Predictive Representation for Upcoming Linguistic Input in Younger and Older Adults

윤홍옥,문선현,노수림 한국언어정보학회 2018 언어와 정보 Vol.22 No.2

The immediate use of the contextual information to predict the upcoming information during sentence comprehension may vary depending on the aspects of the linguistic and world knowledge and the cognitive ability of readers. In this study, we investigated how well older readers employ their linguistic and world knowledge to develop the expectation for the upcoming information during sentence comprehension. In two offline tasks (cloze and listing), older and young readers were asked to complete sentence fragments (when agents and recipients were given or when agents and patients were given). The responses were used to compute predictability measurements (structural and lexical predictability). We found no aging effect in the production of likely structural choices and likely lexical choices, meaning that the most predictable ones to older readers were also the most predictable to young readers. Significant aging effect emerged in the production of unlikely choices; older readers were more predictable to unlikely structures but less predictable to unlikely words. We discuss the contextual sensitivity of older readers in formulating their knowledge representation for what is coming up next.

Segmental Acoustic Correlates Associated with the Korean Lenis Stops

윤홍옥 서울대학교 언어교육원 2013 語學硏究 Vol.49 No.1

The purpose of this study was to investigate which acoustic correlates to stop feature distinction were realized due to the presence of a segmentation boundary and how semantic focus information contributed to acoustic correlates associated with segmental units. A production study was conducted using Korean lenis stops. The closure durations and VOTs of lenis stops were longer when they were in boundary-initial positions than when they were in boundary-internal positions. The VOTs became longer as the position of words in the structural hierarchy of sentences grew higher. The F0s of vowels were lower when they followed boundary-initial lenis stops than when they followed boundary-internal lenis stops. The semantic focus information resulted in longer VOTs of initial lenis stops and lower F0s in vowels following initial lenis stops. These results indicated that talkers reliably indicated the onset of words and phrases in the closure durations and the VOTs of lenis stops and the F0s of their following vowels.

The Effects of Word Predictability and Contextual Uncertainty in the Processing of Korean Dative Sentences: An Eye-Movement Reading Comprehension Study

윤홍옥,이동수,홍우평 서울대학교 인지과학연구소 2017 Journal of Cognitive Science Vol.18 No.2

The purpose of this study was to investigate the conjoined roles of word predictability and contextual uncertainty in modeling readers’ processing difficulty in the integration of recipients or patients into Korean dative sentences, by observing readers’ eye movements in reading. The recipients and patients were arranged in a canonical order (i.e., recipient before patient) or a non-canonical order (i.e., patient before recipient). Using a cloze task, we measured a word’s conditional probability to estimate the degree of predictability for a target word given a context. The outputs from the clozetype listing task were used to compute entropy-based contextual uncertainty corresponding to the degree of contextual constraint at the point in which target words would appear. While the effect of word predictability on eye movement in reading was being taken into account in linear mixed-effect models, the significant effect of contextual uncertainty emerged only in the processing of target words in non-canonical sentences in a way that words were read more rapidly as the strength of contextual uncertainty increased. Including the contextual-uncertainty factor in the model of word predictability improved the goodness of the model fit significantly in the condition of canonical sentences and marginally significantly in that of non-canonical sentences. Our results suggest that the role of contextual uncertainty is important to improve the model performance accounting for expectation-based probabilistic readers' behaviors during sentence comprehension. A weak context (i.e., high contextual uncertainty) in which a wide distribution of possible choices is constructed contributes to the reduction of processing difficulty, in particular, when readers do not make a strong commitment for upcoming structural information.

The Role of Frequency in the Processing of giving and receiving Events in Korean

윤홍옥,이은경 서울대학교 언어교육원 2019 語學硏究 Vol.55 No.2

This study aimed to examine the processing benefits of frequency information associated with the case marker -eykey in comprehending Korean declarative sentences. By using a picture description task in which pictures ambiguously illustrated either a giving event (-eykeyREC … cwuta ‘give … to’) or a receiving event (-eykeySOURCE … patta ‘receive … from’), we found that giving events were predominantly preferred to receiving events. The results of the online sentence comprehension study revealed that 1) give-type verbs were integrated into sentences faster than receive-type verbs overall and 2) the reading-time differences between the verb types were significant when role NPs were canonically ordered (NP-eykey … NP-(l)ul) but not when they were noncanonically presented (NP-(l)ul … NP-eykey). We claim that structural and semantic frequency bias associated with -eykey facilitates readers’ anticipatory processing in the integration of upcoming information. We further discuss how the processing differences in giving and receiving events might attribute to the argument-adjunct distinction between recipients and sources.

The Effect of Role Predictability and Word Predictability on Sentence Comprehension

윤홍옥,홍우평 서울대학교 인지과학연구소 2014 Journal of Cognitive Science Vol.15 No.3

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the degree of difficultyin the integration of a word into a sentence could be determined by not onlyhow likely the word would be for a given context but also how likely thethematic role associated with the word would be to occur. For our aim, we useddative sentences in Korean in which three arguments (i.e., agent, recipient, andpatient/theme) appeared prior to a sentence-final verb. We manipulated 1) thedegree of role predictability corresponding to the third argument by scramblingthe internal arguments that occurred after an agent and 2) the predictabilityof words corresponding to the third arguments that was either highly likelyor unlikely for a given context. A self-paced moving window reading with asecondary judgment task was conducted. A linear mixed-effect regressionson the reading times of the words corresponding to the third arguments wasrun while controlling for the effects of lexical frequencies and lengths onthe processing of target words. The results from the model revealed that thewords were read faster when they were highly likely for given contexts thanwhen they were unlikely, and importantly, that the words were read fasterwhen the roles associated with the words were strongly expected than whenthey were weakly expected. Our results showed that both role predictabilityand word predictability had independent effects on the processing of a wordin a sentence. We claim that a processing model should be loaded with at leasttwo components that take into account role predictability as well as word predictability.

증거성 문장종결어미의 청자 인식 탐구: 서울방언 사용자와 연변방언 사용자 비교

윤홍옥,김철수 한국언어정보학회 2020 언어와 정보 Vol.24 No.1

Hongoak Yun and Jin Zhe zhu. 2020. Exploring listeners’ perception on evidential grammatical markers: Comparison between Seoul and Yanbian dialect users. Language and Information 24.1, 29-45. Korean uses grammatical markers to express evidentiality which refers to the source of information of an event indicating whether speakers directly witness the event, indirectly infer the source from general knowledge or perceptual cues, or are told about the event. Many studies have explored linguistic systems for Korean evidential types. However, little has been investigated about how well speakers’ intention on expressing the source of information has delivered to listeners. In this study, we attempted to quantify the degree of listeners’ perceptual sensitivity on speakers’ linguistic cues representing whether speakers witness expressed events. Manipulating eight sentence-ending markers (i.e., -e, -ta, -ci, -canha, -ney, -te-, -kwuna, -tay) of event statements, we asked Seoul and Yanbian dialect users to rate the likelihood of speakers’ witnessing expressed events from 1 (least likely) to 5 (most likely). Our results showed that event statements ended with –e marker were scored the highest rates (speakers were highly likely to witness the events), whereas event statements ended with –tay marker were scored the lowest rates (speakers were least likely to witness the events). We discuss that the source of information cued by grammatical markers is not always perceived to listeners in a way that the marker grammar defines.

Psycholinguistic Approaches to Code Switching: A Proposal for Multi-dimensional Comparisons across Typologically-different Languages

윤홍옥,양용준,김은희,박주현 미래영어영문학회 2020 영어영문학 Vol.25 No.1

Code switching is a common linguistic phenomenon that multiple languages are combined together in bilinguals’ utterances within or across sentences. In this paper, we review previous bilingual studies under the psycholinguistic perspectives as a way to overcome the explanatory validity of existing theories on code switches. In line with the activation-based psycholinguistic approaches, we propose to conduct three-way comparisons of code switching across typologically-same-and-different languages (i.e., Korean-to-Chinese, Korean- to-English, and Korean-to-Japanese). These multi-dimensional systematic testings will provide empirical evidence to investigate underlying linguistic and cognitive processes that are engaged in bilinguals’ minds. The lack of actual experimental data is the limitation of the current proposal.

The effect of role shifting and expectation in the processing of center-embedded relative clauses in Korean

윤홍옥,남윤주,유덕근,홍우평 경희대학교 언어정보연구소 2015 언어연구 Vol.32 No.2

The purpose of this study is to examine whether the effect of role shifting and expectation serves an independent function in predicting the degree of processing difficulty in center-embedded relative clauses in Korean. In Experiment 1, we observed that head NPs modified by relative clauses, regardless of the order of constituents (i.e., SORELV or OSRELV), took longer to read when the roles corresponding to the traces of the head NPs needed shifting than when they needed not. In Experiment 2, we found that probabilistic distributions pertaining to the head NPs differed as a function of whether or not role shifting for the NPs was required. The mixed-effect models with expectation playing as a predictor on processing difficulty behaved similarly to the model with role shifting being a predictor on processing difficulty. However, mediation analyses in which expectation and role shifting were considered in the same model yielded that the effect of expectation subsumed that of role shifting when constituents were canonically ordered but not when they were scrambled. We claim that the fundamental function of expectation in association with role shifting is additionally effective only when sentence complexity is not extremely severe.

The Effects OF word Predictability and Uncertainty in Sentence Comprehension

윤홍옥 한국생성문법학회 2017 한국생성문법학회 학술대회 논문집 Vol.2017 No.1

Psycholinguistic approaches to computational language models

윤홍옥,송상헌,이은경 담화·인지언어학회 2021 담화·인지언어학회 학술대회 발표논문집 Vol.2021 No.11