Papers by Martin Pickering
Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science
We provide a brief introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science... more We provide a brief introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science entitled Structural Priming in Less-Studied Languages and Dialects. Structural priming is the tendency for people to use linguistic structures that they have recently encountered. It has been extensively investigated in English and a few related languages, but there has been very little work on the vast majority of languages around the world. We are pleased to publish six papers concerned with Turkish, Norwegian, Irish, Italian, and two varieties of Portuguese. They are informative about many issues in linguistic representation and processing and help diversify psycholinguistics and the cognitive sciences more generally.
Cognitive Science
From infancy, we recognize that labels denote category membership and help us to identify the cri... more From infancy, we recognize that labels denote category membership and help us to identify the critical features that objects within a category share. Labels not only reflect how we categorize, but also allow us to communicate and share categories with others. Given the special status of labels as markers of category membership, do novel labels (i.e., non-words) affect the way in which adults select dimensions for categorization in unsupervised settings? Additionally, is the purpose of this effect primarily coordinative (i.e., do labels promote shared understanding of how we categorize objects)? To address this, we conducted two experiments in which participants individually categorized images of mountains with or without novel labels, and with or without a goal of coordination, within a non-communicative paradigm. People who sorted items with novel labels had more similar categories than people who sorted without labels only when they were told that their categories should make sense to other people, and not otherwise. We argue that sorters' goals determine whether novel labels promote the development of socially coherent categories.
Syntactic representation is independent of semantics in Mandarin: evidence from syntactic priming
Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
Acta psychologica, 2018
Successful duetting requires that musicians coordinate their performance with their partners. In ... more Successful duetting requires that musicians coordinate their performance with their partners. In the case of turn-taking in improvised performance they need to be able to predict their partner's turn-end in order to accurately time their own entries. Here we investigate the cues used for accurate turn-end prediction in musical improvisations, focusing on the role of tonal structure. In a response-time task, participants more accurately determined the endings of (tonal) jazz than (non-tonal) free improvisation turns. Moreover, for the jazz improvisations, removing low frequency information (<2100Hz) - and hence obscuring the pitch relationships conveying tonality - reduced response accuracy, but removing high frequency information (>2100Hz) had no effect. Neither form of filtering affected response accuracy in the free improvisation condition. We therefore argue that tonal cues aided prediction accuracy for the jazz improvisations compared to the free improvisations. We com...
The Behavioral and brain sciences, 2017
Structural priming offers a powerful method for experimentally investigating the mental represent... more Structural priming offers a powerful method for experimentally investigating the mental representation of linguistic structure. We clarify the nature of our proposal, justify the versatility of priming, consider alternative approaches, and discuss how our specific account can be extended to new questions as part of an interdisciplinary programme integrating linguistics and psychology as part of the cognitive sciences of language.
Cognitive science, 2018
In the article 'Do bilinguals automatically activate their native language when they are not usin... more In the article 'Do bilinguals automatically activate their native language when they are not using it?' we reported a model simulation of the results from Thierry and Wu (2007). By mistake, we reported incorrect parameters in Table 1. The correct parameters are reported in this corrigendum note. The results reported in the article fully hold and hence the main theoretical argument remains the same.
Brain Research
Recent social-cognitive research suggests that the anticipation of co-actors' actions influences ... more Recent social-cognitive research suggests that the anticipation of co-actors' actions influences people's mental representations. However, the precise nature of such representations is still unclear. In this study we investigated verbal joint representations in a delayed Stroop paradigm, where each participant responded to one color after a short delay. Participants either performed the task as a single actor (single-action, Experiment 1), or they performed it together (joint-action, Experiment 2). We investigated effects of co-actors' action on the ERP components associated with perceptual conflict (Go N2) and response selection (P3b). Compared to single-action, joint-action reduced the N2 amplitude congruency effect when participants had to respond (Go trials), indicating that representing a co-actor's utterance helped to dissociate action codes and attenuated perceptual conflict for the responding participant. Yet, on NoGo trials the centro-parietal P3 (P3b) component amplitude increased for joint-action, suggesting that participants mapped the stimuli onto the co-actor's upcoming response as if it were their own response. We conclude that people represent others' utterances similarly to the way they represent their own utterances, and that shared perceptionaction codes for self and others can sometimes reduce, rather than enhance, perceptual conflict.
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), Jan 17, 2017
To investigate how proficient pianists comprehend pitch relationships in written music when they ... more To investigate how proficient pianists comprehend pitch relationships in written music when they first encounter it we conducted two experiments in which proficient pianists' eyes were tracked while they read and played single-line melodies. In Experiment 1, participants played at their own speed; in Experiment 2 they played with an external metronome. The melodies were either congruent or anomalous, with the anomaly involving one bar being shifted in pitch to alter the implied harmonic structure (e.g., non-resolution of a dominant). In both experiments, anomaly led to rapid disruption in participants' eye-movements in terms of regressions from the target bar, indicating that pianists process written pitch relationships online. This is particularly striking because in musical sight-reading eye movement behaviour is constrained by the concurrent performance. Both experiments also showed that anomaly induced pupil dilation. Together these results indicate that proficient piani...
An experimental approach to linguistic representation
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2016
Within the cognitive sciences, most researchers assume that it is the job of linguists to investi... more Within the cognitive sciences, most researchers assume that it is the job of linguists to investigate how language is represented, and that they do so largely by building theories based on explicit judgments about patterns of acceptability – whereas it is the task of psychologists to determine how language is processed, and that in doing so, they do not typically question the linguists’ representational assumptions. We challenge this division of labor, by arguing that structural priming provides an implicit method of investigating linguistic representations that should end the current reliance on acceptability judgments. Moreover, structural priming has now reached sufficient methodological maturity to provide substantial evidence about such representations. We argue that evidence from speakers’ tendency to repeat their own and others’ structural choices supports a linguistic architecture involving a single ‘shallow’ level of syntax that is connected to a semantic level containing i...
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2017
We used the visual world eye-tracking paradigm to investigate the effects of cognitive load on pr... more We used the visual world eye-tracking paradigm to investigate the effects of cognitive load on predictive eye movements in L1 (Experiment 1) and L2 (Experiment 2) speakers. Participants listened to sentences whose verb was predictive or non-predictive towards one of four objects they were viewing. They then clicked on a mentioned object. Half the participants additionally performed a working memory task of remembering words. Both L1 and L2 speakers looked more at the target object predictively in predictable- than in non-predictable sentences when they performed the listen-and-click task only. However, this predictability effect was delayed in those who performed the concurrent memory task. This pattern of results was similar in L1 and L2 speakers. L1 and L2 speakers make predictions, but cognitive resources are required for making predictive eye movements. The findings are compatible with the claim that L2 speakers use the same mechanisms as L1 speakers to make predictions.
Do Bilinguals Automatically Activate Their Native Language When They Are Not Using It?
Cognitive science, Jan 20, 2016
Most models of lexical access assume that bilingual speakers activate their two languages even wh... more Most models of lexical access assume that bilingual speakers activate their two languages even when they are in a context in which only one language is used. A critical piece of evidence used to support this notion is the observation that a given word automatically activates its translation equivalent in the other language. Here, we argue that these findings are compatible with a different account, in which bilinguals "carry over" the structure of their native language to the non-native language during learning, and where there is no activation of translation equivalents. To demonstrate this, we describe a model in which language learning involves mapping native language phonological relationships to the non-native language, and we show how it can explain the results attributed to automatic activation of translation equivalents.
Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2016
We frequently experience and successfully process anomalous utterances. Here we examine whether p... more We frequently experience and successfully process anomalous utterances. Here we examine whether people do this by 'correcting' syntactic anomalies to yield well-formed representations. In two structural priming experiments, participants' syntactic choices in picture description were influenced as strongly by previously comprehended anomalous (missing-verb) prime sentences as by well-formed prime sentences. Our results suggest that comprehenders can reconstruct the constituent structure of anomalous utterances -even when such utterances lack a major structural component such as the verb. These results also imply that structural alignment in dialogue is unaffected if one interlocutor produces anomalous utterances.
Cognition, 2016
One influential view of language acquisition is that children master structural generalizations b... more One influential view of language acquisition is that children master structural generalizations by making and learning from structure-informed predictions. Previous work has shown that from 3 years of age children can use semantic associations to generate predictions. However, it is unknown whether they can generate predictions by combining these associations with knowledge of linguistic structure. We recorded the eye movements of pre-schoolers while they listened to sentences such as Pingu will ride the horse. Upon hearing ride, children predictively looked at a horse (a strongly associated and plausible patient of ride), and mostly ignored a cowboy (equally strongly associated, but an implausible patient). In a separate experiment, children did not rapidly look at the horse when they heard You can show Pingu … "riding", showing that they do not quickly activate strongly associated patients when there are no structural constraints. Our findings demonstrate that young children's predictions are sensitive to structure, providing support for predictive-learning models of language acquisition.
Why Cognitive Psychology Science Is Not Formalized Folk
It is often assumed that cognitive science is built upon folk psychology, and that challenges to ... more It is often assumed that cognitive science is built upon folk psychology, and that challenges to folk psychology are therefore challenges to cognitive science itself. We argue that, in practice, cognitive science and folk psychology treat entirely non-overlapping domains: cognitive science considers aspects of mental life which do not depend on general knowledge, whereas folk psychology considers aspects of mental
A bstract In two experiments we provided evidence for a joint interference effect in picture nami... more A bstract In two experiments we provided evidence for a joint interference effect in picture naming. Participants took longer to name pictures when they believed that their partner concurrently named pictures than when they believed their partner was silent (Experiment 1) or concurrently categorized the pictures as being from the same or from different semantic categories (Experiment 2). However, picture naming latencies were not affected by beliefs about said. These findings are consistent with the idea that speakers represent whether another speaker is preparing to speak, but not what they are preparing to say.
We examine how the relationship between animacy and syntactic structure might be explained in ter... more We examine how the relationship between animacy and syntactic structure might be explained in terms of an influence of animacy on the psychological processes that underlie the construction of syntactic structure during language production. In this account, animacy exerts its influence through its correlation with conceptual accessibility, or how easily a concept is retrieved from memory. Animate entities are conceptually highly accessible and are therefore retrieved more easily. Because language production is incremental, easily accessed information is processed first; animate entities therefore tend to be privileged during syntactic processes of production. We consider two possible models of how animacy might influence syntactic processing: through an effect on grammatical function assignment, or through a direct effect on word order. We argue that experimental cross-linguistic evidence supports a third model, in which animacy can simultaneously influence both grammatical function assignment and the determination of word order. Finally, we consider why animacy might not affect word order in conjunctions.
Mechanisms for the timely coordination of utterances
Mind Mach, 1997
We respond to Morris and Richardson's (1995) claim that Pickering and Chater's (1995) arguments a... more We respond to Morris and Richardson's (1995) claim that Pickering and Chater's (1995) arguments about the lack of a relation between cognitive science and folk psychology are flawed. We note that possible controversies about the appropriate uses for the two terms do not affect our arguments. We then address their claim that computational explanation of knowledge-rich processes has proved possible in the domains of problem solving, scientific discovery, and reasoning. We argue that, in all cases, computational explanation is only possible for aspects of those processes that do not make reference to general knowledge. We conclude that consideration of the issues raised by Morris and Richardson reinforces our original claim that there are two fundamentally distinct projects for understanding the mind, one based on justification, and the other on computational explanation, and that these apply to non-overlapping aspects of mental life.
Verbs like`begin' and`enjoy' appear to semantically select a complement that expresses an activit... more Verbs like`begin' and`enjoy' appear to semantically select a complement that expresses an activity or an event (Jackendoff, R. (1997). The architecture of the language faculty.
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Papers by Martin Pickering