Prediction, Error, and Adaptation During Online Sentence Comprehension by Alex Brabham Fine ...

272 Pages·2013·14.74 MB·English

by  Alex Fine

Prediction, Error, and Adaptation During Online Sentence Comprehension

by

Alex Brabham Fine

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by
Professor T. Florian Jaeger
Professor Jeffrey T. Runner
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Department of Linguistics
Arts, Sciences and Engineering
School of Arts and Sciences

University of Rochester
Rochester, New York

2013
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I dedicate this thesis to Carly, Gracie, Lawton, and Mylie.
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Biographical Sketch

The author was born in Albemarle, NC, in June 1984. He attended the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics (with
Highest Honors) and a minor in German Literature (with no great distinction other than
being really into Rilke) in 2006. He then worked as a research assistant at the Boston
University School of Medicine from June 2006-July 2008. In the fall of 2008, he began
doctoral studies in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department
of Linguistics at the University of Rochester. He received a Master of Arts degree in
Brain and Cognitive Sciences in the Spring of 2011. In the Fall of 2010, he was awarded
a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. He pursued his research
at the University of Rochester under the direction of Professors T. Florian Jaeger (Brain
and Cognitive Sciences) and Jeffrey T. Runner (Linguistics).

The following publications are a result of research the author conducted while pursuing
doctoral studies at the University of Rochester:

Farmer, T. A., Fine, A. B., & Jaeger, T. F. (2011). Implicit Context-Specific Learning
Leads to Rapid Shifts in Syntactic Expectations. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual
Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Farmer, T. A., Misyak, J. B., Fine, A. B., & Christiansen, M. H. (under revision). The
“Ex-Factor”: Individual differences in linguistic experience help explain variability
in measures of on-line syntactic processing skill.
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Fine, A. B., & Jaeger, T. F. (2011). Language comprehension is sensitive to changes in
the reliability of lexical cues. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the
Cognitive Science Society (pp. 925–930). Boston, MA.
Fine, A. B., & Jaeger, T. F. (2013). Syntactic priming in language comprehension allows
linguisic expectations to converge on the statistics of the input. Proceedings of the
35th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Berlin, Germany.
Fine, A. B., & Jaeger, T. F. (2013). Evidence for implicit learning in syntactic
comprehension. Cognitive Science.
Fine, A. B., Jaeger, T. F., Farmer, T. A., & Qian, T. (under review). Rapid Expectation
Adaptation during Syntactic Comprehension.
Fine, A. B., Kleinschmidt, D., & Jaeger, T. F. (2012). A Bayesian belief updating model
of syntactic expectation adaptation. 25th Meeting of the CUNY Conference on
Human Sentence Processing.
Fine, A. B., Qian, T., Jaeger, T. F., & Jacobs, R. A. (2010). Syntactic Adaptation in
Language Comprehension. Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Cognitive
Modeling and Computational Linguistics (pp. 18–26). Uppsala, Sweden:
Association for Computational Linguistics.
Kleinschmidt, D., Fine, A. B., & Jaeger, T. F. (2012). A belief-updating model of
adaptation and cue combination in syntactic comprehension. Proceedings of the 34th
Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
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Acknowledgments

I’d first like to express my deepest gratitude to Florian Jaeger, who supervised
and collaborated on every study reported in this thesis. Throughout graduate school,
Florian has been an ardent supporter, a tough critic, and a patient teacher. I hope to repay
some of my karmic debt to him by working as hard for my future students and
collaborators as he has for me.
I also thank Jeff Runner, with whom I had the pleasure of collaborating on a set of
studies not included in this thesis. Jeff’s intelligence, calmness, and humanity helped me
endure and find the humor in even the hardest periods of graduate school.
I thank Mike Tanenhaus for his advice and encouragement over the years, and I
thank him most of all for doing so much to create an environment that is such a
stimulating and fun place to do psycholinguistics. Mike and Florian also deserve joint
recognition for the seminars and lab meetings very early in my graduate career where the
seeds of the main ideas in this thesis were planted.
I thank the remaining members of my committee, Harry Reis and Greg Carlson,
for their wisdom, kindness, and encouragement, and for teaching me a great deal about
how to be a scholar and a teacher.
I would like to thank Kathy Corser for all of her help and kindness throughout my
time in Rochester, as well as Jen Gillis, Chris Dambra, and Chris Freemesser, for
generally helping to make this department such an easy place to do research.
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I thank Bob Joseph, Daniela Plesa Skwerer, and Helen Tager-Flusberg at Boston
University for teaching me how to work in an experimental psychology lab, and for
taking a chance in hiring and mentoring someone with so little demonstrated ability to
handle expensive equipment. I don’t think I would’ve had the opportunity to study in a
program like the one at Rochester without their guidance.
I thank my teachers at UNC—especially Misha Becker, Randy Hendrick, Laura
Janda, and Craig Melchert—for encouraging me to pursue the study of language even
when I was a shiftless undergraduate. I would like to single out Randy Hendrick, who
tolerated my almost-daily visits to his office for four years without ever so much as
hinting at my failure to comply with the unwritten dictates of appointment and office
hour etiquette.
I outline his contributions in more detail below, but I would like to take this
additional opportunity to thank Andrew Watts for all of his help and patience over the
years. The work reported here would not have happened—or would have happened
much more slowly and at a much greater spiritual cost—without Andrew.
I read somewhere that if you ever discover that you are the smartest person in the
room, you should find a new room. I thank my fellow students (both at Rochester and
elsewhere) for never forcing me to find another room. For their consistent friendship,
love, and intelligence I thank especially Esteban Buz, Thomas Farmer, Masha
Fedzechkina, Maureen Gillespie, Peter Graff, Liz Hirshorn, Lizz Karuza, Chris Kim,
Dave Kleinschmidt, Dan Pontillo, Ting Qian, Ben Van Durme, and Ilker Yildirim.
Special thanks go to Judith Degen for her unwavering loyalty and friendship despite
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having such intimate knowledge of my shortcomings in the areas of toothpaste-
purchasing, stove-cleaning, and dog-fur-sweeping.
Of those people just mentioned, I am particularly indebted intellectually to
Thomas Farmer, Dave Kleinschmidt, and Ting Qian, whose feedback and advice on the
work reported here made it much better than it would otherwise be.
I also thank my friends outside of my academic circle who were with me the
whole time, and who helped me establish the emotional bulwark necessary to do
behavioral research for a living, especially Greg Buzulencia, Joyce Chapman, Ben Ellis,
John Francis, Abby Glogower, Dan Miner, Perry Sherouse, and Martin Zahra.
I thank Inbal for the surprise ending.
Finally, and most importantly, I thank my family for their unconditional love. I
thank my mother and father for always supporting and never pressuring me. I thank my
brother and sister for being my best friends.
I probably forgot someone. Please don’t over-interpret it.
To the extent that this thesis contains any durable insights about human language
processing, the individuals mentioned above deserve credit. All deficiencies in the thesis
are my responsibility alone.
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Abstract

A fundamental challenge for human cognition is perceiving and acting in a world in
which the statistics that characterize available sensory data are non-stationary. This
thesis focuses on this problem specifically in the domain of sentence comprehension,
where linguistic variability poses computational challenges to the processes underlying
sentence comprehension. We begin by framing the problem of linguistic variation,
especially in syntax, and then propose that humans respond to this variability by
continuously adapting to and learning the statistical regularities of novel linguistic
environments. Experiments 1-6 provide evidence that, in the face of a novel environment
whose statistics violate subjects’ expectations, subjects adjust their linguistic expectations
in order to allow their expectations to converge towards the statistics of the current
environment. These experiments tacitly assume that adaptation is error-sensitive:
subjects adapt when their expectations are violated. Experiment 7 explicitly addresses
and tests this tacit assumption. In that experiment, we provide a quantitative
operationalization of the syntactic “error signal” in language comprehension, and ask
how the magnitude of this error signal correlates with immediate changes in linguistic
expectations. This experiment also provides the context for a more in-depth discussion of
what type of cognitive mechanism might give rise to the experimental results reported in
this thesis. Experiment 8 attempts to more directly address the presumed environment-
specificity of adaptation by asking whether distributional information indexed to a
particular environment and to particular verbs can be retained over multiple days. The
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work reported here takes a step toward synthesizing three lines of research in
psycholinguistics that have previously proceeded largely in parallel: (1) experience- or
expectation-based processing, (2) syntactic priming, and (3) statistical learning in
language. The work here also suggests an intriguing if somewhat tentative link between
adaptation in syntactic comprehension on the one hand and adaptation in lower-level
speech perception and non-linguistic perception, where adaptation phenomena have
previously been more thoroughly examined.
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Contributors and Funding Sources

This thesis was supervised by a committee consisting of Professors T. Florian Jaeger,
Jeffrey Runner, Michael Tanenhaus, Greg Carlson, and Harry Reis. All stages of
experiment design, development, analysis and interpretation were conducted in
collaboration with Florian Jaeger. The data reported in Experiment 1 was provided by
Thomas Farmer, and earlier versions of the analyses reported there were previously
published in a proceedings paper in 2011, as well as in a journal article currently under
review, both listed in the Biographical Sketch. The data for Experiments 2 and 3 was
collected with the assistance of Andrew Watts. The data from Experiment 2 was
published in a proceedings paper from 2013, listed in the Biographical Sketch. The data
for Experiment 4 was collected with the assistance of Andrew Watts and Jeremy Ferris.
Earlier analyses of that data were published in a proceedings paper from 2010, listed in
the Biographical Sketch. Experiment 5 was conducted with the assistance of Andrew
Watts and has not yet been reported in a publication. Experiment 6 was conducted with
the assistance of Narissa Gogos and Nicole Craycraft, and the results from that
experiment were published in a proceedings paper from 2013, as well as in a journal
article currently under review, both listed in the Biographical Sketch. The data reported
in Experiment 7 was originally collected and generously shared with me by Malathi
Thothathiri and Jesse Snedeker. Some of the analyses reported for that experiment were
published in an article appearing in the journal Cognitive Science, listed in the
Biographical Sketch. The data reported in Experiment 8 was collected with the