Adult speakers rarely produce a verb that does not agree with its subject in number, unless the sentence contains nouns with clashing pluralities. For example, a sentence such as “The key next to the cabinets…”, sometimes elicits a plural verb, and such attraction errors are more common with singular than plural heads (the attraction asymmetry). Both attraction and attraction asymmetry have been instrumental in understanding the computations underlying agreement production. Interestingly, developmental studies of agreement have often found very different patterns of agreement errors in children, leading to the conclusion of different mechanisms for agreement production in children and adults. Using a referential communication game, we demonstrate that English-speaking children as young as 5 years of age show robust agreement attraction. Children 6 years and older also demonstrate the attraction asymmetry. These findings support similar mechanisms underlying agreement production in children and adults.

This paper uses the signal detection theory (SDT) to investigate the contribution of visual information to two monitoring-dependent functions, metacognitive awareness of errors and error corrections. Data from two experiments show that complete removal of visual outcome results in a mild decrease in error awareness and a much more significant decrease in correction rates. Partially restoring visual information by including positional information (as in masked password typing) causes a modest but statistically significant improvement in correction performance. Interestingly, participants treat the change to the quality of information differently across the tasks, with more conservative behavior (avoiding false alarms) in the correction task. These findings show the SDT’s ability to quantify, in a graded manner, the contribution of specific types of information to monitoring in complex tasks, while also providing additional information about how participants handle the change to the quality of information in a task-dependent manner.

Native adult speakers of a language can produce grammatical sentences fluently, effortlessly, and with relatively few errors. These characteristics make the highly-practiced task of speaking a viable candidate for an automatic process, i.e., one independent of cognitive control. However, recent studies have suggested that some aspects of production, such as lexical retrieval and tailoring speech to an addressee, may depend on the speaker’s inhibitory control abilities. Less clear is the dependence of syntactic operations on inhibitory control processes. Using both a direct manipulation of inhibitory control demands and an analysis of individual differences, we show that one of the most common syntactic operations, producing the correct subject-verb agreement, requires inhibitory control when a singular subject noun competes with a plural local noun as in “The snake next to the purple elephants is green.” This finding calls for the integration of inhibitory control mechanisms into models of agreement production, and more generally into theories of syntactic production.

Younger adults use both semantic and phonological cues to quickly and efficiently localize the referent during sentence comprehension. While some behavioral studies suggest that older adults use contextual information even more strongly than younger adults, ERP studies have shown that this population, as a group, is less apt at using contextual semantic cues to predict upcoming words. The current study extends the investigation of contextual cue processing in auditory sentence comprehension beyond semantic cue processing, by comparing younger and older adults in their ability to use phonological cues in indefinite articles (a/an) to localize the referent in an eye-tracking visual world paradigm. Our results suggest that both age groups use such phonological information for referent localization, but with different timelines: younger adults use the cues to anticipate an upcoming word, whereas older adults show delayed cue processing after the target word has been spoken. Together with findings from semantic context processing, these results support a model of sentence comprehension in which the use of contextual cues continues with aging, but is no longer as efficient as in the young system for anticipatory word retrieval.

Conversations sometimes include speech errors that are repaired. But what do speakers and listeners remember, the error, the repair, or both? In three experiments, we investigated this question by having speakers give instructions for clicking on pictures (Exp 1) or by having listeners follow those instructions by clicking on the referenced pictures (Exps 2 and 3), followed by a surprise recognition test for the spoken words. Results of Exps 1 and 2 showed that both speakers and listeners have better memory for errors than repairs. Exp 3 managed to reverse this pattern by preventing listeners from clicking on the objects that were the referents of speech errors. Collectively, these results suggest superior memory for errors, not when they are simply perceived, but when they are tied to an action.

One of the major debates in the field of word production is whether lexical selection is competitive or not. For nearly half a century, semantic interference effects in picture naming latencies have been claimed as evidence for competitive (relative threshold) models of lexical selection, while semantic facilitation effects have been claimed as evidence for non-competitive (simple threshold) models instead. In this paper, we use a computational modeling approach to compare the consequences of competitive and noncompetitive selection algorithms for blocked cyclic picture naming latencies, combined with two approaches to representing taxonomic and thematic semantic features. We show that although our simple model can capture both semantic interference and facilitation, the presence or absence of competition in the selection mechanism is unrelated to the polarity of these semantic effects. These results question the validity of prior assumptions and offer new perspectives on the origins of interference and facilitation in language production.

Fast and efficient correction of speech errors is essential to effective communication. Yet, despite several accounts of error detection, no computational account exists to explain how humans repair their speech errors. This paper proposes the first such model. We demonstrate that a simple automatic mechanism can form the basis of most repairs. We then demonstrate that augmenting the model with a conflict-based monitoring-control loop allows it to capture more nuanced findings in human speech error repair data.

The classic Baddeley and Hitch (1974) model divides working memory into domain-specific subsystems and a shared, do- main-general central executive, which plays a role in allocating resources to items stored in the subsystems. The nature of this resource—in particular, its quantization (discrete vs. continu- ous) and the flexibility of its allocation—has been studied ex- tensively in the visual domain, with evidence from experiments using continuous response measures providing support for models with flexibly and continuously divisible resources. It remains unclear, however, whether similar mechanisms medi- ate the division of resources in phonological working memory. In this paper, we show that, despite representational differences between visual and auditory processing, continuous measures can also be employed for studying phonological working memory. Using such measures, we demonstrate that the prin- ciples of resource division in visual and phonological pro- cessing are indeed similar, providing evidence for a domain- general mechanism for allocating working memory resources.

Using referential context in language (e.g., saying “blue pen” when two different-colored pens are visible) makes communication efficient. But it is still unclear which general cognitive processes support the use of context in conversation. Research on pragmatic use in language implicates working memory and inhibitory control; however, no studies have shown evidence of a shared cognitive mechanism in both production and comprehension within an individual. The current study asked a) whether referential context use is supported by the same cognitive mechanisms in production and comprehension, b) which processes are implicated, and c) whether the nature of the context itself affects processing. Participants completed a referential communication eye-tracking task in which a disambiguating adjective was either necessary or over-informative, as well as a cognitive test battery. The results implicated inhibitory control in both production and comprehension (although the comprehension results were more variable), suggesting a shared underlying cognitive mechanism across domains.