Biomedical subjects

Juhani Järvikivi

Publications and source records attributed to Juhani Järvikivi.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Ambiguous pronoun resolution: contrasting the first-mention and subject-preference accounts.

A visual-world eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of order of mention and grammatical role on resolution of ambiguous pronouns in Finnish. According to the first-mention account, general cognitive structure-building processes make the first-mentioned noun phrase the preferred antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun. According to the subject-preference account, the preferred antecedent is the grammatical subject of the preceding clause or sentence. Participants listened to sentences in either subject-verb-object or object-verb-subject order; each was followed by a sentence containing an ambiguous pronoun that referred to either the subject or the object. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they looked at pictures representing the two possible antecedents of each pronoun. Analyses of the fixations on the pictures showed that listeners used both order-of-mention and grammatical-role information to resolve ambiguous pronouns.

Attention↗

PubMed2005

Developing a speech intelligibility test based on measuring speech reception thresholds in noise for English and Finnish.

A subjective test was developed suitable for evaluating the effect of mobile communications devices on sentence intelligibility in background noise. Originally a total of 25 lists, each list including 16 sentences, were developed in British English and Finnish to serve as the test stimuli representative of adult language today. The sentences, produced by two male and two female speakers, were normalized for naturalness, length, and intelligibility in each language. The sentence sets were balanced with regard to the expected lexical and phonetic distributions in the given language. The sentence lists are intended for adaptive measurement of speech reception thresholds (SRTs) in noise. In the verification of the test stimuli, SRTs were measured for ten subjects in Finnish and nine subjects in English. Mean SRTs were -2.47 dB in Finnish and -1.12 dB in English, with standard deviations of 1.61 and 2.36 dB, respectively. The mean thresholds did not vary significantly between the lists or the talkers after two lists were removed from the Finnish set and one from the English set. Thus the numbers of lists were reduced from 25 to 23 and 24, respectively. The statistical power of the test increased when thresholds were averaged over several sentence lists. With three lists per condition, the test is able to detect a 1.5-dB difference in SRTs with the probability of about 90%.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2002

Counterintuitive cross-linguistic differences: More morphological computation in English than in Finnish.

This study investigates the role of derivational morphology in lexical processing in two typologically quite different languages: Finnish and English. While Finnish is a language with an extremely rich morphology, English morphology is relatively poor. Consequently, the role of morphology in storing and processing words would be expected to be greater in Finnish than in English. With a series of visual lexical decision experiments in both languages, we find that the opposite is the case for derivational morphology: for English, parsing of morphological constituents is often required, whereas for Finnish, full-form storage and access seems to be the rule. We try to explain this counterintuitive finding by making an appeal to the lexical-statistical properties of both languages.

Computers↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Form-based representation in the mental lexicon: priming (with) bound stem allomorphs in Finnish.

A series of four visual-visual priming experiments investigates the role of bound stem allomorphs in the representation and processing of Finnish case inflected nouns. Niemi et al. (1994) and Laine et al. (1994) argue that Finnish nouns are parsed into stem and affix in reception and that the bound stem allomorphs have separate (visual) lexical representations. Recently Järvikivi and Niemi (in press) have provided converging evidence for their claim based on a series of lexical decision experiments with Finnish stem allomorphs. The results from the present series of four follow-up experiments reported here showed that (isolated) bound stem allomorphs primed the recognition of the corresponding monomorphemic nouns significantly compared both to phonologically unrelated pseudowords and to phonologically minimally different pseudowords. Furthermore, not only did both phonologically transparent and opaque case inflected nouns prime the corresponding nominative singulars, but also there was no difference in priming between the two. The results are well in accordance and corroborate the hypotheses drawn from the earlier investigations. Moreover, they further indicate that bound stem allomorphs have representations on a purely formal level only, i.e., they serve as indices of and entering points to morphological/morphosyntactic information.

Cognition↗