Christoph Scheepers

University of Glasgow | UofG · School of Psychology

Structural priming implies that speakers/listeners unknowingly re-use syntactic structure over subsequent utterances. Previous research found that structural priming is reliably enhanced when lexical content is repeated (lexical boost effect). A widely held assumption is that structure-licensing heads enjoy a privileged role in lexically boosting s...

The implicit prosody hypothesis (Fodor, 1998, 2002) proposes that silent reading coincides with a default, implicit form of prosody to facilitate sentence processing. Recent research demonstrated that a more vivid form of implicit prosody is mentally simulated during silent reading of direct speech quotations (e.g., Mary said, "This dress is beauti...

Human language processing must rely on a certain degree of abstraction, as we can produce and understand sentences that we have never produced or heard before. One way to establish syntactic abstraction is by investigating structural priming. Structural priming has been shown to be effective within a cognitive domain, in the present case, the lingu...

A number of recent studies found evidence for shared structural representations across different cognitive domains such as mathematics, music, and language. For instance, Scheepers et al. (2011) showed that English speakers’ choices of relative clause (RC) attachments in partial sentences like The tourist guide mentioned the bells of the church tha...

Late bilinguals often report less emotional involvement in their second language, a phenomenon called reduced emotional resonance in L2. The present study measured pupil dilation in response to high- versus low-arousing words (e.g., riot vs. swamp) in German-English and Finnish-English late bilinguals, both in their first and in their second langua...

The pseudohomophone effect refers to an established finding whereby in a visual lexical decision task, non-word letter strings that are pronounced like real words (e.g., WAWK) are harder to reject than pronounceable non-word strings that are non-homophonic to real words (e.g., FLIS). This paper reports two lexical decision experiments that aimed at...

Narcissism is a part of the Dark Triad that consists also of the traits of Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Two main types of narcissism exist: grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. Being a Dark Triad trait, narcissism is typically associated with negative outcomes. However, recent research suggests that at least the grandiose type may be linked (d...

In many Western cultures, the processing of temporal words related to the past and to the future is associated with left and right space, respectively – a phenomenon known as the horizontal Mental Time Line (MTL). While this mapping is apparently quite ubiquitous, its regularity and consistency across different types of temporal concepts remain to...

In two experiments, this study investigates relative clause (RC) attachment priming within Mandarin (L1) and from English (L2) to Mandarin (L1) in Mandarin-English bilinguals. Experiment 1 demonstrates a low-attachment (LA) preference for Mandarin, with significant priming effects influencing the attachment of RC completions. Experiment 2 reveals t...

In two online survey studies (N = 688 and N = 247, respectively) we developed and validated a new psychometric scale for measuring emotional resonance reduction in bilinguals’ LX (“later learnt language”) relative to their L1 (“first language”). The final scale, dubbed RER-LX (for Reduced Emotional Resonanc e in LX ), comprises 15 items and possess...

In a recent study, Fernandez et al. (2021) investigated parafoveal processing in L1 English and L1 German–L2 English readers using the gaze contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). Unexpectedly, L2 readers derived an interference from a non-cognate translation parafoveal mask (arrow vs. pfeil), but derived a benefit from a German orthographic p...

From the perspectives of grounded, situated, and embodied cognition, we have developed a new approach for assessing individual differences. Because this approach is grounded in two dimensions of situatedness—situational experience and the Situated Action Cycle—we refer to it as the Situated Assessment Method (SAM²). Rather than abstracting over sit...

A talk I have given in 2022, reporting simulation results for Type I error rate and power of various LMM and GLMM approaches to the analysis of RT data. Brace yourself for some surprises...

We have evolved to become who we are, at least in part, due to our general drive to create new things and ideas. When seeking to improve our creations, ideas, or situations, we systematically overlook opportunities to perform subtractive changes. For example, when tasked with giving feedback on an academic paper, reviewers will tend to suggest addi...

We often refer to space when we talk about time. To support this, studies show that we tend to associate the past with the left and the future with the right, space. However, there is little research that compares the spatial mapping of individual time units within the same methodological framework. Here, we used the same line-bisection paradigm to...

Previous research into drinking behaviour has often focused exclusively on either alcoholic drinks, sugar-sweetened beverages, or water, usually with an emphasis on changing consumption. The primary aim of the present study was to develop and assess a situated framework of drinking behaviour that predicts the frequency of drinking alcoholic as well...

In two online survey studies (N = 688 and N = 247, respectively) we developed and validated a new psychometric scale for measuring emotional resonance reduction in bilinguals’ LX (“later learnt language”) relative to their L1 (“first language”). The final scale, dubbed RER-LX (for Reduced Emotional Resonance in LX), comprises 15 items and possesses...

Studies which provide norms of Likert ratings typically report per-item summary statistics. Traditionally, these summary statistics comprise the mean and the standard deviation (SD) of the ratings, and the number of observations. Such summary statistics can preserve the rank order of items, but provide distorted estimates of the relative distances...

Studies which provide norms of Likert ratings typically report per-item summary statistics. Traditionally, these summary statistics comprise the mean and the standard deviation (SD) of the ratings, and the number of observations. Such summary statistics can preserve the rank order of items, but provide distorted estimates of the relative distances...

From the perspectives of grounded, situated, and embodied cognition, we have developed a new approach for assessing individual differences. Because this approach is grounded in two dimensions of situatedness—situational experience and the Situated Action Cycle—we refer to it as the Situated Assessment Method (SAM2). Rather than abstracting over sit...

In this study we investigated parafoveal processing by L1 and late L2 speakers of English (L1 German) while reading in English. We hypothesized that L2ers would make use of semantic and orthographic information parafoveally . Using the gaze contingent boundary paradigm, we manipulated six parafoveal masks in a sentence ( Mark found th*e wood for th...

Threat conditioning research frequently relies on making inferences about associative learning mechanisms using a single item for each conditioned stimulus (CS+, CS-) and the unconditioned stimulus. However, this type of design does not allow for assessing the extent to which results generalise to populations of items and can lead to anticonservati...

Call for participation in short online questionnaire

Bilinguals often display reduced emotional resonance their second language (L2) and therefore tend to be less prone to decision-making biases in their L2 (e.g., Costa et al. in Cognition 130(2):236–254, 2014a, PLoS One 9(4):1–7, 2014b)—a phenomenon coined Foreign Language Effect (FLE). The present pre-registered experiments investigated whether FLE...

Much reading research has found that informative parafoveal masks lead to a reading benefit for native speakers (see, Schotter et al., 2012). However, little reading research has tested the impact of uninformative parafoveal masks during reading. Additionally, parafoveal processing research is primarily restricted to native speakers. In the current...

A short pamphlet on parsimony as an inferential principle.

The tendency to repeat syntactic structure over consecutive sentence production or comprehension trials has received much attention in psycholinguistics over the past 25 years. Syntactic priming is not only informative in terms of potential cognitive architectures and mechanisms for linguistic processing, but has also (more specifically) been argue...

Data underlying the analyses reported in this paper. In ZIP-format (contains “README.txt” for further information). (ZIP)

Stimuli. The selected 30 High- and 30 Low Arousal words per language, in alphabetical order. (DOCX)

PCA. Information about the Principal Component Analysis on item characteristics. (DOCX)

Random effects. Supplemental information on random effects in the area-under-curve analyses. (DOCX)

Late bilinguals often report less emotional involvement in their second language, a phenomenon called reduced emotional resonance in L2. The present study measured pupil dilation in response to high- versus low-arousing words (e.g., riot vs. swamp) in German-English and Finnish-English late bilinguals, both in their first and in their second langua...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02056.].

From the perspective of the situated conceptualization framework, the primary purpose of concepts is for categorizing and integrating elements of situations to support goal-directed action (including communication and social interaction). To the extent that important situational elements are categorized and integrated properly, effective goal-direc...

The active voice and passive voice are complementary sentence forms that are available when describing a transitive event. In English, the latter has two variants: be-passive and get-passive. Numerous attempts have been made in the literature to represent the syntactic and semantic differences between these forms, while maintaining their shared fea...

Understanding the determinants of syntactic choice in sentence production is a salient topic in psycholinguistics. Existing evidence suggests that syntactic choice results from an interplay between linguistic and non-linguistic factors, and a speaker’s attention to the elements of a described event represents one such factor. Whereas multimodal acc...

Linear mixed-effects models (LMEMs) have become increasingly prominent in psycholinguistics and related areas. However, many researchers do not seem to appreciate how random effects structures affect the generalizability of an analysis. Here, we argue that researchers using LMEMs for confirmatory hypothesis testing should minimally adhere to the st...

Attentional control of referential information is an important contributor to the structure of discourse (Sanford, 2001; Sanford & Garrod, 1981). We investigated how attention and memory interplay during visually situated sentence production. We manipulated speakers’ attention to the agent or the patient of a described event by means of a referenti...

Human language processing must rely on a certain degree of abstraction, as we can produce and understand sentences that we have never produced or heard before. One way to establish abstraction in syntactic processing is by investigating structural priming. Structural priming is defined as the tendency to repeat aspects of syntactic structure from o...

In an ERP study, classic Chinese poems with a well-known rhyme scheme were used to generate an expectation of a rhyme in the absence of an expectation for a specific character. Critical characters were either consistent or inconsistent with the expected rhyme scheme and semantically congruent or incongruent with the content of the poem. These stimu...

Interword spaces have been reported to play an important role in silent reading of alphabetic languages. However, it has not yet been clear whether text spacing/segmentation facilitates the cognitive process in silent reading of Chinese, a logographic language, especially in reading Chinese regulated poems which have predefined rhythmic structures....

Motion events in language describe the movement of an entity to another location along a path. In two eye-tracking experiments we found that comprehension of motion events involves the online construction of a spatial mental model that integrates language with the visual world. In the first experiment, participants listened to sentences describing...

Conference poster from AMLaP 2015

This is an unpublished manuscript on our work (dating back to 2009) on syntactic priming in pre-school children. We tried to publish it in a good journal, but eventually gave up on that, as we are both working on completely different things now - potentially worth reading nonetheless. Comments welcome!

Literature assumes that negation is more difficult to understand than affirmation, but this might depend on the pragmatic context. The goal of this paper is to show that pragmatic knowledge modulates the unfolding processing of negation due to the previous activation of the negated situation. To test this, we used the visual world paradigm. In this...

We investigated the interplay between overt prosodic cues and semantic cues on the structural interpretation of spoken sentences that permit either high- or low-attachment of a final relative clause. Prosodic cues were manipulated via the presence or absence of a strong prosodic boundary before the relative clause, and semantic cues were induced vi...

We investigated the interplay between overt prosodic cues and semantic cues on the structural interpretation of spoken sentences that permit either high- or low-attachment of a final relative clause. Prosodic cues were manipulated via the presence or absence of a strong prosodic boundary before the relative clause, and semantic cues were induced vi...

In this chapter, we review recent research concerned with “inner voice” experiences during silent reading of direct speech (e.g., Mary said, “This dress is beautiful!”) and indirect speech (e.g., Mary said that the dress was beautiful). Converging findings from speech analysis, brain imaging, and eye tracking indicate that readers spontaneously eng...

Developmental dyslexia is often characterized by a dual deficit in both word recognition accuracy and general processing speed. While previous research into dyslexic word recognition may have suffered from speed-accuracy trade-off, the present study employed a novel eye-tracking task that is less prone to such confounds. Participants (10 dyslexics...

Experimental designs are often within-subjects and between-items, or vice versa. For example, in lexical decision experiments, conditions frequently involve different types of words (between-item manipulation) all of which are presented to each participant (within-subject manipulation). Such designs almost always pose the problem of controlling for...

In the experiment reported here, 30 participants made a lexical decision on 120 spoken words and 120 spoken non-words. The words had either an upward (e.g. 'moon') or downward (e.g. 'sewer') spatial association, or they were neutral in this respect (e.g. 'letter'). Participants made their lexical decisions by fixating a target located either above...

Measuring aesthetics as a substantial part of design has not been considerably developed yet due to its qualitative nature. This research aims to develop a capable system in order to measure the defined qualities of aesthetics. This process is achieved by conducting design experiments in which eye-tracking technology is used as an objective tool to...

Presentation given at the Psycholinguistics Coffee Meeting in Edinburgh, February 26, 2014

Scheepers et al. (2011) showed that the structure of a correctly solved mathematical equation affects how people subsequently complete sentences containing high vs. low relative-clause attachment ambiguities. Here we investigated whether such effects generalise to different structures and tasks, and importantly, whether they also hold in the revers...

In English, transitive events can be described in various ways. The main possibilities are active-voice and passive-voice, which are assumed to have distinct semantic and pragmatic functions. Within the passive, there are two further options, namely be-passive or get-passive. While these two forms are generally understood to differ, there is little...

What features of a poem make it captivating, and which cognitive mechanisms are sensitive to these features? We addressed these questions experimentally by measuring pupillary responses of 40 participants who listened to a series of Limericks. The Limericks ended with either a semantic, syntactic, rhyme or metric violation. Compared to a control co...

To describe a transitive event, the English language allows a choice of two Voices. The canonical form is the active-voice, and the alternative is passive-voice, which offers its own semantic and syntactic functions. The passive-voice can also be divided into two further variants: be-passives and get-passives. Though theories are numerous, literatu...

The analysis of the internal structure of concepts reveals the presence of a substantial amount of contextual information. Even though this interaction is easily recognizable, it is not clear how contextual information is processed and included into concept representations. The aim of this paper is to shed light on this question by analyzing the ef...

Cognitive mechanisms underlying linguistic communication do not only rely upon retrieval and processing of linguistic information; they also involve constant updating and organizing of this linguistic information in relation with other, more general, cognitive mechanisms. Some existing theoretical models assume such a tight interactive link between...

In describing motion events verbs of manner provide information about the speed of agents or objects in those events. We used eye tracking to investigate how inferences about this verb-associated speed of motion would influence the time course of attention to a visual scene that matched an event described in language. Eye movements were recorded as...

Experimental sentences used in experiment. (DOCX)

To date, cognitive probe paradigms have been used in different guises to obtain reaction time measurements suggestive of an attention bias towards sleep in insomnia. This study adopts a methodology which is novel to sleep research to obtain a continual record of where the eyes-and therefore attention-are being allocated with regard to sleep and neu...

TEST is a novel taxonomy of knowledge representations based on three distinct hierarchically organized representational features: Tropism, Embodiment, and Situatedness. Tropic representational features reflect constraints of the physical world on the agent’s ability to form, reactivate, and enrich embodied (i.e., resulting from the agent’s bodily c...

Linear mixed-effects models (LMEMs) have become increasingly prominent in psycholinguistics and related areas. However, many researchers do not seem to appreciate how random effects structures affect the generalizability of an analysis. Here, we argue that researchers using LMEMs for confirmatory hypothesis testing should minimally adhere to the st...

We analysed how syntactic flexibility influences sentence production in two different languages-English and Russian. In Experiment 1, speakers were instructed to produce as many structurally different descriptions of transitive-event pictures as possible. Consistent with the syntactically more flexible Russian grammar, Russian participants produced...

Linear mixed-effects models (LMEMs) have become increasingly prominent in psycholin-guistics and related areas. However, many researchers do not seem to appreciate how random effects structures affect the generalizability of an analysis. Here, we argue that researchers using LMEMs for confirmatory hypothesis testing should minimally adhere to the s...