Building a more engaged scientist from the bottom up: The impact of public engagement training on undergraduate students.

Engaging with the public is increasingly seen as an important role of scientists. Despite that, few opportunities exist for undergraduate students to receive training in engaging with the public about science. Thus, little is known about the impact of such training on students. The goal of the current study was to investigate the impact of public engagement training on participants in a summer program for undergraduates that provides training in both research and engagement activities. The results of our interviews suggest that providing opportunities for undergraduates to engage with the public (1) has many personal, academic, and career benefits for students; (2) increases participants' interest in public engagement; and (3) may contribute to helping students develop and maintain an identity as scientists. Importantly, students from minoritized racial groups may be even more impacted by this experience. These data suggest that early experiences with public engagement may not only be an important way to increase the number of publicly engaged scientists but may also broaden participation in science.

Collective nouns are conceptually plural: Evidence from the grammatical SNARC effect.

To develop theories of how comprehenders extract the message from a linguistic stream, it is critical to understand how they conceptually represent referents. The experiments reported here focus on singular collective nouns (e.g., committee, team), which introduce a single group into the discourse and test whether they nonetheless are conceptually plural (i.e., construed as consisting of multiple entities) by using the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) paradigm (Dehaene & Changeux, 1993). In this paradigm, participants are typically faster to respond to smaller numbers or numerical stimuli when making a response on their left and faster to respond to larger numbers or numerical stimuli when making a response on their right. In three experiments, participants saw German words on a computer screen and decided whether each one described a single entity or something that could be subdivided into multiple entities (Experiment 1) or whether they would use "ist" or "sind" ("is" or "are") in combination with the word if it were the subject of a sentence (Experiments 2 and 3). The mapping of responses to participants' left and right hands was counterbalanced. Experiment 1 failed to show a grammatical SNARC effect. Experiments 2 and 3 showed a grammatical SNARC effect that extended to collective noun phrases. The results of these experiments suggest that collective noun phrases are instantiated as conceptually plural in comprehenders' minds. We discuss the differential task effects and the implications of these data on theories of language comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

How quantifiers influence the conceptual representation of plurals.

This paper reports the results of two experiments that investigate the nature of plural conceptual representations that are created during sentence comprehension. Previous work has found that comprehenders seem to represent both a singular object and a plural set of objects during the comprehension of plural nouns. The activation of the singular object has been attributed to the pragmatic processing involved in understanding the plural (Patson, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 42, 1140-1153, 2016a). The goal of the current study was to further investigate this hypothesis. Experiment 1 used a picture-matching paradigm to investigate how comprehenders conceptualize plural nouns quantified with many, which renders the scalar implicature unnecessary. Consistent with the pragmatic processing hypothesis, comprehenders did not activate a singular form when the plural was quantified with many. Experiment 2 was designed to further investigate whether all quantifiers block activation of the singular form. The same picture-matching paradigm was used with numerical quantifiers that specify numbers either within or above the subitization range. When the number was within the subitization range, comprehenders' conceptual representations contained exactly that number of objects, and importantly did not contain a singular object. When number was above the subitization range, comprehenders' conceptual representations did not contain an exact number of objects and seemed to activate a singular object. These data are consistent with constraints on how many objects can be represented in visual working memory. Taken together, the results of these two experiments suggest that the plural's conceptual representation emerged as a result of grammatical processing as well as limits on the visual processing system.

Conceptual Factors Influence Children's Distributivity Bias.

Sentences such as "The girls read a book" can lead to multiple interpretations: They could be reading the same book (collective) or they could each be reading their own book (distributive). In ambiguous contexts, adults prefer the collective interpretation, and preschool children show a slight bias for a distributive interpretation. The current research investigated whether conceptual factors (number of actors) influences interpretations of these kinds of predicates. The data with children show a stronger collective bias when there are four actors compared to two actors. This may be because children are more likely to conceptualize groups of four (vs. two) as sets rather than collections of individuals. These data are discussed with reference to research on visual and conceptual integration abilities, showing that children lag behind in their ability to combine components into a whole in comparison to parsing objects into their component parts.

Evidence in support of a scalar implicature account of plurality.

There is increasing evidence that the plural is semantically unmarked for number such that a plural can be interpreted as meaning "at least one." The 2 experiments reported here used a picture matching paradigm to investigate the conceptual representations built during the comprehension of sentences with plural definite descriptions (e.g., leaves). In Experiment 1, participants read sentences that specified that the objects in the plural were spatially distributed (scattered leaves), spatially grouped (a pile of leaves), or neutral with respect to spatial distribution. After reading the sentence, participants saw a picture that either contained multiple spatially distributed objects, multiple spatially grouped objects, or a single object. In Experiment 2, the sentential context specified a large, uncountable set size, a small set size, or was neutral with respect to set size. The picture that followed either depicted a large set size, a small set size, or a single object. Participants read each sentence and then judged whether the picture was of an object that was in the sentence. Both experiments provided evidence that even when comprehenders build detailed conceptual representations for plural definite descriptions, they have still activated the singular interpretation of the plural. These data are consistent with an account of the plural in which the plural is semantically unmarked for number and the plural meaning is derived via a scalar implicature. (PsycINFO Database Record

Misinterpretations in agreement and agreement attraction.

It has been well established that subject-verb number agreement can be disrupted by local noun phrases that differ in number from the subject head noun phrase. In sentence production, mismatches in the grammatical number of the head and local noun phrases lead to agreement errors on the verb as in: the key to the cabinets are. Similarly, although ungrammaticality typically causes disruption in measures of sentence comprehension, the disruption is reduced when the local noun phrase has a plural feature. Using a forced-choice comprehension question method, we report two experiments that provide evidence that comprehenders were likely to misinterpret the number information on the head noun phrase when morphosyntactic number markings on the local noun phrase and verb did not match the head. These results are consistent with a growing body of research that suggests that comprehenders often arrive at a final interpretation of a sentence that is not faithful to the linguistic input.

Comprehending the impossible: what role do selectional restriction violations play?

To elucidate how different kinds of knowledge are used during comprehension, readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences that were: plausible, impossible because of a selectional restriction violation, or impossible because of a violation of general world knowledge. Eye movements on the pre-critical, critical, and post-critical words evidenced disruption in the selectional restriction violation condition compared to the other two conditions. These findings suggest that disruption associated with reading about impossible events is not directly determined by how impossible the event seems. Rather, the relationship between the verb and arguments in the sentence seems to matter. These findings are the strongest evidence to date that processing effects associated with selectional restrictions can dissociate from those associated with general world knowledge about events.

The mental representation of plural events.

A growing body of work suggests that in the absence of strong cues to individuation, comprehenders leave their mental representations of plural entities underspecified-that is, they mentally represent plural noun phrases (NPs) as groups or nondifferentiated sets. The current paper investigates whether this also holds for plural events. Experiments 1a-1b used an aspectual coercion manipulation to provide evidence that event plurality can be indexed by the number-of-words judgement task that Patson and Warren [2010. Evidence for distributivity effects in comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 36, 782-789] used to investigate the mental representation of plural nouns. Experiment 2 confirmed this by showing that comprehenders mentally represent predicates associated with distributive quantifiers as plural, and they do so immediately at the verb rather than waiting until the completion of the predicate. Experiment 3 probed inherently distributed verbs and showed that inherent distributivity is not enough to push comprehenders to mentally represent multiple events. Only when the subject of an inherently distributed verb is a conjoined NP, rather than a plural definite description, do comprehenders mentally represent multiple events. Experiment 4 replicated and extended Experiment 3. This body of findings suggests that in the absence of strong cues to individuation, plural events are left underspecified. However, when disambiguating information is provided, comprehenders do mentally represent number information explicitly and incrementally.

The conceptual representation of number.

The experiments reported here investigated the format of plural conceptual representations using a picture-matching paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences that ended with a singular noun phrase (NP), a two-quantified plural NP, or a plural definite description [The parents handed the child the (two) crayon/s] and then saw a picture of one or multiple referents for the NP. Judgement times to confirm that there was overlap between the pictured object(s) and a noun in the sentence showed an interaction between the NP's number and NP-picture match. For singular NPs and two-quantified NPs, participants were reliably faster to respond "yes" to a picture that had the exact number of objects specified by the NP, but for plural definite descriptions, the effect of the number of pictured items was not reliable. Experiment 2 extended this finding to conceptual plurals. Participants read sentences biased toward either a collective (Together the men carried a box-box is interpreted as singular) or distributed (Each of the men carried a box-box is likely interpreted as plural) reading. Experiment 2 showed the same interaction between NP conceptual plurality and NP-picture match as that in Experiment 1. These results suggest that: (a) our default conceptual representations for plural definite descriptions are no more similar to images of small sets of multiple items than to images of singular items; and (b) the difference between singular and plural conceptual representations is unlikely to be simply the presence or absence of a plural feature. The results are consistent with theories in which plurality is unmarked, such that some plural NPs can refer to singular referents [e.g., Sauerland, U., Anderssen, J., & Yatsushiro, J. (2005). The plural is semantically unmarked. In S. Kepser & M. Reis (Eds.), Linguistic evidence (pp. 413-434). Berlin: de Gruyter].

Building complex reference objects from dual sets.

There has been considerable psycholinguistic investigation into the conditions that allow separately introduced individuals to be joined into a plural set and represented as a complex reference object (e.g., Eschenbach, et al., 1989; Garrod & Sanford, 1982; Koh & Clifton, 2002; Koh et al., 2008; Moxey et al., 2004; Sanford & Lockhart, 1990). The current paper reports three eye-tracking experiments that investigate the less-well understood question of what conditions allow pointers to be assigned to the individuals within a previously undifferentiated set, turning it into a complex reference object. The experiments made use of a methodology used in Patson and Ferreira (2009) to distinguish between complex reference objects and undifferentiated sets. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that assigning different properties to the members of an undifferentiated dual set via a conjoined modifier or a comparative modifier transformed it into a complex reference object. Experiment 3 indicated that assigning a property to only one member of an undifferentiated dual set introduced pointers to both members. These results demonstrate that pointers can be established to referents within a plural set without picking them out via anaphors; they set boundaries on the kinds of implicit contrasts between referents that establish pointers; and they illustrate that extremely subtle properties of the semantic and referential context can affect early parsing decisions.

Lexical and Post-Lexical Complexity Effects on Eye Movements in Reading.

The current study investigated how a post-lexical complexity manipulation followed by a lexical complexity manipulation affects eye movements during reading. Both manipulations caused disruption in all measures on the manipulated words, but the patterns of spill-over differed. Critically, the effects of the two kinds of manipulations did not interact, and there was no evidence that post-lexical processing difficulty delayed lexical processing on the next word (c.f. Henderson & Ferreira, 1990). This suggests that post-lexical processing of one word and lexical processing of the next can proceed independently and likely in parallel. This finding is consistent with the assumptions of the E-Z Reader model of eye movement control in reading (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009).

Evidence for distributivity effects in comprehension.

In the current article, we introduce a new methodology for detecting whether a word in a sentence is conceptually represented as plural and use it to shed light on a debate about whether comprehenders interpret singular indefinite noun phrases within a distributed predicate as plural during online reading. Experiment 1 extended a methodology previously used by Berent, Pinker, Tzelgov, Bibi, and Goldfarb (2005) to test individual words or word pairs by having readers judge, at a critical word, whether 1 or 2 words appeared on a computer screen while performing self-paced reading on a sentence presented in 1- and 2-word chunks. In line with Berent et al., Experiment 1 indicated that participants were slower to judge that 1 word was on the screen when the word was plural (e.g., cats) than when it was singular (e.g., cat). Experiment 2 used this paradigm to show that readers build different conceptual representations for distributed versus collective predicates and interpret a singular indefinite noun phrase within a distributed predicate as plural (e.g., Kaup, Kelter, & Habel, 2002; but cf. Filik, Paterson, & Liversedge, 2004; Paterson, Filik, & Liversedge, 2008).

Eye movements when reading implausible sentences: investigating potential structural influences on semantic integration.

The disruption that occurs in response to reading about implausible events in unambiguous sentences can be informative about the time course of semantic interpretation (e.g., Hagoort, Hald, Bastiaansen, & Petersson, 2004; Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006; Warren & McConnell, 2007). Two eye-tracking studies used implausible sentences to investigate whether local factors like the structural relationships and the distance between words cueing a plausibility violation influence how quickly those words are integrated into a global semantic interpretation. Experiment 1 suggested that eye-movement disruption was unaffected by the number of words intervening between the words cueing the implausibility. Experiment 2 demonstrated that eye-movement disruption to implausibility occurred along the same time course regardless of whether the words cueing the implausibility were in a theta-assigning relation or not. These results suggest that these local structural factors do not influence how quickly new words are integrated into a semantic representation, but rather the global event representation determines the time course over which implausibility is detected.

Lingering misinterpretations in garden-path sentences: evidence from a paraphrasing task.

Using a forced-choice question-answering paradigm, K. Christianson, A. Hollingworth, J. F. Halliwell, and F. Ferreira (2001) showed that the original misinterpretation built during the analysis of a garden-path sentence lingers even after reanalysis has occurred. However, their methodology has been questioned (R. P. G. van Gompel, M. J. Pickering, J. Pearson, & G. Jacob, 2006). In this study, the authors report evidence for lingering misinterpretations using a paraphrasing methodology, which is less biased than previous methodologies. Using paraphrasing, they found that garden-path sentences are paraphrased according to a partially reanalyzed interpretation. This finding suggests that the arguments put forward by Christianson et al. are correct: Comprehenders' final interpretations of sentences are often incorrect and do not correspond to the initial input. These findings support the theory that comprehension can occur in a "good-enough" manner (F. Ferreira, V. Ferraro, & K. G. D. Bailey, 2002; F. Ferreira & N. Patson, 2007).

Conceptual plural information is used to guide early parsing decisions: Evidence from garden-path sentences with reciprocal verbs.

In three eyetracking studies, we investigated the role of conceptual plurality in initial parsing decisions in temporarily ambiguous sentences with reciprocal verbs (e.g., While the lovers kissed the baby played alone). We varied the subject of the first clause using three types of plural noun phrases: conjoined noun phrases (the bride and the groom), plural definite descriptions (the lovers), and numerically quantified noun phrases (the two lovers). We found no evidence for garden-path effects when the subject was conjoined (Ferreira & McClure, 1997), but traditional garden-path effects were found with the other plural noun phrases. In addition, we tested plural anaphors that had a plural antecedent present in the discourse. We found that when the antecedent was conjoined, garden-path effects were absent compared to cases in which the antecedent was a plural definite description. Our results indicate that the parser is sensitive to the conceptual representation of a plural constituent. In particular, it appears that a Complex Reference Object (Moxey et al., 2004) automatically activates a reciprocal reading of a reciprocal verb.