Corrigendum: Does a walk-through video help the parser down the garden-path? A visually enhanced self-paced reading study in Dutch.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1009265.].

Does a walk-through video help the parser down the garden-path? A visually enhanced self-paced reading study in Dutch.

The human language processing mechanism assigns a structure to the incoming materials as they unfold. There is evidence that the parser prefers some attachment types over others; however, theories of sentence processing are still in dispute over the stage at which each source of information contributes to the parsing system. The present study aims to identify the nature of initial parsing decisions during sentence processing through manipulating attachment type and verbs' argument structure. To this end, we designed a self-paced reading task using globally ambiguous constructions in Dutch. The structures included double locative prepositional phrases (PPs) where the first PP could attach both to the verb (high attachment) and the noun preceding it (low attachment). To disambiguate the structures, we presented a visual context in the form of short animation clips prior to each reading task. Furthermore, we manipulated the argument structure of the sentences using 2- and 3-argument verbs. The results showed that parsing decisions were influenced by contextual cues depending on the argument structure of the verb. That is, the visual context overcame the preference for high attachment only in the case of 2-argument verbs, while this preference persisted in structures including 3-argument verbs as represented by longer reading times for the low attachment interpretations. These findings can be taken as evidence that our language processing system actively integrates information from linguistic and non-linguistic sources from the initial stages of analysis to build up meaning. We discuss our findings in light of serial and parallel models of sentence processing.

Exposure to hazmat road accidents - Toxic release simulation and GIS-based assessment method.

Industrial demand has intensified production, utilization, and transport of hazardous materials (hazmat). As the production and use of hazardous materials are frequently carried out at different locations, accidents during the transport of hazmats constantly occur. The most critical points on the hazmat routs within inhabited urban or rural areas are centres where the population with increased vulnerability reside. This study aims to assess the exposure of people with disabilities to the impact of hazmat road accidents, in order to provide evidence-based knowledge necessary for the establishment of competent disaster preparedness procedures. A case study was developed for ammonia release from a tanker truck in the vicinity of the Institution for Children and Youth with Disabilities in Veternik, a suburban settlement of Novi Sad, Serbia. An integrated methodology for the risk assessment of the identified problem was proposed focusing on environmental and human-induced variables with a significant impact on the hazard magnitude. The simulation conducted with ALOHA (Areal Locations of Hazardous Atmospheres) confirmed assumption that the combination of high temperature and low wind speed can cause the worst-case scenario i.e. to expose a larger surface area to the influence of released ammonia. In addition, hazard maps were developed by importing the simulated area of ammonia spread into Quantum GIS (QGIS) software.

Online Processing of Temporal Agreement in a Grammatical Tone Language: An ERP Study.

Previous electrophysiological studies that have examined temporal agreement violations in (Indo-European) languages that use grammatical affixes to mark time reference, have found a Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) and/or P600 ERP components, reflecting morpho-syntactic and syntactic processing, respectively. The current study investigates the electrophysiological processing of temporal relations in an African language (Akan) that uses grammatical tone, rather than morphological inflection, for time reference. Twenty-four native speakers of Akan listened to sentences with time reference violations. Our results demonstrate that a violation of a present context by a past verb yields a P600 time-locked to the verb. There was no such effect when a past context was violated by a present verb. In conclusion, while there are similarities in both Akan and Indo-European languages, as far as the modulation of the P600 effect is concerned, the nature of this effect seems to be different for these languages.

The role of semantics and repair processes in article-noun gender disagreement in Italian: An ERP study.

In this sentence reading study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the processing mechanism of article-noun gender disagreement in two kinds of nouns in Italian. The first are nouns with syntactic gender (il trenoM 'train'; la sediaF 'chair') for which the processing and repair of gender disagreement entails only one repair option, namely for the article (morphosyntactic repair). The second kind are nouns with semantic gender (il bambinoM 'boy', la bambinaF 'girl'). Here, there are two options for processing and repairing gender mismatch: repairing the article (morphosyntactic repair) or repairing the noun (both morphosyntactic and semantic repair). Both classes of nouns elicited the LAN, indicating that gender disagreement is always registered at the morphosyntactic level. In addition, the P600 was elicited in both conditions, but was larger for semantic gender, reflecting a more complex repair for this class of nouns.