Margreet Vogelzang

Newcastle University | NCL · School of Psychology

Multilingualism and linguistic diversity are the norm in India. Although studies have shown a relation between bilingualism and cognitive gains, linguistic diversity has as of yet been ignored as a potential factor affecting cognitive skills. This study aims to fill this gap by examining how cognitive skills - as measured by the n-back and Raven's...

Previous research has shown effects of syntactic complexity on sentence processing. In linguistics, syntactic complexity (caused by different word orders) is traditionally explained by distinct linguistic operations. This study investigates whether different complex word orders indeed result in distinct patterns of neural activity, as would be expe...

Age-related hearing loss typically affects the hearing of high frequencies in older adults. Such hearing loss influences the processing of spoken language, including higher-level processing such as that of complex sentences. Hearing aids may alleviate some of the speech processing disadvantages associated with hearing loss. However, little is known...

The resolution of ambiguous pronouns is influenced by the preceding linguistic discourse. This raises the question whether the processing of an object pronoun is also influenced by the preceding sentential subject. In an experiment with Dutch adults, we recorded pupil dilation as a measure of the cognitive effort involved in resolving pronominal ve...

Reduced forms such as the pronoun he provide little information about their intended meaning compared to more elaborate descriptions such as the lead singer of Coldplay. Listeners must therefore use contextual information to recover their meaning. Across languages, there appears to be a trade-off between the informativity of a form and the prominen...

There is ample evidence that prosodic cues in intonational phrase boundaries facilitate the chunking of speech in adults. Additionally, the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis proposes that these prosodic cues influence chunking in silent reading, and punctuation has indeed been shown to induce prosodic breaks that shape parsing decisions. While prosodic s...

Recent research on the processing of code-switched (CS) speech has yielded conflicting results, suggesting that CS can both alleviate cognitive demand and impose a cognitive cost. In light of these seemingly contradictory findings, this study examines the processing of CS utterances by late L1 Bulgarian L2 English bilinguals residing in the UK. Dat...

Background: Learning an additional language is a diverse experience, shaped by factors like learners’ linguistic and cognitive profiles and sociolinguistic context. Research in instructed language learning assumes that input should be presented in a unilingual mode, overlooking natural practices in linguistically diverse societies where mixed langu...

In this study, we present a pedagogical intervention to strengthen English reading comprehension in Indian multilingual primary-school children from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Specifically, we aimed to improve reading comprehension by providing structured, mixed-language intervention in government and low-cost private schools in Hyderabad (Tela...

Empirical studies on bilingual children’s reference production have often focussed on comparisons with monolingual peers. In this study, we introduce the concept of ‘reference profiles’: Speakers may exhibit similar or different behaviours in reference production, independently of whether they belong to a specific group (e.g., monolinguals or bilin...

The present experimental studies shed light on effects of implicit prosodic cues on anaphora resolution as well as on how these differ both within and between L1 and L2 speaker groups. In two self-paced reading studies, L1 and L2 participants read poem-like texts that contained anaphoric ambiguity. These stimuli were designed to include a rhyming s...

Theory of Mind has long been studied as a core weakness in autism spectrum disorder due to its relationship with social reciprocity, while bilingualism has been shown to compensate for autistic individuals' mentalizing weaknesses. However, our knowledge of the Theory of Mind developmental trajectories of bilingual and monolingual autistic children,...

In a highly multilingual country like India, challenges and opportunities arise in education and language policy. Although multilingualism is often associated with developmental advantages, Indian primary school children generally show low learning outcomes, specifically on literacy. Here we examine the influence of mother tongue education and mult...

Within the psycholinguistic literature, there has been a longstanding debate regarding whether we resolve syntactic parsing ambiguities via universal or language-specific biases. The present study investigates attachment biases in the online parsing of 'relative clause' (RC) attachment in Italian with respect to pseudorelative (PR) availability. Fo...

In this perspectives article, we call for a collaborative approach to research on children’s development of conversational inferences and of reading inferences. Despite the clear commonalities in their focus, the two rich research traditions have remained almost entirely separate, primarily within the fields of Developmental Psychology and Experime...

Indian classrooms are multilingual by default though learners’ multilingual resources are not always utilized to their fullest potential. The aim was to develop comprehension and vocabulary knowledge in English of fifth-grade learners through the translanguaging pedagogy. For the present study, four participant English teachers from low SES governm...

Aims: While research on syntactic L1 attrition has largely focused on interface phenomena (e.g., overt pronouns in null-subject languages), attrition has also been reported to affect syntactic parsing. This paper extends previous work by looking at the attrition of (pseudo)relative clause parser biases in L1-Italian L2-English speakers. This was do...

Background: German is exceptional in its use of noun capitalisation. It has been sug- gested that sentence-internal capitalisation as in German may benefit processing by specifically marking a noun and thus a noun phrase (NP). However, other cues, such as a determiner, can also indicate an NP. The influence of capitalisation on processing may thus...

Previous research focusing on direct object/subject garden path sentences, as in "While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib", has provided evidence for the influence of multiple syntactic and non-syntactic factors on disambiguation. The present study sheds light on the role of a textual parameter that has received little attention in the liter...

Reference production is a complex task that requires keeping track of discourse referents and selecting discourse-appropriate referring expressions (REs). Whether an RE is appropriate depends on the status of the referent in discourse. The use of REs by bilingual children is subject to individual variation and it has been suggested that distinct co...

Polysemous words are words that have multiple related senses. They can be cross-categorial, that is, the related senses occur across word categories, such as noun and verb. (1) uses the noun balloon as a verb: (1) Every birthday, we hang lights in the trees and balloon the front gate. The meaning of such unconventional uses requires a pragmatic inf...

Underprivileged but highly multilingual Indian children often show low literacy performance. As a complicating factor, these children are often expected to develop literacy not just in the regionally dominant language but also in English. As good literacy skills are crucial for later academic development, it is important to identify factors that co...

The deficit in cognitive flexibility, i.e. the ability to adapt cognitive behavior to changing contexts, is one of the most prominent characteristics of autistic individuals. Inflexibility may manifest in restricted interests and increased susceptibility to the effects of misinformation either through inefficient inhibition of non-target informatio...

It is known that German children generally show correct interpretation of object pronouns like him in German sentences equivalent to ‘John saw him’ by age 4. In contrast, Dutch (and English) children often incorrectly allow such object pronouns to refer to the sentential subject up to age 7, an effect that is known as the Delay of Principle B Effec...

Models that have been proposed to account for the organization of the production system are not in agreement as to whether semantic or phonological information is of primary importance for lemma selection in word production. While semanticosyntactic constraints and conceptual specification is prioritized by serial models, interactive or cascade mod...

This study examined whether bilingualism boosts Theory of Mind as measured by a non-verbal false belief (FB) task in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and how this potential boost may stem from improvements in a variety of other domains, namely executive functions (EFs), language, metalinguistic awareness skills, as well as autism sever...

Purpose Adults with mild-to-moderate age-related hearing loss typically exhibit issues with speech understanding, but their processing of syntactically complex sentences is not well understood. We test the hypothesis that listeners with hearing loss' difficulties with comprehension and processing of syntactically complex sentences are due to the pr...

Although various factors have been considered in syntactic ambiguity research, the influence of formal textual features remains largely unexplored. Poem stimuli were designed to test whether line breaks influence the availability of preceding hosts for RC adjunction. In an online pilot reading study, we considered presentation in 5-line poem format...

How do second language learners acquire form-meaning associations in the second language that are inconsistent with their first language? In this study, we focus on subject pronouns in Italian and Dutch. A native speaker of the non-null subject language Dutch learning the null subject language Italian as a second language will not only have to lear...

This article reports on the processing and comprehension of COMP-trace violations in German. The status of the COMP-trace effect in German is a controversial issue. It has been argued that judgments on long-distance (LD) subject questions are distorted because of parsing problems in the main clause, the embedded clause, or both, and that LD subject...

Full text: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GGJBn42Kd8ensTrJKJ4f/full?target=10.1080/0163853X.2019.1591127 Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and proces...

This paper investigates which cognitive abilities predict the interpretation of complex sentences by older adults. Participants performed a picture-selection task after hearing complex and simpler sentences, as well as a broad test battery of cognitive tests. The results show that different cognitive factors serve as predictors for the interpretati...

This paper investigates to what extent the variations in experimental results on the interpretation of Italian subject pronouns can be explained by the different discourses used in the experimental studies. A cognitive model implemented in ACT-R was used to simulate pronoun processing and interpretation in discourse, which is influenced by the vari...

This dissertation investigated the acquisition and interpretation of referring expressions, for example how listeners figure out who a speaker intended to refer to by using the referring expression he. An interdisciplinary approach was taken, using experimental studies examining the interpretation of referring expressions and the cognitive effort i...

Language processing is not an isolated capacity, but is embedded in other aspects of our cognition. However, it is still largely unexplored to what extent and how language processing interacts with general cognitive resources. This question can be investigated with cognitively constrained computational models, which simulate the cognitive processes...

It has been argued by Roeper and colleagues that second-order beliefs (beliefs about beliefs) can only be represented using an overt recursion device, such as sentence embedding. We investigated this claim in a comprehension experiment with Dutch adults. For sequences of three simplex sentences linked by demonstrative pronouns (e.g., “Computers are...

In this paper, we present a cognitive model that simulates the processing of subject pronouns in Italian. The model is implemented in the cognitive architecture ACT-R and uses hierarchically ranked constraints to select the most likely referent of a pronoun. When this model is combined with a measure of accessibility in discourse and a processing t...

To improve children's understanding of fractions, many curricula have started to use graphical representations (GRs). These would help children to relate to the problem more than when only a symbolic representation is shown. Moyer et al. (2002) state that the use of GRs can be especially helpful in a computer tutor, because of the interactions that...

Kehler (2002) claims that in sentences with resemblance relations parallel syntactic structures are prefered, while for cause-effect relations this is irrelevant, thus voice mismatches are dispreferred in resemblance relations. Adding a presupposition trigger like 'too' might help repair the damage made by the mismatch, making such sentences more f...