstrated a significant orthographic-semantic (O-S) consistency effect on lexical decision performance. Specifically, lexical decision latencies were faster for words with a consistent O-S relationship than for words that do not have a consistent O-S relationship, with consistency being defined in terms of the semantics of those words’ “orthographic neighbors”. Interestingly, however, the words assumed to be orthographic neighbors were different across the studies and, therefore, different factors may have been at work in the two situations. In order to more closely examine the origin of O-S consistency effects in lexical decision tasks, we first attempted to replicate both of those results. Then, we examined O-S consistency effects based on addition (e.g., cats-CAT, pant-PAN), substitution (e.g., cot-CAT, pin-PAN) and deletion (seat-SAT, road-ROD) neighbors separately for mono-morphemic English words in both the datasets used in the previous studies and, based on the former two neighbor types, in a lexical decision experiment. Throughout our data analyses, we observed that addition neighbors play an important role in producing an O-S consistency effect in lexical decision performance. In contrast, we failed to observe a significant O-S consistency effect when consistencies were computed based only on the substitution (or deletion) neighbors. Because addition neighbors involve many morphologically-related neighbors, we further examined the roles that morphologically-related and unrelated neighbors play in producing the O-S consistency effect. Those analyses revealed that the O-S consistency effect for addition neighbors is largely produced by the combination of a processing advantage when a word has many morphologically-related neighbors and a processing disadvantage when a word has many morphologically-unrelated neighbors. More broadly, this research demonstrates that readers pick up on the statistical relationships between spelling and meaning.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104646"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143906279","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}

{"title":"Hearing a code-switch increases bilinguals’ attention to and memory for information","authors":"Lauren K. Salig ,&nbsp;Jorge R. Valdés Kroff ,&nbsp;L. Robert Slevc ,&nbsp;Jared M. Novick","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104647","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104647","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In conversation with each other, bilinguals sometimes code-switch between their shared languages. While psycholinguistic research often highlights the challenges of processing code-switches compared to single-language utterances, bilinguals seem to navigate code-switching with ease. Alongside empirical evidence that code-switching does not always disrupt comprehension in natural contexts, this raises intriguing questions about the potential benefits of code-switching. We propose that code-switching enhances bilingual listeners’ attention to the speech signal, improving the encoding and memory of linguistic messages near the switch. In Experiment 1, Spanish-English bilinguals listened to code-switched and single-language stories, occasionally reported their attention levels, and later answered comprehension questions. They reported greater attention to and demonstrated increased memory for code-switched content. Experiment 2 tested whether this attentional effect was simply due to the saliency of language changes by having English-speaking monolinguals complete the same task. Although monolinguals showed better memory when reporting higher attention, they did not show increased attention following code-switches. These findings suggest that bilinguals’ experience with the communicative contexts in which code-switches typically occur enables them to focus their attention on speech content during a code-switch, aiding in their collection and retention of that content over time.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104647"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143898622","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}