Holly P Branigan

• PhD
• Professor at University of Edinburgh

Recent work has looked to understand user perceptions of speech agent capabilities as dialogue partners (termed partner models), and how this affects user interaction. Yet, partner model effects are currently inferred from language production as no metrics are available to quantify these subjective perceptions more directly. Through three phases of...

When conveying a message to an interlocutor, speakers need to code concepts in lexical expressions, a process known as lexical retrieval. There is evidence that speakers can take into account the dialectal background of their interlocutor to tailor their lexical retrieval; for instance, our pilot experiment showed that participants, when asked to g...

Natural language contains and communicates social biases, often reflecting attitudes, prejudices and stereotypes. Here we provide evidence for a novel psychological pathway for the expression of such biases, in which they arise as a consequence of the automatized mechanisms by which humans retrieve words to produce sentences. Four experiments show...

Previous research has established that children’s experiences of language during in-person interactions (e.g. individual and cumulative experiences of structural choices) implicitly shape language learning. We investigated whether children also implicitly learn structural choices during online interactions, and whether this is affected by the visua...

Recent work has looked to understand user perceptions of speech agent capabilities as dialogue partners (termed partner models), and how this affects user interaction. Yet, currently partner model effects are inferred from language production as no metrics are available to quantify these subjective perceptions more directly. Through three studies,...

Accounts of language production make different predictions about the conditions under which structural priming should be enhanced by lexical repetition (the lexical boost). Repetition of the head verb strongly enhances structural priming of a sentence, but studies of English have found contradictory results regarding the effects of noun repetition....

Previous research has found apparently contradictory effects of a semantically similar competitor on how people refer to previously mentioned entities. To address this issue, we conducted two picture-description experiments in spoken Mandarin. In Experiment 1, participants saw pictures and heard sentences referring to both the target referent and a...

Syntactic priming effects are argued to reflect the mechanisms that underlie language acquisition. This chapter explores the predictions of key models for such learning via syntactic priming and discusses the extent to which behavioural evidence is consistent with these predictions. Specifically, the chapter examines whether the timecourse of primi...

In dialogue, speakers tend to imitate, or align with, a partner’s language choices. Higher levels of alignment facilitate communication and can be elicited by affiliation goals. Since autistic children have interaction and communication impairments, we investigated whether a failure to display affiliative language imitation contributes to their con...

According to an influential hypothesis, people imitate motor movements to foster social interactions. Could imitation of language serve a similar function? We investigated this question in two pre-registered experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to alternate naming pictures and matching pictures to a name provided by a partner. Cruc...

This study explores the mechanism underlying shared syntactic representations for highly similar languages by investigating whether cross-linguistic syntactic priming is affected by language proficiency. In two experiments, native (L1) Mandarin-Chaoshanese speakers with moderate proficiency in Cantonese (L2) heard Chaoshanese and Cantonese dative s...

According to an influential hypothesis, people imitate motor movements to foster social interactions. Could imitation of language serve a similar function? We investigated this question in two pre-registered experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to alternate naming pictures and matching pictures to a name provided by a partner. Cruc...

According to an influential hypothesis, people imitate motor movements to foster social interactions. Could imitation of language serve a similar function? We investigated this question in two pre-registered experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to alternate naming pictures and matching pictures to a name provided by a partner. Cruc...

Two picture-matching-game experiments investigated if lexical-referential alignment to non-native speakers is enhanced by a desire to aid communicative success (by saying something the conversation partner can certainly understand), a form of audience design. In Experiment 1, a group of native speakers of British English that was not given evidence...

This study explores the mechanism underlying shared syntactic representations for highly similar languages by investigating whether cross-linguistic syntactic priming is affected by language proficiency. In two experiments, native (L1) Mandarin-Chaoshanese speakers with moderate proficiency in Cantonese (L2) heard Chaoshanese and Cantonese dative s...

Speakers' lexical choices are affected by interpersonal-level influences, like a tendency to reuse an interlocutor's words. Here, we examined how those choices are additionally affected by community-level factors, like whether the interlocutor is from their own or another speech community (in-community vs. out-community partner), and how such inter...

It has been proposed that the Glutamate (Glu) system is implicated in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) via an imbalance between excitatory and inhibitory brain circuits, which impacts on brain function. Here, we investigated the excitatory-inhibitory imbalance theory by measuring Glu concentrations and the relationship with resting-state function. N...

Second language (L2) speakers frequently make errors when producing L2 inflectional morphology, but the underlying causes of errors remain unclear. We report three experiments investigating how such errors might arise within the language production system, focusing on L2 speakers whose L1 does not use inflectional morphology to indicate temporal pr...

Interlocutors tend to refer to objects using the same names as each other. We investigated whether native and non-native interlocutors' tendency to do so is influenced by speakers' nativeness and by their beliefs about an interlocutor's nativeness. A native or non-native participant and a native or non-native confederate directed each other around...

Oral presentation at Words in the World International Conference 2020

Training for effective communication in high-stakes environments actively promotes targeted communicative strategies. One oft-recommended strategy is closed-loop communication (CLC), which emphasises three components to signal understanding: call-out, checkback and closing of the loop. Using CLC is suggested to improve clinical outcomes, but resear...

There is much evidence that the bilingual lexicon is well integrated at the level of individual words. In this article, we propose that it is also integrated at the multiword phrase (MWP) level. We first review the representation of single words within and across languages. Drawing upon this framework, we review current accounts of MWP representati...

Do speakers make use of a word’s phonological and orthographic forms to determine the syntactic structure of a sentence? We reported two Mandarin structural priming experiments involving homophones to investigate word-form feedback on syntactic encoding. Participants tended to reuse the syntactic structure across sentences; such a structural primin...

When threatened with ostracism, children attempt to strengthen social relationships by engaging in affiliative behaviors such as imitation. We investigated whether an experience of ostracism influenced the extent to which children imitated a partner's language use. In two experiments, 7- to 12-year-old children either experienced ostracism or did n...

Previous research has found apparently contradictory effects of a semantically similar competitor on how people refer to previously mentioned entities. To address this issue, we conducted two picture-description experiments in spoken Mandarin. In Experiment 1, participants saw pictures and heard sentences referring to both the target referent and a...

Research on structural priming in the visual-world paradigm (VWP) has examined how visual referents are looked at when participants are repeatedly exposed to sentences with the same or a different syntactic structure. A core finding is that participants look more at a visual referent when it is consistent with the primed interpretation. In this stu...

We provide a brief introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science entitled Structural Priming in Less-Studied Languages and Dialects. Structural priming is the tendency for people to use linguistic structures that they have recently encountered. It has been extensively investigated in English and a few related langua...

From infancy, we recognize that labels denote category membership and help us to identify the critical features that objects within a category share. Labels not only reflect how we categorize, but also allow us to communicate and share categories with others. Given the special status of labels as markers of category membership, do novel labels (i.e...

When speakers describe the world, they typically do so from their own perspective. However, they are able to adopt a different perspective, and sometimes do so even when they are not communicating with someone who has a different perspective from their own. In three experiments, we investigated the factors that might lead speakers to adopt a non-se...

Language use is intrinsically variable, such that the words we use vary widely across speakers and communicative situations. For instance, we can call the same entity refrigerator or fridge. However, attempts to understand individual differences in how we process language have made surprisingly little progress, perhaps because most psycholinguistic...

From infancy, we recognize that labels denote category membership and help us to identify the critical features that objects within a category share. Labels not only reflect how we categorize, but also allow us to communicate and share categories with others. Given the special status of labels as markers of category membership, do novel labels (i.e...

The assumptions we make about a dialogue partner's knowledge and communicative ability (i.e. our partner models) can influence our language choices. Although similar processes may operate in human-machine dialogue, the role of design in shaping these models, and their subsequent effects on interaction are not clearly understood. Focusing on synthes...

Coordination between speakers in dialogue requires balancing repetition and change, the old and the new. Interlocutors tend to reuse established forms, relying on communicative precedents. Yet linguistic interaction also necessitates adaptation to changing contexts or dynamic tasks, which might favor abandoning existing precedents in favor of bette...

The assumptions we make about a dialogue partner's knowledge and communicative ability (i.e. our partner models) can influence our language choices. Although similar processes may operate in human-machine dialogue, the role of design in shaping these models, and their subsequent effects on interaction are not clearly understood. Focusing on synthes...

Theories of language processing generally assume that speakers construct independent representations for syntactic and semantic information, based largely on evidence from English and related languages. But it is not clear whether the assumption of autonomous syntactic representations extends to other languages with different typological characteri...

Purpose Although there is increasing interest in using structural priming as a means to ameliorate grammatical encoding deficits in persons with aphasia (PWAs), little is known about the precise mechanisms of structural priming that are associated with robust and enduring effects in PWAs. Two dialogue-like comprehension-to-production priming experi...

Background & Aims: Impaired message-structure mapping results in deficits in both sentence production and comprehension in aphasia. Structural priming has been shown to facilitate syntactic production for persons with aphasia (PWA). However, it remains unknown if structural priming is also effective in sentence comprehension. We examined if PWA sho...

We report a study that investigated executive functions in four groups of participants that varied in bilingual language experience, using a task that measured two theoretically motivated mechanisms of cognitive control (proactive and reactive control). Analyses of accuracy based on aggregated measures suggested an advantage in early highly profici...

Previous studies have suggested that multilingual speakers do not represent their languages entirely separately but instead share some representations across languages. To determine whether sharing is affected by language similarity, we investigated whether participants' tendency to repeat syntax across languages was affected by language similarity...

Background Planning and communication are pivotal in achieving team goals. Studies have shown that teams with effective planning and sharing of mental models display better performance in resuscitation. The Advanced Life Support (ALS) algorithm serves as an overall script regarding specific stages during resuscitation, but it does not explicitly sp...

The ability to selectively access two languages characterises the bilingual everyday experience. Previous studies showed the role of second language (L2) proficiency, as a proxy for dominance, on language control. However, the role of other aspects of the bilingual experience-such as age of acquisition and daily exposure-are relatively unexplored....

Evidence from cross-linguistic priming suggests that bilinguals can share their representations of constructions that occur in both languages. Some studies suggest that such sharing occurs only when the constructions involve identical syntactic categories and word order, thereby supporting a restricted shared-structure account of bilingual linguist...

Adult second language speakers exhibit consistent variability when producing L2 inflectional morphology (Lardiere, 1998), especially those whose L1 does not use morphological marking. Many different sources for errors have been proposed, including absence of the relevant morphological representations (Hawkins & Chan, 1997), and L1 prosodic constrai...

Speakers manipulate word order to indicate the prominence of a particular entity. For example, the prominent entity is Patient in English passive sentences (e.g., Putin in “Putin was kicked by Obama”) but Agent in active sentences (e.g., Obama in “Obama kicked Putin”). Is there a scale of prominence? In other words, is there a difference between se...

This poster demonstrates the researcher’s recent study on the effects of semantic similarity on the production of referential expressions in Mandarin Chinese.

Background and aims Implicit learning mechanisms associated with detecting structural regularities have been proposed to underlie both the long-term acquisition of linguistic structure and a short-term tendency to repeat linguistic structure across sentences (structural priming) in typically developing children. Recent research has suggested that a...

This case study takes the reader through the process of developing a picture description paradigm for a second language (L2) production experiment as part of a PhD thesis. The case looks at the various theoretical and practical challenges faced along the way and how they were dealt with. This included the presentation of stimuli, detailed instructi...

It is well established that children with autism spectrum disorder ( ASD ) show impaired understanding of others and deficits within social functioning. However, it is still unknown whether self‐processing is related to these impairments and to what extent self impacts social functioning and communication. Using an ownership paradigm, we show that...

Structural priming offers a powerful method for experimentally investigating the mental representation of linguistic structure. We clarify the nature of our proposal, justify the versatility of priming, consider alternative approaches, and discuss how our specific account can be extended to new questions as part of an interdisciplinary programme in...

This poster demonstrates the the researcher’s recent study on the effects of animacy and similarity on simple sentence production in Mandarin Chinese.

Adult second language (L2) speakers frequently make inflectional errors in production (Lardiere, 1998), especially when their L1 does not use inflectional marking. Different accounts of optional inflectional marking explain these errors in different ways, including absence of the appropriate grammatical representations (Hawkins & Chan, 1997), or pr...

Anaphora resolution is a probabilistic process that involves linguistic and cognitive factors. So far, anaphora resolution in Italian has mainly been studied from a linguistic perspective. Moreover, different interpretational preferences have been found in Italian bilingual speakers. Here, we combined a visual world eye-tracking experiment and a fo...

Poster for AMLaP 2017, Lancaster, detailing research on the effects of interaction on real world categories between L1 and L2 speakers.

Our conversational partners often easily recognise prominent information that we intend to draw their attention to. For example, hearing utterances (1) ‘It was Beckham whom Obama kicked’ or (2) ‘Beckham, Obama kicked him’, they understand that the prominent entity in our mind is the patient (Beckham; Focus in (1) and Topic in (2)). But how do we ma...

Adult second language (L2) speakers frequently make inflectional errors in production (Lardiere, 1998), especially when their L1 does not use inflectional marking. Different accounts of optional inflectional marking explain these errors in different ways, including absence of the appropriate grammatical representations (Hawkins & Chan, 1997), or pr...

Background: Two experiments investigated the contribution of conflict inhibition to pragmatic deficits in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Typical adults' tendency to reuse interlocutors' referential choices (lexical alignment) implicates communicative perspective-taking, which is regulated by conflict inhibition. We examined whether...

Error-based implicit learning models (e.g., Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006) propose that a single learning mechanism underlies immediate and long-term effects of experience on children?s syntax. We test two key predictions of these models: That individual experiences of infrequent structures should yield both immediate and long-term facilitation, and th...

Within the cognitive sciences, most researchers assume that it is the job of linguists to investigate how language is represented, and that they do so largely by building theories based on explicit judgments about patterns of acceptability – whereas it is the task of psychologists to determine how language is processed, and that in doing so, they d...

We frequently experience and successfully process anomalous utterances. Here we examine whether people do this by ‘correcting’ syntactic anomalies to yield well-formed representations. In two structural priming experiments, participants’ syntactic choices in picture description were influenced as strongly by previously comprehended anomalous (missi...

Novel labels provide feedback that may enhance categorical alignment between interlocutors. However, the nature of this feedback may not always be linguistic. Lupyan (2008) has demonstrated the effects of labels on individual categorization, and even non-word labels have seemingly produced greater consistency in sorting strategies (Lupyan & Casasan...

This study used grapheme-colour synaesthesia, a neurological condition where letters evoke a strong and consistent impression of colour, as a tool to investigate normal language processing. For two sets of compound words varying by lexical frequency (e.g., football vs lifevest) or semantic transparency (e.g., flagpole vs magpie), we asked 19 graphe...

It is well established that adults converge on common referring expressions in dialogue, and that such lexical alignment is important for successful and rewarding communication. The authors show that children with an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and chronological- and verbal-age-matched typically developing (TD) children also show spontaneous l...

We show that children’s syntactic production is immediately affected by individual experiences of structures and verb–structure pairings within a dialogue, but that these effects have different timecourses. In a picture-matching game, three- to four-year-olds were more likely to describe a transitive action using a passive immediately after hearing...

Although it is generally accepted that syntactic information is processed independently of semantic information in languages such as English, there is less agreement about whether the same is true in languages such as Mandarin that have fewer reliable cues to syntactic structure. We report five experiments that used a structural priming paradigm to...

Picture-word interference (PWI) is a common paradigm for studying lexical retrieval in word production , which has been used in both mono-and bilingual studies. Language variation, however, has rarely been addressed in lexical-access research. Previous results with two German varieties found no cross-varietal facilitation from meaning-identical dis...

For successful language use, interlocutors must be able to accurately assess their shared knowledge (“common ground”). Such knowledge can be accumulated through linguistic and non-linguistic context, but the same context can be associated with different patterns of knowledge, depending on the interlocutor's participant role (Wilkes-Gibbs and Clark,...

How ease of access to semantic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic information affects constituent structure selection has been investigated exclusively in nominative/accusative head-initial (VO) languages. We investigated whether these findings can be generalized to ergative head-final (OV) languages like Basque. Using the structural priming pa...

The growth of speech interfaces and speech interaction with computer partners has made it increasingly important to understand the factors that determine users’ language choices in human-computer dialogue. We report two controlled experiments that used a picture-naming-matching task to investigate whether users in human-computer speech-based intera...

Communication is characterized by speakers' dynamic adaptations and coordination of both linguistic and nonverbal behaviors. Understanding this phenomenon of alignment and its underlying mechanisms and processes in both human-human and human-computer interaction is of particular importance when building artificial interlocutors. In this paper we co...

Most sentence production models consider how ease of access to semantic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic information affects choice of constituent structure. These considerations are drawn exclusively from studies that investigated nominative/accusative head-initial (VO) languages. We investigated whether these findings can be generalized to...

We investigated the production of subject relative clauses (SRc) in Italian pre-school children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and age-matched typically-developing children (TD) controls. In a structural priming paradigm, children described pictures after hearing the experimenter produce a bare noun or an SRc description, as part of a pict...

Many languages allow arguments to be omitted when they are recoverable from the context, but how do people comprehend sentences with a missing argument? We contrast a syntactically-represented account whereby people postulate a syntactic representation for the missing argument, with a syntactically-non-represented account whereby people do not post...

In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the interplay between visual and linguistic information processing during time-telling, and how this is affected by speaking in a non-native language. We compared time-telling in Greek and English, which differ in time-telling word order (hour vs. minute mentioned first), by contrasting Greek-English b...

We investigate repeated exposure within-trial and the interaction between this short-term priming and long-term adaptation on predictive eye-movements during situated language understanding.

Following the Sixth International Workshop on Language Production (Edinburgh, UK, Sept., 2010), this special issue presents a collection of contributions concerned with a wide range of representational and processing components. In the present article, we review the evidence for parallel processing at different levels within the production system w...

A structural priming experiment investigated whether bilingual speakers’ processing of their non-native language (L2) depends entirely on their experience of L2, or whether it is also affected by their experience of the native language (L1). German-L1 and Spanish-L1 proficient speakers of English (and English-L1 controls) described pictures of dati...

Background: Survival from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is dependent on the chain of survival. Early recognition of cardiac arrest and provision of bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) are key determinants of OHCA survival. Emergency medical dispatchers play a key role in cardiac arrest recognition and giving telephone CPR advice....

Most theories of human language production assume that generating a sentence involves several stages, including an initial stage where the prelinguistic message is determined and a subsequent stage of grammatical encoding. However, it is contentious whether grammatical encoding involves separate stages of grammatical-function assignment and lineari...

The ability to learn visual-phonological associations is a unique predictor of word reading, and individuals with developmental dyslexia show impaired ability in learning these associations. In this study, we compared developmentally dyslexic and nondyslexic adults on their ability to form cross-modal associations (or "bindings") based on a single...