One perennially important question for theories of sentence comprehension is whether the human sentence processing mechanism is parallel (i.e., it simultaneously represents multiple syntactic analyses of linguistic input) or serial (i.e., it constructs only a single analysis at a time). Despite its centrality, this question has proven difficult to address for both theoretical and methodological reasons (Gibson & Pearlmutter, 2000; Lewis, 2000). In the present study, we reassess this question from a novel perspective. We investigated the well-known ambiguity advantage effect (Traxler, Pickering, & Clifton, 1998) in a speeded acceptability judgment task. We adopted a signal detection theoretic approach to these data, with the goal of determining whether speeded judgment responses were conditioned on one or multiple syntactic analyses. To link these results to incremental parsing models, we developed formal models to quantitatively evaluate how serial and parallel parsing models should impact perceived sentence acceptability in our task. Our results suggest that speeded acceptability judgments are jointly conditioned on multiple parses of the input, a finding that is overall more consistent with parallel parsing models than serial models. Our study thus provides a new, psychophysical argument for coactive parses during language comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Humans are surprisingly adept at interpreting what is happening around them – they spontaneously and rapidly segment and organize their dynamic experience into coherent event construals. Such event construals may offer a starting point for assembling a linguistic description of the event during speaking (Levelt, 1989). However, the precise format of event representations and their mapping to language have remained elusive, partly because research on how people mentally segment and perceive events (see Radvansky & Zacks, 2014 for a review) has largely proceeded separately from analyses of how events are encoded in language (see Truswell, 2019 for a review).

The transferability and clinical value of genetic risk scores (GRSs) across populations remain limited due to an imbalance in genetic studies across ancestrally diverse populations. Here we conducted a multi-ancestry genome-wide association study of 156,319 prostate cancer cases and 788,443 controls of European, African, Asian and Hispanic men, reflecting a 57% increase in the number of non-European cases over previous prostate cancer genome-wide association studies. We identified 187 novel risk variants for prostate cancer, increasing the total number of risk variants to 451. An externally replicated multi-ancestry GRS was associated with risk that ranged from 1.8 (per standard deviation) in African ancestry men to 2.2 in European ancestry men. The GRS was associated with a greater risk of aggressive versus non-aggressive disease in men of African ancestry (P = 0.03). Our study presents novel prostate cancer susceptibility loci and a GRS with effective risk stratification across ancestry groups.