Verb biases are shaped through lifelong learning.

Verbs often participate in more than 1 syntactic structure, but individual verbs can be biased in terms of whether they are used more often with 1 structure or the other. For instance, in a sentence such as "Bop the bunny with the flower," the phrase "with the flower" is more likely to indicate an instrument with which to "bop," rather than which "bunny" to bop. Conversely, in a sentence such as "Choose the cow with the flower," the phrase "with the flower" is more likely to indicate which "cow" to choose. An open question is where these biases come from and whether they continue to be shaped in adulthood in a way that has lasting consequences for real-time processing of language. In Experiment 1 we replicated previous findings that these language-wide biases guide online syntactic processing in a computer-based visual-world paradigm. In Experiment 2, we tested the malleability of these biases by exposing adults to initially unbiased verbs situated in unambiguous contexts that led to either instrument or modifier interpretations. During test, participants interpreted sentences containing either modifier- or instrument-trained verbs in ambiguous contexts. Eye-movement and action data show that participants' considerations of the candidate interpretations of the ambiguous with-phrases were guided by the newly learned verb biases. These results suggest that co-occurrence information about specific verbs and syntactic structures embedded in language experiences plays a role in forming, and continuously shaping, the verb biases that constitute a part of the broader representation of the language. (PsycINFO Database Record

Listeners use speaker identity to access representations of spatial perspective during online language comprehension.

Little is known about how listeners represent another person's spatial perspective during language processing (e.g., two people looking at a map from different angles). Can listeners use contextual cues such as speaker identity to access a representation of the interlocutor's spatial perspective? In two eye-tracking experiments, participants received auditory instructions to move objects around a screen from two randomly alternating spatial perspectives (45° vs. 315° or 135° vs. 225° rotations from the participant's viewpoint). Instructions were spoken either by one voice, where the speaker's perspective switched at random, or by two voices, where each speaker maintained one perspective. Analysis of participant eye-gaze showed that interpretation of the instructions improved when each viewpoint was associated with a different voice. These findings demonstrate that listeners can learn mappings between individual talkers and viewpoints, and use these mappings to guide online language processing.

Perspective-taking in comprehension, production, and memory: An individual differences approach.

The ability to take a different perspective is central to a tremendous variety of higher level cognitive skills. To communicate effectively, we must adopt the perspective of another person both while speaking and listening. To ensure the successful retrieval of critical information in the future, we must adopt the perspective of our own future self and construct cues that will survive the passage of time. Here we explore the cognitive underpinnings of perspective-taking across a set of tasks that involve communication and memory, with an eye toward evaluating the proposal that perspective-taking is domain-general (e.g., Wardlow, 2013). We measured participants' perspective-taking ability in a language production task, a language comprehension task, and a memory task in which people generated their own cues for the future. Surprisingly, there was little variance common to the 3 tasks, a result that suggests that perspective-taking is not domain-general. Performance in the language production task was predicted by a measure of working memory, whereas performance in the cue-generation memory task was predicted by a combination of working memory and long-term memory measures. These results indicate that perspective-taking relies on differing cognitive capacities in different situations.

Do adults show a curse of knowledge in false-belief reasoning? A robust estimate of the true effect size.

Seven experiments use large sample sizes to robustly estimate the effect size of a previous finding that adults are more likely to commit egocentric errors in a false-belief task when the egocentric response is plausible in light of their prior knowledge. We estimate the true effect size to be less than half of that reported in the original findings. Even though we found effects in the same direction as the original, they were substantively smaller; the original study would have had less than 33% power to detect an effect of this magnitude. The influence of plausibility on the curse of knowledge in adults appears to be small enough that its impact on real-life perspective-taking may need to be reevaluated.

Reducing reliance on inaccurate information.

People learn from the texts that they read, but sometimes what they read is wrong. Previous research has demonstrated that individuals encode even obvious inaccuracies, at times relying on the misinformation to complete postreading tasks. In the present study, we investigated whether the influence of inaccurate information might be reduced by encouraging the retrieval of accurate knowledge. Participants read an extended text that contained both accurate and inaccurate assertions, after which they evaluated the validity of statements associated with those assertions. In general, participants made more mistakes in their evaluations of statements after having read inaccurate as compared to accurate assertions, offering evidence of the influence of misinformation. However, when participants were tasked with correcting inaccuracies during reading, their mistakes were substantially reduced. Encouraging the retrieval of accurate knowledge during reading can reduce the influence of misinformation. These findings are discussed with respect to the contributions of episodic traces and prior knowledge on learning, as well as to the conditions that support successful comprehension.