Martin J Pickering

The University of Edinburgh | UoE · Department of Psychology

Standard models of lexical production assume that speakers access representations of meaning, grammar, and different aspects of sound in a roughly sequential manner (whether or not they admit cascading or interactivity). In contrast, we review evidence for a parallel activation model in which these representations are accessed in parallel. Accordin...

In this paper, we consider influential theories and models of simultaneous interpreting through the prism of current theories and findings in psycholinguistics. We review evidence suggesting that meaning is routinely accessed during comprehension, and, on this basis, suggest that it is unlikely that interpreters produce translation equivalents with...

There is controversy about the extent to which people predict phonology during comprehension. In three visual-world experiments, we ask whether it occurs in Mandarin, a tonal language. Participants heard sentences containing a target word that was highly predictable (Cloze 80.2%, Experiment 1) or very highly predictable (Cloze 93.9%, Experiments 2-...

Research suggests that interlocutors manage the timing demands of conversation by preparing what they want to say early. In three experiments, we used a verbal question-answering task to investigate what aspects of their response speakers prepare early. In all three experiments, participants answered more quickly when the critical content (here, ba...

Research investigating the complex interplay of cognitive mechanisms involved in speech listening for people with hearing loss has been gaining prominence. In particular, linguistic context allows the use of several cognitive mechanisms that are not well distinguished in hearing science, namely those relating to "postdiction", "integration", and "p...

Although previous research has demonstrated that language comprehension can be egocentric, there is little evidence for egocentricity during prediction. In particular, comprehenders do not appear to predict egocentrically when the context makes it clear what the speaker is likely to refer to. But do comprehenders predict egocentrically when the con...

While studies have shown the importance of listener feedback in dialogue, we still know little about the factors that impact its quality. Feedback can either indicate that the addressee is aligning with the speaker (i.e. “positive” feedback) or that there is some communicative trouble (i.e. “negative” feedback). This study provides an in-depth acco...

The standardization account predicts short message service (SMS) interactions, allowed by current technology, will support the use and conventionalization of ideographs. Relying on psycholinguistic theories of dialogue, we argue that ideographs (such as emoji) can be used by interlocutors in SMS interactions, so that the main contributor can use th...

To answer a question, speakers must determine their response and formulate it in words. But do they decide on a response before formulation, or do they formulate different potential answers before selecting one? We addressed this issue in a verbal question-answering experiment. Participants answered questions more quickly when they had one potentia...

How does the brain code the meanings conveyed by language? Neuroimaging studies have investigated this by linking neural activity patterns during discourse comprehension to semantic models of language content. Here, we applied this approach to the production of discourse for the first time. Participants underwent fMRI while producing and listening...

Prediction has long been considered advantageous in simultaneous interpreting, as it may allow interpreters to comprehend more rapidly and focus on their own production. However, evidence of prediction in simultaneous interpreting to date is relatively limited. In addition, it is unclear whether training in simultaneous interpreting influences pred...

Prediction is often used during language comprehension. However, studies of prediction have tended to focus on L1 listeners in quiet conditions. Thus, it is unclear how listeners predict outside the laboratory and in specific communicative settings. Here, we report two eye-tracking studies which used a visual-world paradigm to investigate whether p...

Our new paper "Purposeful listening in challenging conditions: a study of prediction during consecutive interpreting in noise" is to appear shortly in PLOS ONE! Using eye-tracking measures in the visual-world paradigm, we found that people predict during consecutive interpreting, even in noisy conditions. We did not find evidence that either nois...

Prediction has long been considered advantageous in simultaneous interpreting. But do people make predictions during a SI task even before training in SI? In this eye-tracking study, we consider predictions during SI both before and after SI training. We find that trainees make predictions even before training, and we find no evidence that training...

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...

In dialogue, speakers process a great deal of information, take and give the floor to each other, and plan and adjust their contributions on the fly. Despite the level of coordination and control that it requires, dialogue is the easiest way speakers possess to come to similar conceptualizations of the world. In this paper, we show how speakers ali...

How does the brain code the meanings conveyed by language? Neuroimaging studies have investigated this by linking neural activity patterns during discourse comprehension to semantic models of language content. Here, we applied this approach to the production of discourse for the first time. Participants underwent fMRI while producing and listening...

People sometimes interpret implausible sentences nonliterally, for example treating The mother gave the candle the daughter as meaning the daughter receiving the candle. But how do they do so? We contrasted a nonliteral syntactic analysis account, according to which people compute a syntactic analysis appropriate for this nonliteral meaning, with a...

Language processing requires the integration of diverse sources of information across multiple levels of processing. A range of psycholinguistic properties have been documented in previous studies as having influence on brain activation during language processing. However, most of those studies have used factorial designs to probe the effect of one...

Comprehenders predict what a speaker is likely to say when listening to non-native (L2) and native (L1) utterances. But what are the characteristics of L2 prediction, and how does it relate to L1 prediction? We addressed this question in a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, which tested when L2 English comprehenders integrated perspective into t...

Co-actors represent and integrate each other's actions, even when they need not monitor one another. However, monitoring is important for successful interactions, particularly those involving language, and monitoring others' utterances probably relies on similar mechanisms as monitoring one's own. We investigated the effect of monitoring on the int...

Language processing requires the integration of diverse sources of information across multiple levels of processing. A range of psycholinguistic properties have been documented in previous studies as having influence on brain activation during language processing. However, most of those studies have used factorial designs to probe the effect of one...

We report the results of an eye-tracking study which used the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) to investigate the time-course of prediction during a simultaneous interpreting task. Twenty-four L1 French professional conference interpreters and twenty-four L1 French professional translators untrained in simultaneous interpretation listened to sentences i...

When comprehending discourse, listeners engage default-mode regions associated with integrative semantic processing to construct a situation model of its content. We investigated how similar networks are engaged when we produce, as well as comprehend, discourse. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants spoke about a series of spec...

In dialogue, people represent each other's utterances in order to take turns and communicate successfully. In previous work [Gambi, C., Van de Cavey, J., & Pickering, M. J. (2015). Interference in joint picture naming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 41(1), 1-21.], speakers who were naming single pictures or pic...

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...

Comprehenders often predict what they are going to hear. But do they make the best predictions possible? We addressed this question in three visual-world eye-tracking experiments by asking when comprehenders consider perspective. Male and female participants listened to male and female speakers producing sentences (e.g., I would like to wear the ni...

People sometimes interpret implausible sentences non-literally, for example treating The mother gave the candle the daughter as meaning the daughter receiving the candle. But how do they do so? We contrasted a nonliteral syntactic analysis account, according to which people compute a syntactic analysis appropriate for this nonliteral meaning, with...

We present a theory of dialogue as a form of cooperative joint activity. Dialogue is treated as a system involving two interlocutors and a shared workspace that contains their contributions and relevant non-linguistic context. The interlocutors construct shared plans and use them to “post” contributions to the workspace, to comprehend joint contrib...

Co-acting participants represent and integrate each other’s actions, even when they are not required to monitor one another. However, monitoring the actions of a partner is an important component of successful interactions, and particularly of linguistic interactions. Moreover, monitoring others may rely on similar mechanisms to those that are invo...

Determining when a partner's spoken or musical turn will end requires well-honed predictive abilities. Evidence suggests that our motor systems are activated during perception of both speech and music, and it has been argued that motor simulation is used to predict turn-ends across domains. Here we used a dual-task interference paradigm to investig...

When comprehending discourse, listeners engage default mode regions associated with integrative semantic processing to construct a situation model of its content. We investigated how similar networks are engaged when we produce, as well as comprehend, discourse. During fMRI, participants spoke about a series of specific topics and listened to disco...

In dialogue, people must represent each other’s utterances in order to take turns smoothly and achieve their communicative goals. Previous work has shown that speakers who are naming pictures represent whether another speaker is engaged in the same task (versus a different or no task) concurrently, but it is less clear to what extent such co-repres...

Language comprehension depends heavily upon prediction, but how predictions are generated remains poorly understood. Several recent theories propose that these predictions are in fact generated by the language production system. Here, we directly test this claim. Participants read sentence contexts that either were or were not highly predictive of...

How do we update our linguistic knowledge? In seven experiments, we asked whether error-driven learning can explain under what circumstances adults and children are more likely to store and retain a new word meaning. Participants were exposed to novel object labels in the context of more or less constraining sentences or visual contexts. Both two-t...

Language comprehension depends heavily upon prediction, but how predictions are generated remains poorly understood. Several recent theories propose that these predictions are in fact generated by the language production system. Here, we directly test this claim. Participants read sentence contexts that either were or were not highly predictive of...

Cognates – words which share form and meaning across two languages – have been extensively studied to understand the bilingual mental lexicon. One consistent finding is that bilingual speakers process cognates faster than non-cognates, an effect known as cognate facilitation. Yet, there is no agreement on the underlying factors driving this effect....

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...

How do we update our linguistic knowledge? In seven experiments, we asked whether error-driven learning can explain under what circumstances adults and children are more likely to store and retain a new word meaning. Participants were exposed to novel object labels in the context of more or less constraining sentences or visual contexts. Both two-t...

Some evidence suggests that prediction is more limited in non-native language (L2) than native language (L1) comprehension. We evaluate the hypothesis that prediction is limited in L2 because prediction is largely non-automatic. We examine whether the subprocesses involved in prediction are unconscious, unintentional, efficient and uncontrollable (...

Linguistic interaction between two people is the fundamental form of communication, yet almost all research in language use focuses on isolated speakers and listeners. In this innovative work, Garrod and Pickering extend the scope of psycholinguistics beyond individuals by introducing communication as a social activity. Drawing on psychological, li...

In two ERP experiments, we investigated whether readers prioritize animacy over real-world event-knowledge during sentence comprehension. We used the paradigm of Paczynski and Kuperberg (2012), who argued that animacy is prioritized based on the observations that the ‘related anomaly effect’ (reduced N400s for context-related anomalous words compar...

This study aims to establish whether the processing of different connectives (and, but) and different coherence relations (addition, contrast) can be modulated by a structural feature of the connected segments, namely parallelism. While but is mainly used to contrast two expressions, and occurs in many different relations and has been shown to come...

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...

By age 2, children are developing foundational language processing skills, such as quickly recognizing words and predicting words before they occur. How do these skills relate to children’s structural knowledge of vocabulary? Multiple aspects of language processing were simultaneously measured in a sample of 2‐to‐5‐year‐olds (N = 215): While older...

Although it takes several hundred milliseconds to prepare a spoken contribution, gaps between turns in conversation tend to be much shorter. To produce these short gaps, it appears that interlocutors predict the end of their partner's turn. The theory of prediction-by-simulation proposes that individuals use their own motor system to model a partne...

By age 2, children are developing foundational language processing skills, such as quickly recognizing words and predicting words before they occur. How do these skills relate to children’s structural knowledge of vocabulary? Multiple aspects of language processing were simultaneously measured in a sample of 2-to-5-year-olds (N=215): While older ch...

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...

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...

Do people predict different aspects of a predictable word to the same extent? We tested prediction of phonological and gender information by creating phonological and gender mismatches between an article and a predictable noun in Italian. Native Italian speakers read predictive sentence contexts followed by the expected noun (e.g., un incidente: ‘a...

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...

People make comprehension easier by predicting upcoming language. We might therefore expect prediction to occur during the extremely difficult task of simultaneous interpreting. This paper examines the theoretical and empirical foundations of this premise. It reviews accounts of prediction during comprehension in both monolinguals and bilinguals, a...

People make comprehension easier by predicting upcoming language. We might therefore expect prediction to occur during the extremely difficult task of simultaneous interpreting. This paper examines the theoretical and empirical foundations of this premise. It reviews accounts of prediction during comprehension in both monolinguals and bilinguals, a...

During conversation, interlocutors often produce their utterances with little overlap or gap between their turns. But what mechanism underlies this striking ability to time articulation appropriately? In two verbal yes/no question-answering experiments, we investigated whether listeners use the speech rate of questions to time articulation of their...

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...

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...

Literacy has many obvious benefits: it exposes the reader to a wealth of new information and enhances syntactic knowledge. However, we argue that literacy has an additional, often overlooked, benefit: it enhances people's ability to predict spoken language thereby aiding comprehension. Readers are under pressure to process information more quickly...

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...

The nature of the facilitation occurring when sentences share a verb and syntactic structure (i.e., lexically-mediated syntactic priming) has not been adequately addressed in comprehension. In four eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the degree to which lexical, syntactic, thematic, and verb form repetition contribute to facilitated target se...

Odor naming is enhanced in communities where communication about odors is a central part of daily life (e.g., wine experts, flavorists, and some hunter‐gatherer groups). In this study, we investigated how expert knowledge and daily experience affect the ability to name odors in a group of experts that has not previously been investigated in this co...

Syntactic priming in language production is the increased likelihood of using a recently encountered syntactic structure. In this paper, we examine two theories of why speakers can be primed: error‐driven learning accounts (Bock, Dell, Chang, & Onishi, 2007; Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006) and activation‐based accounts (Pickering & Branigan, 1999; Reitt...

If you are kind to me, I am likely to reciprocate and doing so feels fair. Many theories of social exchange assume that such reciprocity and fairness are well aligned with one another. We argue that this correspondence between reciprocity and fairness is restricted to interpersonal dyads and does not govern more complex multilateral interactions. W...

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...

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...

Most cognitive research concerned with the relationship between language and music asks whether isolated individuals represent and process them in similar ways. In this paper, we focus instead on the relationship between interactive language and interactive music and suggest that speakers engaged in dialogue and musicians engaged in joint performan...

Research suggests that during conversation, interlocutors coordinate their utterances by predicting the speaker's forthcoming utterance and its end. In two experiments, we used a button-pressing task, in which participants pressed a button when they thought a speaker reached the end of their utterance, to investigate what role the wider discourse p...