Biomedical subjects

Martin Corley

Publications and source records attributed to Martin Corley.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

It's the way that you, er, say it: hesitations in speech affect language comprehension.

Everyday speech is littered with disfluency, often correlated with the production of less predictable words (e.g., Beattie & Butterworth [Beattie, G., & Butterworth, B. (1979). Contextual probability and word frequency as determinants of pauses in spontaneous speech. Language and Speech, 22, 201-211.]). But what are the effects of disfluency on listeners? In an ERP experiment which compared fluent to disfluent utterances, we established an N400 effect for unpredictable compared to predictable words. This effect, reflecting the difference in ease of integrating words into their contexts, was reduced in cases where the target words were preceded by a hesitation marked by the word er. Moreover, a subsequent recognition memory test showed that words preceded by disfluency were more likely to be remembered. The study demonstrates that hesitation affects the way in which listeners process spoken language, and that these changes are associated with longer-term consequences for the representation of the message.

Cognition↗

PubMed2006

Seeing ahead: experience and language in spatial perspective.

Spatial perspective can be directed by various reference frames, as well as by the direction of motion. In the present study, we explored how ambiguity in spatial tasks can be resolved. Participants were presented with virtual reality environments in order to stimulate a spatialreference frame based on motion. They interacted with an ego-moving spatial system in Experiment 1 and an object-moving spatial system in Experiment 2. While interacting with the virtual environment, the participants were presented with either a question representing a motion system different from that of the virtual environment or a nonspatial question relating to physical features of the virtual environment. They then performed the target task assign the label front in an ambiguous spatial task. The findings indicate that the disambiguation of spatial terms can be influenced by embodied experiences, as represented by the virtual environment, as well as by linguistic context.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Judgment of disfluency in people who stutter and people who do not stutter: results from magnitude estimation.

Two experiments used a magnitude estimation paradigm to test whether perception of disfluency is a function of whether the speaker and the listener stutter or do not stutter. Utterances produced by people who stutter were judged as "less fluent," and, critically, this held for apparently fluent utterances as well as for utterances identified as containing disfluency. Additionally, people who stutter tended to perceive utterances as less fluent, independent of who produced these utterances. We argue that these findings are consistent with a view that articulatory differences between the speech of people who stutter and people who do not stutter lead to perceptually relevant vocal differences. We suggest that these differences are detected by the speech self-monitoring system (which uses speech perception) resulting in covert repairs. Our account therefore shares characteristics with the Covert Repair (Postma & Kolk, 1993) and Vicious Circle (Vasić & Wijnen, 2005) hypotheses. It differs from the Covert Repair hypothesis in that it no longer assumes an additional deficit at the phonological planning level. It differs from the Vicious Circle hypothesis in that it no longer attributes hypervigilant monitoring to unknown, external factors. Rather, the self-monitor becomes hypervigilant because the speaker is aware that his/her speech is habitually deviant, even when it is not, strictly speaking, disfluent.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

Syntactic priming in English sentence production: categorical and latency evidence from an Internet-based study.

To date, syntactic priming in sentence production has been investigated categorically, in terms of the probabilities of reusing particular syntactic structures. In this paper, we report a web-based replication of Pickering and Branigan (1998), Experiment 1, using a typed sentence completion paradigm that made it possible to record not only the responses made but also the response onset latency for each sentence completion. In conditions where priming occurred (as determined categorically), responses took less time when target completions were of the same type as preceding prime completions than when they differed. As well as validating Internet-based research by direct comparison with laboratory-based work, our findings strengthen the support for an architectural account of syntactic priming as envisaged by Pickering and Branigan.

Adolescent↗