Robert J Hartsuiker

• Professor (Full) at Ghent University

Disfluency can occur when a speaker faces difficulty in language production, but it is also as a strategy to stall for time and create an illusion of continuity in speech. To better understand the origin of disfluency, the current study used a drift diffusion model (DDM) in a context of semantic competition. We developed a speeded version of the pi...

Some authors argue that filled pauses serve a communicative function in speech. The current study aims to test this function by analysing the difference in filler-use in a self-directed and social speech condition. Additionally, the influence of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) traits and stress on the difference in filler-use between the two conditi...

A doubly-quantified sentence like 'Every bear approached a tent is ambiguous': Did every bear approach a different tent, or did they approach the same tent? These two interpretations are assumed to be mentally represented as logical representations, which specify how the different quantifiers are assigned scope with respect to each other. Based on...

A series of artificial language (AL) learning studies investigated the development of shared syntactic representations during early stages of second language (L2) acquisition. In this paradigm, the sharing of syntax is measured by means of structural priming: if structures are shared between two languages, a sentence in one language (e.g., the AL)...

A series of artificial language (AL) learning studies investigated the development of shared syntactic representations during early stages of second language (L2) acquisition. In this paradigm, the sharing of syntax is measured by means of structural priming: if structures are shared between two languages, a sentence in one language (e.g., the AL)...

There is no consensus in the literature about the role of disfluencies as cues to deception. The current study used an interactive picture-description game to collect speech data of speakers and veracity assessments of listeners engaged in a socially meaningful interaction. The paradigm was implemented so that not only statement veracity (i.e., tru...

Some authors argue that filled pauses serve a communicative function in speech. The current study aims to test this function by analysing the difference in filler-use in a self-directed and social speech condition. Additionally, the influence of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) traits and stress on the difference in filler-use between the two conditi...

Although structural priming seems to rely on the same mechanisms in production and comprehension, effects are not always consistent between modalities. Methodological differences often result in different data types, namely choice data in production and reaction time data in comprehension. In a structural priming experiment with English ditransitiv...

We studied the role of discourse coherence relations on structure formulation in sentence production by examining whether a connective, an essential signal of coherence relations, modulates the tendency for speakers to reuse sentence structures (i.e., structural priming). We further examined three possible modulating factors: the type of connective...

Background: It is common for the older adult population to have age-associated cognitive decline and develop neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia. Several studies have suggested that classification algorithms based on linguistic features may be useful for the early detection of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Aims: The current study aimed t...

Language comprehension involves the derivation of the meaning of sentences by combining the meanings of their parts. In some cases, this can lead to ambiguity. A sentence like Every hiker climbed a hill allows two logical representations: One that specifies that every hiker climbed a different hill and one that specifies that every hiker climbed th...

Several studies have shown that different types of disfluency occur depending on the language production stage at which people experience difficulties. The current study combined a network task and a picture–word interference task to analyse whether lexical-semantic difficulty triggers errors and disfluencies in connected-speech production. The par...

A great majority of people around the world know more than one language. So, how does knowing one language affect the learning and use of additional languages? The question of cross-language influences is the focus of this book. Do bilinguals hear, understand, and produce language and meaning differently because of the languages they speak? How wel...

A doubly-quantified sentence like 'Every bear approached a tent is ambiguous': Did every bear approach a different tent, or did they approach the same tent? These two interpretations are assumed to be mentally represented as logical representations, which specify how the different quantifiers are assigned scope with respect to each other. Based on...

A doubly-quantified sentence like 'Every bear approached a tent is ambiguous': Did every bear approach a different tent, or did they approach the same tent? These two interpretations are assumed to be mentally represented as logical representations, which specify how the different quantifiers are assigned scope with respect to each other. Based on...

In the current study, we asked whether delays in the earliest stages of picture naming elicit disfluency. To address this question, we used a network task, where participants describe the route taken by a marker through visually presented networks of objects. Additionally, given that disfluencies are arguably multifactorial, we combined this task w...

Cross-linguistic structural priming effects suggest that bilinguals have shared or connected memory representations for similar syntactic structures. This predicts an influence of the production preferences of one language in the other language (Bernolet & Hartsuiker, 2018). We hypothesized that shared structures will lead to a facilitatory effect...

Language production is incremental in nature; we tend to plan linguistic chunks prior to articulating the first word of the utterance. Researchers have acquired knowledge about how far ahead sentences are generally planned, but mostly in monolinguals or the speaker's first language (Allum & Wheeldon, 2007; Martin, Crowther, Knight, Tamborello II, &...

Many cross-language sentence processing studies showed structural priming, which suggests a shared representation across languages or separate but interacting representations for each language. To investigate whether multilinguals can rely on such representations to predict structure in comprehension, we conducted two visual-world eye-tracking prim...

Disfluency can occur when a speaker faces difficulty in language production, but also as a strategy to stall for time and create an illusion of continuity in speech. To better understand the origin of disfluency, the current study used a drift diffusion model (DDM) in a context of semantic competition. We developed a speeded version of the picture–...

Implicit learning theories assume that structural priming is based on an error-based prediction mechanism (e.g. Chang et al. [2006]. Becoming syntactic. Psychological Review, 113(2), 234–272.), which predicts stronger priming when the bias of the verb in the prime sentence towards a syntactic structure mismatches the actual sentence’s structure (in...

Several studies showed that different types of disfluencies occur depending on the language production stage at which people experience difficulties. The current study combined a network task and a picture-word interference task to analyse whether lexical-semantic difficulty triggers errors and disfluencies in connected-speech production. The parti...

Arai et al. (2007) showed that structural priming in the comprehension of English dative sentences only occurred when the verb was repeated between prime and target, suggesting a lexically-dependent mechanism of structure prediction. However, a recent study in Mandarin comprehension found abstract (verb-independent) structural priming and such prim...

Bock et al. (1992) found that the binding of animacy features onto grammatical roles is susceptible to priming in sentence production. Moreover, this effect did not interact with structural priming. This finding supports an account according to which syntactic representations are insensitive to the consistency of animacy-to-structure mapping. This...

We conducted a norming study amongst Dutch children (6-12 years) to investigate whether they would correctly interpret our set of 208 color drawings, developed for longitudinal research on the production and comprehension of transitive sentences, if the transitive action on each drawing was described with an active or a passive sentence. The childr...

The visual world paradigm is one of the most influential paradigms to study real-time language processing. The present study tested whether visual world studies can be moved online, using PCIbex software (Zehr & Schwarz, 2018) and the WebGazer.js algorithm (Papoutsaki et al., 2016) to collect eye-movement data. Experiment 1 was a fixation task in w...

Several language production levels may be involved in the production of disfluencies. In the current study, we conducted network task experiments to tackle disfluencies related to conceptualization, which we operationalized by impeding visual object recognition (i.e. blurring). Contrary to what was expected, blurriness did not lead to more disfluen...

Various studies have claimed that the sense of agency is based on a comparison between an internal estimate of an action's outcome and sensory feedback. With respect to speech, this presumes that speakers have a stable pre-articulatory representation of their own speech. However, recent research suggests that the sense of agency is flexible and thu...

Sensory feedback plays an important role in speech motor control. One of the main sources of evidence for this are studies where online auditory feedback is perturbed during ongoing speech. In motor control, it is therefore crucial to distinguish between sensory feedback and externally generated sensory events. This is called source monitoring. Pre...

Cognates - words that share form and meaning between languages - are processed faster than control words. However, is this facilitation effect merely lexical in nature or does it cascade to phonological/orthographic (i.e., sub-lexical) processes? This study compared cognate effects in spoken and typewritten production, which share lexical, but not...

The visual world paradigm is one of the most influential paradigms to study real-time language processing. The present study tested whether visual world studies can be moved online, using PCIbex software (Zehr & Schwarz, 2018) and the WebGazer.js algorithm (Papoutsaki et al., 2016) to collect eye-movement data. Experiment 1 was a fixation task in w...

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions While evidence for proactive language control processes has been found during single word production, very little and conflicting evidence has been observed for such control processes during sentence production. So, the main goal of this study was to investigate whether proactive language control can o...

Many languages have particle verbs like meegeven in Dutch, in which a particle (“mee”, with) sometimes appears independently from the root verb (“geven”, give). To investigate whether particle verbs and their root verbs share a lexical-syntactic (lemma) representation, we tested whether structural priming (the tendency for speakers to repeat senten...

This paper examined the role of lexical processing in phrase structure building in sentence production. We asked whether speakers exploit a lexical cue as a lexical guide (i.e. the cued word occurs earlier in the sentence) and as a retrieval cue (i.e. a cue facilitates the retrieval of a memorised structure). In two experiments, participants recall...

Purpose The current study examines how speech disfluencies manifest themselves in the two languages of bilingual persons who stutter, starting from the hypothesis that stuttering is associated with an attentional deficit at the level of speech production. Methods Twenty-eight bilingual people who stutter performed a spontaneous and a controlled sp...

Various studies have claimed that the sense of agency is based on a comparison between an internal estimate of an action’s outcome and sensory feedback. With respect to speech, this presumes that speakers have a stable pre-articulatory representation of their own speech. However, recent research suggests that the sense of agency is flexible and thu...

Structural priming studies in production have demonstrated stronger priming effects for unexpected sentence structures (inverse preference effect). This is consistent with error-based implicit learning accounts that assume learning depends on prediction error. Such prediction error can be verb-specific, leading to strong priming when a verb that is...

Numerous studies have established that speakers tend to form utterances by reusing previously experienced sentence structures (i.e., structural priming). It was also frequently found that the repetition of lexical items enhances structural priming (i.e., lexical boost). This facilitation effect occurs not only when there is a full overlap of verbs,...

Two longitudinal studies investigated the development of syntactic representations in late second language (L2) learners by means of structural priming in an artificial language (AL) paradigm. Several studies found cross-linguistic structural priming in L2 learners, suggesting that they have shared syntactic representations across languages. But ho...

This study investigated the impact of the speaker’s identity generated by the voice on sentence processing. We examined the relation between ERP components associated with the processing of the voice (N100 and P200) from voice onset and those associated with sentence processing (N400 and late positivity) from critical word onset. We presented Dutch...

We investigated L1 and L2 frequency effects in the sharing of syntax across languages (reflected in cross-linguistic structural priming) using an artificial language (AL) paradigm. Ninety-six Dutch speakers learned an AL with either a prepositional-object (PO) dative bias (PO datives appeared three times as often as double-object [DO] datives) or a...

Structural priming studies in production have demonstrated stronger priming effects for unexpected sentence structures (inverse preference effect). This is consistent with error-based implicit learning accounts that assume learning depends on prediction error. Such prediction error can be verb-specific, leading to strong priming when a verb that is...

Several studies used artificial language (AL) learning paradigms to investigate structural priming between languages in early phases of learning. The presence of such priming would indicate that these languages share syntactic representations. Muylle et al. (2020a) found similar priming of transitives and ditransitives between Dutch (SVO order) and...

To reveal the underlying cause of disfluency, several authors related the pattern of disfluencies to difficulties at specific levels of production, using a Network Task. Given that disfluencies are multifactorial, we combined this paradigm with eye-tracking to disentangle disfluency related to word preparation difficulties from others (e.g. stallin...

Applied linguistic work claims that multilinguals’ non-native languages interfere with one another based on similarities in cognitive factors like proficiency or age of acquisition. Two experiments explored how trilinguals regulate control of native- and non-native-language words. Experiment 1 tested 46 Dutch–English–French trilinguals in a monitor...

Older adults are able to implicitly pick up structural regularities in the environment despite declining cognitive abilities. Here, we investigated elderly’s abilities to implicitly pick up novel linguistic constraints in speech production. Across four training days, young and healthy older Dutch-speaking adults were asked to rapidly recite Dutch p...

A doubly quantified sentence, such as All hikers climbed a hill, allows two interpretations: Did all hikers climb different hills, or did they climb the same hill? Previous work has shown that comprehenders construct disambiguated logical representations of these interpretations (Raffray & Pickering, 2010). We extended this line of research by inve...

This study assessed the usefulness of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to study word production in the brain. As a test case, we focused on the semantic interference effect (SIE), which has been demonstrated in many behavioral studies and has also been studied using neuroimaging techniques. Experiment 1 examined whether fNIRS can ident...

Speakers monitor auditory feedback during speech production in order to correct for speech errors. The comparator model proposes that this process is supported by comparing sensory feedback to internal predictions of the sensory consequences of articulation. Additionally, this comparison process is proposed to support the sense of agency over vocal...

Sensory feedback plays an important role in speech motor control. One of the main sources of evidence for this are studies where online auditory feedback is perturbed during ongoing speech. In motor control, it is therefore crucial to distinguish between sensory feedback and externally generated sensory events. This is called source monitoring. Pre...

To reveal the underlying cause of disfluency, several authors use a network task, where participants describe the route taken by a marker through visually presented networks of objects. To be able to disentangle disfluency related to word preparation from other factors, we combined this task with eye-tracking. We asked whether delays in the earlies...

Speakers’ memory of sentence structure can persist and modulate the syntactic choices of subsequent utterances (i.e., structural priming). Much research on structural priming posited a multifactorial account by which an implicit learning process and a process related to explicit memory jointly contribute to the priming effect. Here, we tested two p...

Second language (L2) speakers produce speech more slowly than first language (L1) speakers. This may be due to a delay in lexical retrieval, but it is also possible that the delay is situated at later stages. This study used delayed picture naming to test whether late production stages (leading up to articulation) are slower in L2 than in L1. Dutch...

As all human activities, verbal communication is fraught with errors. It is estimated that humans produce around 16,000 words per day, but the word that is selected for production is not always correct and neither is the articulation always flawless. However, to facilitate communication, it is important to limit the number of errors. This is accomp...

Many languages have particle verbs like meegeven in Dutch, in which a particle (“mee”, with) sometimes appears independently from the root verb (“geven”, give). To investigate whether particle verbs and their root verbs share a lexical-syntactic (lemma) representation, we tested whether structural priming (the tendency for speakers to repeat senten...

A doubly quantified sentence, such as 'All hikers climbed a hill', allows two possible logical representations: Did all hikers climb different hills, or did they climb the same hill? Previous work has shown that comprehenders construct disambiguated logical representations of these interpretations (Raffray & Pickering, 2010). We extended this line...

Motor speech requires numerous neural computations including feedforward and feedback control mechanisms. A reduction of auditory or somatosensory feedback may be implicated in disorders of speech, as predicted by various models of speech control. In this paper the effects of reduced somatosensory feedback on articulation and intelligibility of ind...

The extent to which negative bias toward foreign‐accented speakers originates from social categorization (in‐group/out‐group categorization) and/or from processing fluency (ease in processing information) is not clear. Some have argued that accent first induces a social identity effect and that processing fluency later modifies the impact of this e...

Several studies found cross‐linguistic structural priming with various language combinations. Here, we investigated the role of two important domains of language variation: case marking and word order, for transitive and ditransitive structures. We varied these features in an artificial language learning paradigm, using three different artificial l...

Several studies found cross-linguistic structural priming with various language combinations. Here, we investigated the role of two important domains of language variation: case marking and word order. We varied these features in an artificial language (AL) learning paradigm, using three different AL versions in a between-subjects design. Priming w...

Speakers monitor auditory feedback during speech production in order to correct for speech errors. The comparator model proposes that this process is supported by comparing sensory feedback to internal predictions of the sensory consequences of articulation. Additionally, this comparison process is proposed to support the sense of agency over vocal...

To reveal the underlying cause of disfluency, several authors related the pattern of disfluencies to difficulties at specific levels of production, using a Network Task. However, disfluencies are arguably multifactorial. To disentangle disfluency related to word preparation from other factors, we combined this task with eye-tracking. We manipulated...

Several studies used artificial language (AL) learning paradigms to investigate structural priming between languages in early phases of learning. The presence of such priming would indicate that syntactic representations are shared across these languages. Muylle, Bernolet, and Hartsuiker (2020) found similar priming between Dutch (SVO order) and an...

We investigated L1 and L2 frequency effects in the sharing of syntax across languages (reflected in cross-linguistic structural priming) using an artificial language (AL) paradigm. Ninety-six Dutch speakers learned an AL with either a prepositional-object (PO) dative bias (PO datives appeared three times as often as double-object [DO] datives) or a...

Within the language system, several of the language production levels may be involved in the production of disfluencies. Here, we conducted network task experiments to tackle disfluencies occurring during lexical selection, grammatical selection, and conceptual formulation. We showed that each difficulty induced a different pattern of disfluency. A...

We present a set of 423 animated action movie clips of 3 s, that we expect to be useful for a variety of experimental paradigms in which sentences are elicited. The clips either depict an action involving only an agent (intransitive action, e.g., a policeman that is sleeping), an action involving an agent and a patient (transitive action, e.g., a p...

Four experiments in Italian investigated how conceptual entities are mapped onto grammatical functions. By orthogonally manipulating the animacy of the elements partaking to a transitive event, we tested two views of the theme to function mapping process. Under the function mapping account, this mapping is a competition for the syntactic functions...

The role of auditory feedback in vocal production has mainly been investigated by altered auditory feedback (AAF) in real time. In response, speakers compensate by shifting their speech output in the opposite direction. Current theory suggests this is caused by a mismatch between expected and observed feedback. A methodological issue is the difficu...

Older adults are able to implicitly pick up structural regularities in the environment in a relatively unaffected way despite age-related cognitive decline. Although there is extensive evidence for this observation in the domain of motor skill learning, it is not clear whether this is also true for aspects of language learning. In this study, we in...

Cognates – words that share form and meaning between languages – are processed faster than control words. However, it is unclear whether this effect is merely lexical (i.e., central) in nature, or whether it cascades to phonological/orthographic (i.e., peripheral) processes. This study compared the cognate effect in spoken and typewritten productio...

Two longitudinal studies investigated the development of syntactic representations in late second language (L2) learners by means of structural priming in an artificial language (AL)paradigm. Several studies found cross-linguistic structural priming in L2 learners, suggesting that they have shared syntactic representations across languages. But how...

Using the visual world paradigm, we tested whether Dutch-English bilinguals predict upcoming semantic information in auditory sentence comprehension to the same extent in their native (L1) and second language (L2). Participants listened to sentences in L1 and L2 while their eye-movements were measured. A display containing a picture of either a tar...

Although speaking a foreign language is undoubtedly an asset, foreign-accented speakers are usually perceived negatively. It is unknown, however, to what extent this bias impacts cognitive processes. Here, we used ERPs and pupillometry to investigate whether the negative bias generated by a short exposure to a foreign accent influences the overall...

Research on error monitoring suggests that bilingual Dutch-English speakers are slower to correct some speech errors in their second language (L2) as opposed to their first language (L1). But which component of self-monitoring is slowed down in L2, error detection or interruption and repair of the error? This study charted the time course of monito...

In dialogue, speakers tend to adapt their speech to the speech of their interlocutor. Adapting speech production to preceding speech input may be particularly relevant for second language (L2) speakers interacting with native (L1) speakers, as adaptation may facilitate L2 learning. Here we asked whether Dutch-English bilinguals adapt pronunciation...

This study investigated whether syntactic mimicry leads to prosocial effects and whether any such effects are modulated by personality traits. Participants and a confederate of the experimenters took turns describing simple scenes. Target scenes could be described using either a prepositional object or a double object dative structure and we tested...

This chapter discusses language comprehension processes that come after recognition of the spoken word form. These involve syntactic analysis, semantic–syntactic integration, and syntactic integration and revision. It will be shown that there is considerable overlap in structure building in L1 and L2, especially for relatively simple structures. Pr...

The correct interpretation of Multiword Units (MWUs) is crucial to many applications in Natural Language Processing but is a challenging and complex task. In recent years, the computational treatment of MWUs has received considerable attention but there is much more to be done before we can claim that NLP and Machine Translation (MT) systems proces...

There are clear disadvantages in the speed of word production and recognition in a second language (L2), relative to the first language (L1). Some accounts claim that these disadvantages occur because of a slow-down in lexical retrieval and phonological encoding. But it is also possible that the slow-down originates from a later part of the product...

Several studies have shown that syntactic structures can be primed between the different languages of a bilingual. Bilingual production models put forward by Hartsuiker, Pickering, and Veltkamp (2004) and Pickering and Hartsuiker (2008) therefore assume that bilinguals share syntactic structures between languages as much as possible. In this paper,...

In the present manuscript, we investigate the source of congruency effects in a group of Dutch-French Bilinguals. In particular, participants performed a colour-identification Stroop task, in which both (first language) Dutch and (second language) French distracting colour words were presented in colours. The typical finding is impaired responding...

Languages often use different constructions to convey the same meaning. For example, the meaning of a causative construction in English (Jen had her computer fixed) is conveyed using an active structure in Korean (Jen-NOM her computer-ACC fixed), and yet little is known about how bilinguals represent and process such constructions. The present stud...

Structural priming data are sometimes compatible with several theoretical views, as shown here for three key theoretical claims. One reason is that prime sentences affect multiple representational levels driving syntactic choice. Additionally, priming is affected by further cognitive functions (e.g., memory). We therefore see priming as a useful to...

Numerous studies suggest that audiovisual speech influences lexical processing. However, it is not clear which stages of lexical processing are modulated by audiovisual speech. In this study, we examined the time course of the access to word representations in long-term memory when they were presented in auditory-only and audiovisual modalities. We...

Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) display a variety of impairments in motor and non-motor language processes; speech is decreased on motor aspects such as amplitude, prosody and speed and on linguistic aspects including grammar and fluency. Here we investigated whether verbal monitoring is impaired and what the relative contributions of the in...

Table A. Number of observations per percentile. Table B. Performance per participant on the Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM). Table C. Performance on the COWAT task. Participant data are compared to normative data from Miatton et al. (2004), calculated for the age distribution within the respective groups. On the left are the data for an educati...

Transcript perception network task. (PDF)

Translation Environment Tools make translators’ work easier by providing them with term lists, translation memories and machine translation output. Ideally, such tools automatically predict whether it is more effortful to post-edit than to translate from scratch, and determine whether or not to provide translators with machine translation output. C...

The lexical bias effect is the tendency for people to make phonological speech errors that result in existing words. Several studies have argued that this effect arises from a combination of factors: the self-monitoring system covertly weeding out more nonword than word errors and feedback of activation during speech production biasing towards lexi...

Auditory phoneme discrimination (APD) is supported by both auditory and motor regions through a sensorimotor interface embedded in a fronto-temporo-parietal cortical network. However, the specific spatiotemporal organization of this network during APD with respect to different types of phonemic contrasts is still unclear. Here, we use source recons...