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…

The so-called depth charge sentences (e.g., "no head injury is too trivial to be ignored") were investigated in a comprehension experiment measuring both whether participants understood the stimuli and how certain they were of their interpretation. The experiment revealed that three factors influence the difficulty of depth charge type…

This study investigates preverbal structural and semantic processing in Japanese, a head-final language, using the maze task. Two sentence types were tested--simple scrambled sentences (Experiment 1) and control sentences (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that even for simple, mono-clausal Japanese sentences, (1) there are online processing…

Two eye-tracking experiments examined the effects of sentence structure on the processing of complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., "began the memo"). Previous work has demonstrated that these expressions impose a processing cost, which has been attributed to the…

Syntactic priming occurs when structural information from one sentence influences processing of a subsequently encountered sentence (Bock, 1986; Ledoux et al., 2007). This article reports 2 eye-tracking experiments investigating the effects of a prime sentence on the processing of a target sentence that shared aspects of syntactic form. The…

There is general agreement that stuttering is caused by a variety of factors, and language formulation and speech motor control are two important factors that have been implicated in previous research, yet the exact nature of their effects is still not well understood. Our goal was to test the hypothesis that sentences of high structural…

A primary function of prosody in many languages is to convey information structure--the "packaging" of a sentence's content into categories such as "focus", "given" and "topic". In English and other West Germanic languages it is widely assumed that focus is signaled prosodically by the location of a…

Previous work has suggested that the difficulty normally associated with processing an object-extracted relative clause (ORC) compared to a subject-extracted relative clause (SRC) is increased when the head noun phrase (NP1) is animate and the embedded noun phrase (NP2) is inanimate, compared to the reverse animacy configuration. Two eye-tracking…

In a previous gaze-contingent boundary experiment, Angele and Rayner (2013) found that readers are likely to skip a word that appears to be the definite article "the" even when syntactic constraints do not allow for articles to occur in that position. In the present study, we investigated whether the word frequency of the preview of a…

Recent research has demonstrated that knowledge of real-world events plays an important role in guiding online language comprehension. The present study addresses the scope of event knowledge activation during the course of comprehension, specifically investigating whether activation is limited to those knowledge elements that align with the local…

In the present study we analyze how the cognitive system deals on-line with number agreement mismatches and whether this on-line process influences the off-line interpretation of the sentence. In two ERP experiments we monitored the on-line processing consequences of subject-verb agreement mismatches, focusing on the integration of a following…

Just as syntax differentiates coherent sentences from scrambled word strings, the comprehension of sequential images must also use a cognitive system to distinguish coherent narrative sequences from random strings of images. We conducted experiments analogous to two classic studies of language processing to examine the contributions of narrative…

Two experiments using a sentence recall task tested the effect of animacy on syntactic processing in Japanese sentence production. Experiment 1 and 2 showed that when Japanese native speakers recalled transitive sentences, they were more likely to assign animate entities earlier positions in the sentence than inanimate entities. In addition,…

Previous evidence suggests that when speakers produce sentences from memory or as picture descriptions, their choices of sentence structure are influenced by how easy it is to retrieve sentence material (accessibility). Three experiments assessed whether this pattern holds in naturalistic, interactive dialogue. Pairs of speakers took turns asking…

These studies investigate how the distinction between generic sentences (e.g., "Boys are good at math") and nongeneric sentences (e.g., "Johnny is good at math") shapes children's social cognition. These sentence types are hypothesized to have different implications about the source and nature of the properties conveyed. Specifically, generics may…