Publications
Selected publications in reversed chronological order. For full list please visit Google Scholar.
2025
- Revising noun predictions based on English measure phrases: Evidence from visual-world eye-trackingKayla Keyue Chen, Ingrid M. Johansen, and Wing-Yee ChowLanguage, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2025
Can comprehenders use unexpected incoming information to revise their existing predictions on the fly? A recent study in Mandarin Chinese found that, upon hearing a prediction-inconsistent nominal classifier, listeners were able to rapidly revise their predictions and redirect their eye gaze towards a previously unexpected object. In the present study, we extended this finding to English using measure phrases (e.g., “a pile of”). Unlike Mandarin classifiers, measure phrases are not obligatory for nouns in English, which allows us to test whether comprehenders can quickly revise their predictions even when the relevant cue is not routinely present in the language. We found that, upon encountering a measure phrase that contradicts their initial prediction, listeners quickly redirected their eye gaze from the originally expected object to an unexpected object that was compatible with the new information. We propose that comprehenders can rapidly revise predictions in response to unexpected bottom-up input across languages.
2024
- Trial-Level and Contiguous Syntactic Adaptation: A Common Domain-General Mechanism at Play?Varvara Kuz, Fangzhou Cai, Keyue Chen, Jiaxin Chen, Xuzi Qi, Clement Veall, and 3 more authorsLanguages, 2024
Garden-path sentences generate processing difficulty due to a more preferred parse conflicting with incoming parsing information. A domain-general cognitive control mechanism has been argued to help identify and resolve these parsing conflicts. This cognitive control mechanism has been argued to underlie adaptation to garden path processing at the trial level (conflict adaptation) and contiguously over the experiment (syntactic adaptation) in independent literature. The strongest evidence for its domain generality comes from garden-path processing being facilitated when preceded by a non-syntactic conflict (e.g., Stroop). This has been reliably observed in the visual world paradigm, which, like Stroop, requires irrelevant visual information to be suppressed. We tested the domain generality of conflict adaptation and its relationship to contiguous syntactic adaptation across four experiments (n = 562). To eliminate the visual object confound, the Stroop task was followed by a sentence-reading task. We observed Stroop and ambiguity effects, but no conflict adaptation in each experiment. Contiguous syntactic adaptation was replicated and most compatible with the parser changing its expectations and/or improving revision. While the data largely fail to support a domain-general cognitive control mechanism, a language-specific one could operate in both trial and contiguous syntactic adaptation and is worth future exploration.
2023
- Processing negative emotion in two languages of bilinguals: Accommodation and assimilation of the neural pathways based on a meta-analysisQinpu Dang, Fengyang Ma, Qiming Yuan, Yongben Fu, Keyue Chen, Zhaoqi Zhang, and 2 more authorsCerebral Cortex, 2023
Numerous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have examined the neural mechanisms of negative emotional words, but scarce evidence is available for the interactions among related brain regions from the functional brain connectivity perspective. Moreover, few studies have addressed the neural networks for negative word processing in bilinguals. To fill this gap, the current study examined the brain networks for processing negative words in the first language (L1) and the second language (L2) with Chinese-English bilinguals. To identify objective indicators associated with negative word processing, we first conducted a coordinate-based meta-analysis on contrasts between negative and neutral words (including 32 contrasts from 1589 participants) using the activation likelihood estimation method. Results showed that the left medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), the left posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), the left amygdala, the left inferior temporal gyrus (ITG), and the left thalamus were involved in processing negative words. Next, these six clusters were used as regions of interest in effective connectivity analyses using extended unified structural equation modeling to pinpoint the brain networks for bilingual negative word processing. Brain network results revealed two pathways for negative word processing in L1: a dorsal pathway consisting of the left IFG, the left mPFC, and the left PCC, and a ventral pathway involving the left amygdala, the left ITG, and the left thalamus. We further investigated the similarity and difference between brain networks for negative word processing in L1 and L2. The findings revealed similarities in the dorsal pathway, as well as differences primarily in the ventral pathway, indicating both neural assimilation and accommodation across processing negative emotion in two languages of bilinguals.
2020
- Effects of noun neighbor ratio on grammatical class recognition of disyllabic compound nouns in ChineseKeyue Chen, and Quansheng XiaExperimental Linguistics, 2020
Research on the dissociation between nouns and verbs has been seeking explanations from the perspectives of morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of nouns and verbs at the lexical level. However, sub-lexical processing seems to be left out in the discussion. Having the information of grammatical class of morpheme, Chinese disyllabic compounds are ideal materials to investigate the effects of sub-lexical properties on the dissociation between nouns and verbs. The present study investigated the effects of noun neighbor ratio of the first character (NNR1) on grammatical class recognition of disyllabic compound nouns in Chinese. Noun neighbor ratio (NNR) is defined as the ratio of the number of noun neighbors (NN) to the neighborhood size (NS) at the same position (e.g., NNR1=NN1/NS1). The experiment matched seventeen nuisance variables between two conditions: low NNR1 and high NNR1. Participants were asked to judge the grammatical class of the target word as quickly as possible. Results showed that words with high NNR1 were processed more quickly than words with low NNR1. The facilitative NNR1 effect suggests that grammatical categories and semantic information of sub-lexical morphemes and disyllabic neighbors are activated during word processing. The results support the semantic explanation of the dissociation between nouns and verbs and call for more attention to NNR in further research on the noun/verb dissociation.
Chen, K. & Xia, Q. (2020). Effects of noun neighbor ratio on grammatical class recognition of disyllabic compound nouns in Chinese. Experimental Linguistics, 9(2), 16-34.