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Fictive motion is the metaphorical motion of an object or abstraction through space. Fictive motion has become a subject of study in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics. In fictive motion sentences, a motion verb applies to a subject that is not literally capable of movement in the physical world, as in the sentence, "The fence runs along the perimeter of the house." Fictive motion is so called because it is attributed to material states, objects, or abstract concepts, that cannot (sensibly) be said to move themselves through physical space. Fictive motion sentences are pervasive in English and other languages.
Cognitive linguist Leonard Talmy discussed many of the spatial and linguistic properties of fictive motion in a book chapter called "Fictive motion in language and 'ception (Talmy 1996). He provided further insights in his seminal book, "Toward a Cognitive Semantics Vol. 1", in 2000. Talmy began analyzing the semantics of fictive motion in the late 1970s and early 1980s but used the term "virtual motion" at that time (e.g. Talmy 1983).
Fictive motion has since been investigated by cognitive scientists interested in whether and how it evokes dynamic imagery. Methods of investigation have included reading tasks, eye-tracking tasks and drawing tasks.
It appears that not only does thinking about actual motion influence people's judgments about time, but thinking about fictive motion has the same effect, suggesting that thinking about one abstract domain may influence people's understanding of another. This raises the question of whether the influence of fictive motion on people's understanding of time is rooted in a concrete, embodied conception of motion, such that both time and fictive motion are ultimately understood in terms of simulations of concrete experience, or whether the effects of fictive motion are a product of the way that language influences thought.
Transderivational search (often abbreviated to TDS) is a psychological and cybernetics term, meaning when a search is being conducted for a fuzzy match across a broad field. In computing the equivalent function can be performed using content-addressable memory.
Unlike usual searches, which look for literal (i.e. exact, logical, or regular expression) matches, a transderivational search is a search for a possible meaning or possible match as part of communication, and without which an incoming communication cannot be made any sense of whatsoever. It is thus an integral part of processing language, and of attaching meaning to communication.
A psychological example of TDS is in Ericksonian hypnotherapy, where vague suggestions are used that the patient must process intensely in order to find their own meanings, thus ensuring that the practitioner does not intrude his own beliefs into the subject's inner world.
Because TDS is a compelling, automatic and unconscious state of internal focus and processing (i.e. a type of everyday trance state), and often a state of internal lack of certainty, or openness to finding an answer (since something is being checked out at that moment), it can be utilized or interrupted, in order to create, or deepen, trance.
TDS is a fundamental part of human language and cognitive processing. Arguably, every word or utterance a person hears, for example, and everything they see or feel and take note of, results in a very brief trance while TDS is carried out to establish a contextual meaning for it.
Although TDS is often associated with spoken language, it can be induced in any perceptual system. Thus Milton Erickson's "hypnotic handshake" is a technique that leaves the other person performing TDS in search of meaning to a deliberately ambiguous use of touch.
Crosslinguistic influence (CLI) refers to the different ways in which one language can affect another within an individual speaker. It typically involves two languages that can affect one another in a bilingual speaker.  An example of CLI is the influence of Korean on a Korean native speaker who is learning Japanese or French. Less typically, it could also refer to an interaction between different dialects in the mind of a monolingual speaker. CLI can be observed across subsystems of languages including pragmatics, semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology, phonetics, and orthography. Discussed further in this article are particular subcategories of CLI—transfer, attrition, the complementarity principle, and additional theories.
The question of how languages influence one another within a bilingual individual can be addressed both with respect to mature bilinguals and with respect to bilingual language acquisition. With respect to bilingual language acquisition in children, there are several hypotheses that examine the internal representation of bilinguals' languages. Volterra and Taeschner proposed the "Single System Hypothesis," which states that children start out with one single system that develops into two systems. This hypothesis proposed that bilingual children go through three stages of acquisition.
Since the development of the "Crosslinguistic Hypothesis", much research has contributed to the understanding of CLI in areas of structural overlap, directionality, dominance, interfaces, the role of input, and the role of processing and production.
Jacquelyn Schachter (1992) argues that transfer is not a process at all, but that it is improperly named. She described transfer as "an unnecessary carryover from the heyday of behaviorism." In her view, transfer is more of a constraint on the L2 learners' judgments about the constructions of the acquired L2 language. Schachter stated, "It is both a facilitating and a limiting condition on the hypothesis testing process, but it is not in and of itself a process."
Language transfer can be positive or negative. Transfer between similar languages often yields correct production in the new language because the systems of both languages are similar. This correct production would be considered positive transfer. An example involves a Spanish speaker (L1) who is acquiring Catalan (L2). Because the languages are so similar, the speaker could rely on their knowledge of Spanish when learning certain Catalan grammatical features and pronunciation. However, the two languages are distinct enough that the speaker's knowledge of Spanish could potentially interfere with learning Catalan properly.
Negative transfer (Interference) occurs when there are little to no similarities between the L1 and L2. It is when errors and avoidance are more likely to occur in the L2. The types of errors that result from this type of transfer are underproduction, overproduction, miscomprehension, and production errors, such as substitution, calques, under/overdifferentiation and hypercorrection.
Overproduction refers to an L2 learner producing certain structures within the L2 with a higher frequency than native speakers of that language. In a study by Schachter and Rutherford (1979), they found that Chinese and Japanese speakers who wrote English sentences overproduced certain types of cleft constructions:
and sentences that contained "There are"/"There is" which suggests an influence of the topic marking function in their L1 appearing in their L2 English sentences.
French learners have been shown to over-rely on presentational structures when introducing new referents into discourse, in their L2 Italian and English.
This phenomenon has been observed even in the case of a target language where the presentational structure does not involve a relative pronoun, as Mandarin Chinese.
Substitution is when the L1 speaker takes a structure or word from their native language and replaces it within the L2. Odlin (1989) shows a sentence from a Swedish learner of English in the following sentence.
Here the Swedish word "bort" has replaced its English equivalent "away".
A Calque is a direct "loan translation" where words are translated from the L1 literally into the L2.
Overdifferentiation occurs when distinctions in the L1 are carried over to the L2.
Underdifferentiation occurs when speakers are unable to make distinctions in the L2.
Hypercorrection is a process where the L1 speaker finds forms in the L2 they consider to be important to acquire, but these speakers do not properly understand the restrictions or exceptions to formal rules that are in the L2, which results in errors, such as the example below.
Other researchers believe that CLI is more than production influences, claiming that this linguistic exchange can impact other factors of a learner's identity. Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008) described such affected areas as experiences, knowledge, cognition, development, attention and language use, to name a few, as being major centers for change because of CLI. These ideas suggest that crosslinguistic influence of syntactic, morphological, or phonological changes may just be the surface of one language's influence on the other, and CLI is instead a different developmental use of one's brain.
CLI has been heavily studied by scholars, but there is still much more research needed because of the multitude of components that make up the phenomenon. Firstly, the typology of particular language pairings needs to be researched to differentiate CLI from the general effects bilingualism and bilingual acquisition.
Also, research is needed in specific areas of overlap between particular language pairings and the domains that influence and discourage CLI. For example, most of the research studies involve European language combinations, and there is a significant lack of information regarding language combinations involving non-European languages, indigenous languages, and other minority languages.
More generally, an area of research to be further developed are the effects of CLI in multilingual acquisition of three or more languages. There is limited research on this occurrence.
Gaston, P. (2013)Syntactic error processing in bilingualism: an analysis of the Optional Infinitive stage in child language acquisition (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Yale University.
Odlin, T. (2005). Crosslinguistic Influence And Conceptual Transfer: What Are The Concepts? "Annual Review of Applied Linguistics," "25". doi:10.1017/s0267190505000012
Sentence processing takes place whenever a reader or listener processes a language utterance, either in isolation or in the context of a conversation or a text. Many studies of the human language comprehension process have focused on reading of single utterances (sentences) without context. Extensive research has shown that language comprehension is affected by context preceding a given utterance as well as many other factors.
Sentence comprehension has to deal with ambiguity in spoken and written utterances, for example lexical, structural, and semantic ambiguities. Ambiguity is ubiquitous, but people usually resolve it so effortlessly that they do not even notice it. For example, the sentence "Time flies like an arrow" has (at least) the interpretations "Time moves as quickly as an arrow", "A special kind of fly, called time fly, likes arrows" and "Measure the speed of flies like you would measure the speed of an arrow". Usually, readers will be aware of only the first interpretation. Educated readers though, spontaneously think about the arrow of time but inhibit that interpretation because it deviates from the original phrase and the temporal lobe acts as a switch.
Instances of ambiguity can be classified as local or global ambiguities. A sentence is globally ambiguous if it has two distinct interpretations. Examples are sentences like "Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony" (was it the servant or the actress who was on the balcony?) or "The cop chased the criminal with a fast car" (did the cop or the criminal have a fast car?). Comprehenders may have a preferential interpretation for either of these cases, but syntactically and semantically, neither of the possible interpretations can be ruled out.
Local ambiguities persist only for a short amount of time as an utterance is heard or written and are resolved during the course of the utterance so the complete utterance has only one interpretation. Examples include sentences like "The critic wrote the book was enlightening", which is ambiguous when "The critic wrote the book" has been encountered, but "was enlightening" remains to be processed. Then, the sentence could end, stating that the critic is the author of the book, or it could go on to clarify that the critic wrote something about a book. The ambiguity ends at "was enlightening", which determines that the second alternative is correct.
When readers process a local ambiguity, they settle on one of the possible interpretations immediately without waiting to hear or read more words that might help decide which interpretation is correct (the behaviour is called "incremental processing"). If readers are surprised by the turn the sentence really takes, processing is slowed and is visible for example in reading times. Locally-ambiguous sentences have, therefore, been used as test cases to investigate the influence of a number of different factors on human sentence processing. If a factor helps readers to avoid difficulty, it is clear that the factor plays a factor in sentence processing.
Experimental research has spawned a large number of hypotheses about the architecture and mechanisms of sentence comprehension. Issues like modularity versus interactive processing and serial versus parallel computation of analyses have been theoretical divides in the field.
Serial accounts assume that humans construct only one of the possible interpretations at first and try another only if the first one turns out to be wrong. Parallel accounts assume the construction of multiple interpretations at the same time. To explain why comprehenders are usually only aware of one possible analysis of what they hear, models can assume that all analyses ranked, and the highest-ranking one is entertained.
There are a number of influential models of human sentence processing that draw on different combinations of architectural choices.
The garden path model is a serial modular parsing model. It proposes that a single parse is constructed by a syntactic module. Contextual and semantic factors influence processing at a later stage and can induce re-analysis of the syntactic parse. Re-analysis is costly and leads to an observable slowdown in reading. When the parser encounters an ambiguity, it is guided by two principles: late closure and minimal attachment. The model has been supported with research on the early left anterior negativity, an event-related potential often elicited as a response to phrase structure violations.
Late closure causes new words or phrases to be attached to the current clause. For example, "John said he would leave yesterday" would be parsed as "John said (he would leave yesterday)", and not as "John said (he would leave) yesterday" (i.e., he spoke yesterday).
Minimal attachment is a strategy of parsimony: The parser builds the simplest syntactic structure possible (that is, the one with the fewest phrasal nodes).
Constraint-based theories of language comprehension emphasize how people make use of the vast amount of probabilistic information available in the linguistic signal. Through statistical learning, the frequencies and distribution of events in linguistic environments can be picked upon, which inform language comprehension. As such, language users are said to arrive at a particular interpretation over another during the comprehension of an ambiguous sentence by rapidly integrating these probabilistic constraints.
The good enough approach to language comprehension, developed by Fernanda Ferreira and others, assumes that listeners do not always engage in full detailed
processing of linguistic input. Rather, the system has a tendency to develop shallow and superficial representations
when confronted with some difficulty. The theory takes an approach that somewhat combines both the garden path model and the constraint based model. The theory focuses on two main issues. The first is that representations formed from complex or difficult material are often shallow and incomplete. The second is that limited information sources are often consulted in cases where the comprehension system encounters difficulty. The theory can be put to test using various experiments in psycholinguistics that involve garden path misinterpretation, etc.
Eye tracking has been used to study online language processing. This method has been influential in informing knowledge of reading. Additionally, Tanenhaus et al. (1995) established the visual world paradigm, which takes advantage of eye movements to study online spoken language processing. This area of research capitalizes on the linking hypothesis that eye movements are closely linked to the current focus of attention.
The rise of non-invasive techniques provides myriad opportunities for examining the brain bases of language comprehension. Common examples include positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), event-related potentials (ERPs) in electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). These techniques vary in their spatial and temporal resolutions (fMRI has a resolution of a few thousand neurons per pixel, and ERP has millisecond accuracy), and each type of methodology presents a set of advantages and disadvantages for studying a particular problem in language comprehension.
Word recognition, according to Literacy Information and Communication System (LINCS) is "the ability of a reader to recognize written words correctly and virtually effortlessly". It is sometimes referred to as "isolated word recognition" because it involves a reader's ability to recognize words individually from a list without needing similar words for contextual help. LINCS continues to say that "rapid and effortless word recognition is the main component of fluent reading" and explains that these skills can be improved by "practic[ing] with flashcards, lists, and word grids".
An article in "ScienceDaily" suggests that "early word recognition is key to lifelong reading skills". There are different ways to develop these skills. For example, creating flash cards for words that appear at a high frequency is considered a tool for overcoming dyslexia. It has been argued that prosody, the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry, can improve word recognition.
Word recognition is a manner of reading based upon the immediate perception of what word a familiar grouping of letters represents. This process exists in opposition to phonetics and word analysis, as a different method of recognizing and verbalizing visual language (i.e. reading). Word recognition functions primarily on automaticity. On the other hand, phonetics and word analysis rely on the basis of cognitively applying learned grammatical rules for the blending of letters, sounds, graphemes, and morphemes.
Word recognition is measured as a matter of speed, such that a word with a high level of recognition is read faster than a novel one. This manner of testing suggests that comprehension of the meaning of the words being read is not required, but rather the ability to recognize them in a way that allows proper pronunciation. Therefore, context is unimportant, and word recognition is often assessed with words presented in isolation in formats such as flash cards Nevertheless, ease in word recognition, as in fluency, enables proficiency that fosters comprehension of the text being read.
The intrinsic value of word recognition may be obvious due to the prevalence of literacy in modern society. However, its role may be less conspicuous in the areas of literacy learning, second-language learning, and developmental delays in reading. As word recognition is better understood, more reliable and efficient forms of teaching may be discovered for both children and adult learners of first-language literacy. Such information may also benefit second-language learners with acquisition of novel words and letter characters. Furthermore, a better understanding of the processes involved in word recognition may enable more specific treatments for individuals with reading disabilities.
Bouma shape, named after the Dutch vision researcher Herman Bouma, refers to the overall outline, or shape, of a word. Herman Bouma discussed the role of "global word shape" in his word recognition experiment conducted in 1973. Theories of bouma shape became popular in word recognition, suggesting people recognize words from the shape the letters make in a group relative to each other. This contrasts the idea that letters are read individually. Instead, via prior exposure, people become familiar with outlines, and thereby recognize them the next time they are presented with the same word, or bouma.
The slower pace with which people read words written entirely in upper-case, or with alternating upper- and lower-case letters, supports the bouma theory. The theory holds that a novel bouma shape created by changing the lower-case letters to upper-case hinders a person's recall ability. James Cattell also supported this theory through his study, which gave evidence for an effect he called word superiority. This referred to the improved ability of people to deduce letters if the letters were presented within a word, rather than a mix of random letters. Furthermore, multiple studies have demonstrated that readers are less likely to notice misspelled words with a similar bouma shape than misspelled words with a different bouma shape.
Though these effects have been consistently replicated, many of their findings have been contested. Some have suggested that the reading ability of upper-case words is due to the amount of practice a person has with them. People who practice become faster at reading upper-case words, countering the importance of the bouma. Additionally, the word superiority effect might result from familiarity with phonetic combinations of letters, rather than the outlines of words, according to psychologists James McClelland and James Johnson.
Parallel letter recognition is the most widely accepted model of word recognition by psychologists today. In this model, all letters within a group are perceived simultaneously for word recognition. In contrast, the serial recognition model proposes that letters are recognized individually, one by one, before being integrated for word recognition. It predicts that single letters are identified faster and more accurately than many letters together, as in a word. However, this model was rejected because it cannot explain the word superiority effect, which states that readers can identify letters more quickly and accurately in the context of a word rather than in isolation.
The accuracy with which readers recognize words depends on the area of the retina that is stimulated. Reading in English selectively trains specific regions of the left hemiretina for processing this type of visual information, making this part of the visual field optimal for word recognition. As words drift from this optimal area, word recognition accuracy declines. Because of this training, effective neural organization develops in the corresponding left cerebral hemisphere.
Eyes make brief, unnoticeable movements called saccades approximately three to four times per second. Saccades are separated by fixations, which are moments when the eyes are not moving. During saccades, visual sensitivity is diminished, which is called saccadic suppression. This ensures that the majority of the intake of visual information occurs during fixations. Lexical processing does, however, continue during saccades. The timing and accuracy of word recognition relies on where in the word the eye is currently fixating. Recognition is fastest and most accurate when fixating in the middle of the word. This is due to a decrease in visual acuity that results as letters are situated farther from the fixated location and become harder to see.
The word frequency effect suggests that words that appear the most in printed language are easier to recognize than words that appear less frequently. Recognition of these words is faster and more accurate than other words. The word frequency effect is one of the most robust and most commonly reported effects in contemporary literature on word recognition. It has played a role in the development of many theories, such as the bouma shape. Furthermore, the neighborhood frequency effect states that word recognition is slower and less accurate when the target has an orthographic neighbor that is higher in frequency than itself. Orthographic neighbors are words of all the same length that differ by only one letter of that word.
Serif fonts, i.e.: fonts with small appendages at the end of strokes, hinder lexical access. Word recognition is quicker with sans-serif fonts by an average of 8 ms. These fonts have significantly more inter-letter spacing, and studies have shown that responses to words with increased inter-letter spacing were faster, regardless of word frequency and length. This demonstrates an inverse relationship between fixation duration and small increases in inter-letter spacing, most likely due to a reduction in lateral inhibition in the neural network. When letters are farther apart, it is more likely that individuals will focus their fixations at the beginning of words, whereas default letter spacing on word processing software encourages fixation at the center of words.
The role of the frequency effect has been greatly incorporated into the learning process. While the word analysis approach is extremely beneficial, many words defy regular grammatical structures and are more easily incorporated into the lexical memory by automatic word recognition. To facilitate this, many educational experts highlight the importance of repetition in word exposure. This utilizes the frequency effect by increasing the reader's familiarity with the target word, and thereby improving both future speed and accuracy in reading. This repetition can be in the form of flash cards, word-tracing, reading aloud, picturing the word, and other forms of practice that improve the association of the visual text with word recall.
Improvements in technology have greatly contributed to advances in the understanding and research in word recognition. New word recognition capabilities have made computer-based learning programs more effective and reliable. Improved technology has enabled eye-tracking, which monitors individuals' saccadic eye movements while they read. This has furthered understanding of how certain patterns of eye movement increases word recognition and processing. Furthermore, changes can be simultaneously made to text just outside the reader's area of focus without the reader being made aware. This has provided more information on where the eye focuses when an individual is reading and where the boundaries of attention lie.
With this additional information, researchers have proposed new models of word recognition that can be programmed into computers. As a result, computers can now mimic how a human would perceive and react to language and novel words. This technology has advanced to the point where models of literacy learning can be digitally demonstrated. For example, a computer can now mimic a child's learning progress and induce general language rules when exposed to a list of words with only a limited number of explanations. Nevertheless, as no universal model has yet been agreed upon, the generalizability of word recognition models and its simulations may be limited.
Despite this lack of consensus regarding parameters in simulation designs, any progress in the area of word recognition is helpful to future research regarding which learning styles may be most successful in classrooms. Correlations also exist between reading ability, spoken language development, and learning disabilities. Therefore, advances in any one of these areas may assist understanding in inter-related subjects. Ultimately, the development of word recognition may facilitate the breakthrough between "learning to read" and "reading to learn".
James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher
"James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher" is an English sentence used to demonstrate lexical ambiguity and the necessity of punctuation,
which serves as a substitute for the intonation, stress, and pauses found in speech.
In human information processing research, the sentence has been used to show how readers depend on punctuation to give sentences meaning, especially in the context of scanning across lines of text. The sentence is sometimes presented as a puzzle, where the solver must add the punctuation.
The sentence refers to two students, James and John, who are required by an English test to describe a man who had suffered from a cold in the past. John writes "The man had a cold", which the teacher marks incorrect, while James writes the correct "The man had had a cold". Since James's answer was right, it had had a better effect on the teacher.
The sentence is easier to understand with added punctuation and emphasis:
In each of the five "had had" word pairs in the above sentence, the first of the pair is in the past perfect form. The italicized instances denote emphasis of intonation, focusing on the differences in the students' answers, then finally identifying the correct one.
Alternatively, the sentence can also be read as John's answer being better than James', simply by placing the same punctuation in a different arrangement through the sentence:
The sentence can be given as a grammatical puzzle or an item on a test, for which one must find the proper punctuation to give it meaning. Hans Reichenbach used a similar sentence ("John where Jack had...") in his 1947 book "Elements of Symbolic Logic" as an exercise for the reader, to illustrate the different levels of language, namely object language and metalanguage. The intention was for the reader to add the needed punctuation for the sentence to make grammatical sense.
In research showing how people make sense of information in their environment, this sentence was used to demonstrate how seemingly arbitrary decisions can drastically change the meaning, analogous to how changes in the punctuation and quotes in the sentence show that the teacher alternately prefers James's work and John's work (e.g., compare: 'James, while John had had "had", had...' vs. 'James, while John had had "had had", ...').
The sentence is also used to show the semantic vagueness of the word "had", as well as to demonstrate the difference between using a word and mentioning a word.
It has also been used as an example of the complexities of language, its interpretation, and its effects on a person's perceptions.
For the syntactic structure to be clear to a reader, this sentence requires, at a minimum, that the two phrases be separated by using a semicolon, period, en-dash or em-dash. Still, Jasper Fforde's novel "The Well of Lost Plots" employs a variation of the phrase to illustrate the confusion that may arise even from well-punctuated writing:
This effect is more important to humans than what was initially thought. Linguists have pointed out that at least the English language has many false starts and extraneous sounds. The phonemic restoration effect is the brain's way of resolving those imperfections in our speech. Without this effect interfering with our language processing, there would be a greater need for much more accurate speech signals and human speech could require much more precision. For experiments, white noise is necessary because it takes the place of these imperfections in speech. One of the most important factors in language is continuity and in turn intelligibility.
The phonemic restoration effect was first documented in a 1970 paper by Richard M. Warren entitled "Perceptual Restoration of Missing Speech Sounds". The purpose of the experiment was to give a reason to why in background of extraneous sounds, masked individual phonemes were still comprehensible.
In his initial experiments, Warren provided the sentence shown and first replaced the first 's' phoneme in legislatures with extraneous noise, in the form of a cough. In a small group of 20 subjects, 19 did not notice a missing phoneme and one person misidentified the missing phoneme. This indicated that in the absence of a phoneme, the brain filled in the missing phoneme, through top-down processing. This was a phenomenon that was somewhat known at the time, but no one was able to pinpoint why it was occurring or had labeled it. He again did the same experiment with the sentence:
He replaced the 'wh' sound in wheel and the same results were found. All people tested wrote down wheel. Warren later did much research for next several decades on the subject.
Since Warren, much research has been done to test the various aspects of the effect. These aspects include how many phonemes can be removed, what noise is played in replacement of the phoneme, and how different contexts alter the effect.
Neurally, the signs of interrupted or stopped speech can be suppressed in the thalamus and auditory cortex, possibly as a consequence of top-down processing by the auditory system. Key aspects of the speech signal itself are considered to be resolved somewhere in the interface between auditory and language-specific areas (an example is Wernicke's area), in order for the listener to determine what is being said. Normally, the latter is thought to be instantiated at the end stages of the language processing system, but for restorative processes, much remains unknown about whether the same stages are responsible for the ability to actually fill-in the missing phoneme.
People with mild and moderate hearing loss were tested for the effectiveness of phonemic restoration. Those with mild hearing loss performed at the same level of a normal listener. Those with moderate hearing loss had almost no perception and failed to identify the missing phonemes. This research is also dependent on the amount of words the observer is comfortable understanding because of the nature of top-down processing.
For people with cochlear implants, acoustic simulations of the implant indicated the importance of spectral resolution. When the brain is using top-down processing, it uses as much information as it can to make a decision on if the filler signal in the gap belongs to the speech, and with lower resolution, there is less information to make a correct guess. A study with actual cochlear implant users indicated that some implant users can benefit from phonemic restoration, but again they seem to need more speech information (longer duty cycle in this case) to achieve this.
The age effects were studied in children and older adults, to observe if children can benefit from phonemic restoration and if so, at what capacity, and if older adults maintain the restoration capacity in the face of age-related neurophysiological changes.
Children are able to produce results comparable to adults by about the age of 5, however still not doing as well as adults. At such an early age most information is processed through bottom-up processing due to the lack of information to recall from. However, this does mean they are able to use previous knowledge of words to fill in the missing phonemes with much less of their brain developed than adults.
Older adults (older than 65 years) with no or minimal hearing loss show benefit from phonemic restoration. In some conditions restoration effect can be stronger in older adults than in younger adults, even when the overall speech perception scores are lower in older adults. This observation is likely due to strong linguistic and vocabulary skills that are maintained in advanced age.
In children, there was no effect of gender on phonemic restoration.
In adults, instead of completely replacing the phonemes, researchers masked them with tones that are informative(helped the listeners pick the correct phoneme), uninformative(neither helped or hurt the listener select the correct phoneme), or misinformative (hurt the listener in picking the correct phoneme). The results showed that women were much more affected by informative and misinformative cues than men. This evidence suggests that women are influenced by top-down semantic information more than men.
The effect reverses in a reverberation room, which echoes real life more so than the typical quiet rooms used for experimentation. This allows for echoes of the spoken phonemes to act as the replacement noise for the missing phonemes. The additional produced white noise that replaces the phoneme adds its own echo and causes listeners to not perform as well.
Another study by Warren was done to determine the effect of the duration of the replacement phoneme on comprehension. Because the brain processes information optimally at a certain rate, when the gap became approximately the length of the word is when the effect started top breakdown and become ineffective. At this point the effect is no longer effective because the observer is now cognisant of the gap.
Much like the McGurk Effect, when listeners were also able to see the words being spoken, they were much more likely to correctly identify the missing phonemes. Like every sense, the brain will use every piece of information it deems important to make a judgement about what it is perceiving. Using the visual cues of mouth movements, the brain will you both in top-down processing to make a decision about what phoneme is supposed to be heard. Vision is the primary sense for humans and for the most part assists in speech perception the most.
Only when the intensity of the noise replacing the phonemes is the same or louder as the surrounding words, does the effect properly work. This effect is made apparent when listeners hear a sentence with gaps replaced by white noise repeat over and over with the white noise volume increasing with each iteration. The sentence becomes more and more clear to the listener as the white noise is louder.
When a word with the segment 's' is removed and replaced by silence and a comparable noise segment were presented dichotically. Simply put, one ear was hearing the full sentence without phoneme excision and the other ear was hearing a sentence with a 's' sound removed. This version of the phonemic restoration effect was particularly strong because the brain was doing much less guess work with the sentence, because the information was given to the observer. Observers reported hearing exactly the same sentence in both ears, regardless of one of their ears missing a phoneme.
The restoration effect is studied mostly in English and Dutch, where the restoration effect seemed similar between the two languages. While no research directly compared the restoration effect further for other languages, it is assumed that this effect is universal for all languages.
That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is
That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is is an English word sequence demonstrating syntactic ambiguity. It is used as an example illustrating the importance of proper punctuation.