Diogo Almeida

New York University Abu Dhabi · Psychology

Previous work on the comprehension of agreement has shown that incorrectly inflected verbs do not trigger responses typically seen with fully ungrammatical verbs when the preceding sentential context furnishes a possibly matching distractor noun (i.e., agreement attraction). We report eight studies, three being direct replications, designed to asses...

Branigan and Pickering advocate the use of syntactic priming to investigate linguistic representations and argue it overcomes several purported deficiencies of acceptability judgments. While we recognize the merit of drawing attention to a potentially underexplored experimental methodology in language science, we do not believe the empirical eviden...

Despite many different scripts being actively in use today, they can be roughly divided into two different categories depending on the type of information about words they privilege: sound, as in alphabetic (e.g.: English) and abjad (e.g.: Arabic) scripts, or meaning, as in logographic scripts (e.g.: Chinese). These different types of scripts are s...

Many theories of phonology assume that the sound structure of language is made up of distinctive features, but there is considerable debate about how much articulatory detail distinctive features encode in long-term memory. Laryngeal features such as voicing provide a unique window into this question: while many languages have two-way contrasts tha...

Sentence-initial temporal clauses headed by before, as in "Before the scientist submitted the paper, the journal changed its policy", have been shown to elicit sustained negative-going brain potentials compared to maximally similar clauses headed by after, as in "After the scientist submitted the paper, the journal changed its policy". Such effects...

Time-window statistics. (DOCX)

Participant information. Demographic information, numbers of trials left per condition for each participant in the ERP analysis, and working memory recall and accuracy scores. (XLSX)

Critical stimuli. Highlighted rows indicate items that were later removed from the analysis. Veridicality bias ratings for each item are also given; for a description of how these were collected see the section "The role of veridicality". (XLSX)

Re-analysis of EEG data cleaned using ICA. (DOCX)

Previous investigations into the validity of acceptability judgment data have focused almost exclusively on type I errors (or false positives) because of the consequences of such errors for syntactic theories (Sprouse & Almeida 2012; Sprouse et al. 2013). The current study complements these previous studies by systematically investigating the type...

AGREEMENT ATTRACTION, the systematic pattern of production and perception errors that occur in sentences containing mismatches in φ-features (generally number) between their subjects and verbs (e.g., The key to the cabinets were...), is interesting because it suggests an unexpected split in how the parser deals with ungrammatical structures of diff...

Most investigations of the representation and processing of speech sounds focus on their segmental representations, and considerably less is known about the representation of suprasegmental phenomena (e.g., Mandarin tones). Here we examine the mismatch negativity (MMN) response to the contrast between Mandarin Tone 3 (T3) and other tones using a pa...

Visual word recognition is a domain of inquiry that interests cognitive scientists and education researchers alike, and it is one of the basic skills involved in literacy. I will present recent work done in the domain of visual word recognition using MEG that attempts to find reliable indices of successful lexical retrieval in brain data and discus...

The representational format of speech units in long-term memory is a topic of debate. We present novel event-related brain potential evidence from the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) paradigm that is compatible with abstract, non-redundant feature-based models like the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL). First, we show that the fricatives /s/ and /f...

The human auditory system distinguishes speech-like information from general auditory signals in a remarkably fast and efficient way. Combining psychophysics and neurophysiology (MEG), we demonstrate a similar result for the processing of visual information used for language communication in users of sign languages. We demonstrate that the earliest...

The role of Broca's area in sentence processing is hotly debated. Hypotheses include that Broca's area supports sentence comprehension via syntax-specific processes, hierarchical structure building, or working memory. Here we adopt a within-subject functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) approach using sentence-level contrasts and non-sententi...

In the processing of subject-verb agreement, non-subject plural nouns following a singular subject sometimes “attract” the agreement with the verb, despite not being grammatically licensed to do so. This phenomenon generates agreement errors in production and an increased tendency to fail to notice such errors in comprehension, thereby providing a...

The mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the electroencephalogram reflects phonological asymmetries: specifically, greater MMN is elicited by infrequent (deviant) tokens when the features of the frequent (standard) token are phonologically underspecified than when those features are phonologically fully specified. Such asymmetries have not been s...

Categorical acceptability judgments form an important and productive heuristic that provides a substantial body of data to theoretical linguists. Despite its popularity, however, they might not always provide an accurate representation of the acceptability facts, especially when it concerns complex patterns of judgments across a range of different...

This magnetoencephalography (MEG) study investigated the early stages of lexical access in reading, with the goal of establishing when initial contact with lexical information takes place. We identified two candidate evoked responses that could reflect this processing stage: the occipitotemporal N170/M170 and the frontocentral P2. Using a repetitio...

The goal of the present study is to provide a direct comparison of the results of informal judgment collection methods with the results of formal judgment collection methods, as a first step in understanding the relative merits of each family of methods. Although previous studies have compared small samples of informal and formal results, this arti...

This is a commentary in response to The need for quantitative methods in syntax and semantics research, by Edward Gibson and Evelina Fedorenko. Gibson and Fedorenko (2013, henceforth G&F) claim that the traditional methods of data collection in syntax are invalid. They argue that these methods routinely yield unreliable data, which in turn casts do...

Acceptability judgments form the primary empirical foundation for generative syntactic theories (Chomsky 1965, Schütze 1996). As such, the methodology of acceptability judgment collection has been a topic of research since the earliest days of generative syntax (e.g., Hill 1961, Spencer 1973). However, the past fifteen years have seen a dramatic in...

There has been a consistent pattern of criticism of the reliability of acceptability judgment data in syntax for at least 50 years (e.g., Hill 1961), culminating in several high-profile criticisms within the past ten years (Edelman & Christiansen 2003, Ferreira 2005, Wasow & Arnold 2005, Gibson & Fedorenko 2010, in press). The fundamental claim of...

The electrophysiological response to words during the 'N400' time window (approximately 300-500 ms post-onset) is affected by the context in which the word is presented, but whether this effect reflects the impact of context on access of the stored lexical information itself or, alternatively, post-access integration processes is still an open ques...

This study aims at verifying whether Portuguese gender-inflected nouns and adjectives are represented as full forms as suggested by Spanish data (Dominguez, Cuetos, & Segui, 1999). A series of lexical decision experiments is reported. Grammatical gender, frequency dominance, and grammatical category are manipulated and cumulative frequency is contr...

There has been a consistent pattern of criticism of the reliability of acceptability judgment data in syntax for at least 50 years (e.g., Hill 1961), culminating in several high-profile criticisms within the past ten years (e.g., Edelman & Christiansen 2003, Ferreira 2005, Wasow & Arnold 2005, Featherston 2007, Gibson & Fedorenko 2010a, 2010b). One...

Form, meaning and context in lexical access: MEG and behavioral evidence