In our article, "Syntactic complexity effects in sentence production" [Scontras, Badecker, Shank, Lim, & Fedorenko, 2015 (EJ1057757)], we reported two elicited production experiments and argued that there is a cost associated with planning and uttering syntactically complex, object-extracted structures that contain a non-local…

This study investigated the effect of semantic information on artificial grammar learning (AGL). Recursive grammars of different complexity levels (regular language, mirror language, copy language) were investigated in a series of AGL experiments. In the with-semantics condition, participants acquired semantic information prior to the AGL…

Two experiments used eyetracking during reading to examine the processing of the matrix verb following object and subject relative clauses. The experiments show that the processing of the matrix verb following an object relative is indeed slowed compared to the processing of the same verb following a subject relative. However, this difficulty is…

Most current models of sentence comprehension assume that the human parsing mechanism (HPM) algorithmically computes detailed syntactic representations as basis for extracting sentence meaning. These models share the assumption that the representations computed by the HPM accurately reflect the linguistic input. This assumption has been challenged…

Four picture-word interference experiments aimed to test the role of grammatical class in lexical production. In Experiment 1 target nouns and verbs were produced in presence of semantically unrelated distractors that could also be nouns and verbs. Participants were slower when the distractor was of the same grammatical category of the target. To…

The present study explores the initial stages of incidental acquisition of two grammatical properties of verbs (subcategorization and [ir]regularity) during reading in first language (L1) and second language (L2) German using an adjusted self-paced reading paradigm. The results indicate that L1 speakers are superior to L2 speakers in the…

Previous research has shown L1 attrition to be restricted to structures at the interfaces between syntax and pragmatics, but not to occur with syntactic properties that do not involve such interfaces ("Interface Hypothesis", Sorace and Filiaci in "Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian." "Second Lang…

The achievement gaps between poor and more affluent students are persistent and chronic, as many students living in poverty are also members of more isolated communities where dialects such as African American English and Southern Vernacular English are often spoken. Non-mainstream dialect use is associated with weaker literacy achievement. The…