Corpus evidence suggests that in contexts in which the presence of multiple antecedents might favor plural reference, the disadvantage observed for singular reference may disappear if the potential antecedents are combined in a group-like plural entity. We examined the relative salience of antecedents in conditions where the context either made a…

A fictional story is always narrated from a certain narrative voice and mode of focalization. These core narrative techniques have a major impact on how readers interpret the narrative plot and connect with the characters. This study used eye-tracking to investigate how classic narrative reading is affected by narrative voice and focalization. The…

Psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on verbal material. Yet, metaphors frequently occur in a multimodal format, blending words and pictures to convey meaning. Here we compared verbal and multimodal metaphors by using item pairs where stimulus one was always a word (e.g., "language" in the metaphorical conditions and…

It is well known that English speakers produce fewer pronouns when discourse contexts include more than one entity that matches the gender of the pronoun, i.e., gender effect. It is controversial, however, what causes the gender effect. Some suggest that it results from speakers' avoidance of linguistic ambiguity, while others suggest that it…

This article presents a self-paced reading study comparing the online processing of interclausal discourse relations in native speakers of English and German. The study aims to contribute to two overarching questions: First, it puts to the test the so-called causality-by-default hypothesis, which states that causality is a default assumption,…

Readers are expected to construct balanced mental representations of socioscientific issues discussed across controversial documents. However, readers tend to be biased toward documents that present belief-consistent perspectives and tend to refute documents that argue against their stance (text-belief consistency effect). Published studies on…