Adrian Staub
Biographic Data
| ID | 816007 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adrian Staub |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adrian |
| FAMILY NAME | Staub |
| SIGNATURE | STAUB A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Massachusetts Amherst |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9045-9610 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Word Trigram Frequency Predicts Failure to Detect Word Transpositions
A substantial recent literature has investigated readers’ failure to detect transposed words in otherwise grammatical sentences. This phenomenon may reflect a process of rational inference, whereby a reader’s prior over word strings overrides the bottom-up perceptual evidence. In three experiments, we tested the prediction emerging from the rational inference framework that failure to detect a transposition should be most common when the prior pr…
Estimating the rate of failure to notice function word errors in natural reading
The ‘Sentence Superiority Effect’ is due to guessing
Sample size and its justification in the Journal of Memory and Language
Eye movements in reading at 50
Perceptual inference corrects function word errors in reading
Predictability in Language Comprehension
Surprisal theory proposes that a word's predictability influences processing difficulty because each word requires the comprehender to update a probability distribution over possible sentences. This article first considers the theory's detailed predictions regarding the effects of predictability on reading time and N400 amplitude. Two rather unintuitive predictions appear to be correct based on the current evidence: There is no specific cost when…
The transposed-word effect does not require parallel word processing
Beware influential findings that have not been replicated
Predictability eliminates neighborhood effects during Chinese sentence reading
Person-based prominence guides incremental interpretation
Prior context influences lexical competition when segmenting Chinese overlapping ambiguous strings
How reliable are individual differences in eye movements in reading
Using eye tracking to investigate failure to notice word transpositions in reading
Why do readers fail to notice word transpositions, omissions, and repetitions? A review of recent evidence and theory
Most readers have had the experience of initially failing to notice an omission or repetition of a function word, or a transposition of two adjacent words. In the present article, we review recent research investigating this phenomenon. We emphasize that failure to notice such errors is of substantial theoretical interest, given what we have learned about how systematically and incrementally readers inspect and process text. We endorse the idea t…
Avoiding Gaps in Romance
Existing evidence suggests that the parser avoids positing a movement dependency if the grammar does not require doing so. By investigating the processing of two syntactic ambiguities that have not been the subject of processing studies before, we provide more conclusive evidence for this parsing bias in two Romance languages: French and Italian. In two acceptability-judgment experiments and two self-paced-reading studies, we found that sentences…
The puzzle of number agreement with disjunction
Which noun phrases is the verb supposed to agree with
We investigate a noncanonical agreement pattern in American English in which a fronted WH-phrase appears to control agreement on an inflected auxiliary, as in Which flowers are the gardener planting? (Kimball & Aissen 1971). We explore this phenomenon with five acceptability- judgment experiments and interpret the resulting data with the aid of a quantitative model of the judgment process. Our study suggests that fronted WH-phrases interfere with…
The Effect of Lexical Predictability on Eye Movements in Reading
A word's predictability in its context has a reliable influence on eye movements in reading. This article reviews the extensive literature that has investigated this influence, focusing on several specific empirical issues. These include assessment of cloze probability as the critical measure of predictability, the form of the relationship between predictability and reading time, the distributional effects of predictability, the interaction betwe…
Teaching and Learning Guide for
This guide accompanies the following article : Charles Clifton Jr and Adrian Staub, ‘Parallelism and Competition in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution’, Language and Linguistics Compass 2 (2008): 234–250, doi: 10.1111/j.1749‐818x.2008.00055.x Introduction Two metaphors have dominated cognitive psychology throughout its history: ‘activation’ and ‘computation’. Activation (itself metaphorically based on neural firing rate) assumes that representations …
Parallelism and Competition in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution
A central issue in sentence-processing research is whether the parser entertains multiple analyses of syntactically ambiguous input in parallel, and whether these analyses compete for selection. In this article, we review theoretical positions for and against such competitive parallelism. We then review empirical evidence, primarily drawing on reading time studies, bearing on the prediction made by parallel competitive models that some cost ought…
Eye movements in reading words and sentences
Parallelism and Competition in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution
A central issue in sentence-processing research is whether the parser entertains multiple analyses of syntactically ambiguous input in parallel, and whether these analyses compete for selection. In this article, we review theoretical positions for and against such competitive parallelism. We then review empirical evidence, primarily drawing on reading time studies, bearing on the prediction made by parallel competitive models that some cost ought…
Predictability in Language Comprehension
Surprisal theory proposes that a word's predictability influences processing difficulty because each word requires the comprehender to update a probability distribution over possible sentences. This article first considers the theory's detailed predictions regarding the effects of predictability on reading time and N400 amplitude. Two rather unintuitive predictions appear to be correct based on the current evidence: There is no specific cost when…
Which noun phrases is the verb supposed to agree with
We investigate a noncanonical agreement pattern in American English in which a fronted WH-phrase appears to control agreement on an inflected auxiliary, as in Which flowers are the gardener planting? (Kimball & Aissen 1971). We explore this phenomenon with five acceptability- judgment experiments and interpret the resulting data with the aid of a quantitative model of the judgment process. Our study suggests that fronted WH-phrases interfere with…
Eye movements in reading words and sentences
Parallelism and Competition in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution
A central issue in sentence-processing research is whether the parser entertains multiple analyses of syntactically ambiguous input in parallel, and whether these analyses compete for selection. In this article, we review theoretical positions for and against such competitive parallelism. We then review empirical evidence, primarily drawing on reading time studies, bearing on the prediction made by parallel competitive models that some cost ought…
Teaching and Learning Guide for
This guide accompanies the following article : Charles Clifton Jr and Adrian Staub, ‘Parallelism and Competition in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution’, Language and Linguistics Compass 2 (2008): 234–250, doi: 10.1111/j.1749‐818x.2008.00055.x Introduction Two metaphors have dominated cognitive psychology throughout its history: ‘activation’ and ‘computation’. Activation (itself metaphorically based on neural firing rate) assumes that representations …
The Effect of Lexical Predictability on Eye Movements in Reading
A word's predictability in its context has a reliable influence on eye movements in reading. This article reviews the extensive literature that has investigated this influence, focusing on several specific empirical issues. These include assessment of cloze probability as the critical measure of predictability, the form of the relationship between predictability and reading time, the distributional effects of predictability, the interaction betwe…
Which noun phrases is the verb supposed to agree with
We investigate a noncanonical agreement pattern in American English in which a fronted WH-phrase appears to control agreement on an inflected auxiliary, as in Which flowers are the gardener planting? (Kimball & Aissen 1971). We explore this phenomenon with five acceptability- judgment experiments and interpret the resulting data with the aid of a quantitative model of the judgment process. Our study suggests that fronted WH-phrases interfere with…
The puzzle of number agreement with disjunction
Prior context influences lexical competition when segmenting Chinese overlapping ambiguous strings
How reliable are individual differences in eye movements in reading
Using eye tracking to investigate failure to notice word transpositions in reading
Why do readers fail to notice word transpositions, omissions, and repetitions? A review of recent evidence and theory
Most readers have had the experience of initially failing to notice an omission or repetition of a function word, or a transposition of two adjacent words. In the present article, we review recent research investigating this phenomenon. We emphasize that failure to notice such errors is of substantial theoretical interest, given what we have learned about how systematically and incrementally readers inspect and process text. We endorse the idea t…
Avoiding Gaps in Romance
Existing evidence suggests that the parser avoids positing a movement dependency if the grammar does not require doing so. By investigating the processing of two syntactic ambiguities that have not been the subject of processing studies before, we provide more conclusive evidence for this parsing bias in two Romance languages: French and Italian. In two acceptability-judgment experiments and two self-paced-reading studies, we found that sentences…
Predictability eliminates neighborhood effects during Chinese sentence reading
Person-based prominence guides incremental interpretation
The transposed-word effect does not require parallel word processing
Beware influential findings that have not been replicated
Eye movements in reading at 50
Perceptual inference corrects function word errors in reading
Predictability in Language Comprehension
Surprisal theory proposes that a word's predictability influences processing difficulty because each word requires the comprehender to update a probability distribution over possible sentences. This article first considers the theory's detailed predictions regarding the effects of predictability on reading time and N400 amplitude. Two rather unintuitive predictions appear to be correct based on the current evidence: There is no specific cost when…
Estimating the rate of failure to notice function word errors in natural reading
The ‘Sentence Superiority Effect’ is due to guessing
Sample size and its justification in the Journal of Memory and Language
Word Trigram Frequency Predicts Failure to Detect Word Transpositions
A substantial recent literature has investigated readers’ failure to detect transposed words in otherwise grammatical sentences. This phenomenon may reflect a process of rational inference, whereby a reader’s prior over word strings overrides the bottom-up perceptual evidence. In three experiments, we tested the prediction emerging from the rational inference framework that failure to detect a transposition should be most common when the prior pr…
Psychology (20 works) · Linguistics (19 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Cognitive psychology (13 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (12 works) · Natural language processing (11 works) · Artificial Intelligence (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Sentence (9 works)