While a large body of work in sentence comprehension has explored how different types of linguistic information are used to guide syntactic parsing, less is known about the effect of discourse structure. This study investigates this question, focusing on the main and subordinate discourse contrast manifested in the distinction between restrictive…

Close reading, as Paula Moya (2016) writes, may remain the "most powerful discipline-specific tool we have at our disposal" (p. 9). At a time when the work of English teachers is threatened by many factors, including political polarization and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), close reading may be the soundest way of unifying and…

This study examined how linguistic complexity features contribute to second language (L2) processing effort by analyzing the Dutch English-L2 learners' eye movements from GECO and MECO, two eye-tracking corpora. Processing effort was operationalized as reading rate, mean fixation duration, regression rate, skipping rate, and mean saccade…

Segmentation is a cornerstone of language processing across levels of linguistic analysis, and yet, standard models of linguistic memory leave the role of higher-order segments in online comprehension understudied. This dissertation advances the Context-Sensitive Encoding (CSE) hypothesis: that implicit prosodic boundaries (Bader, 1998; J. Fodor,…

Readers build a mental representation of text during reading. The coherence building processes readers use to build a mental representation during reading is key to comprehension. We examined the effects of self- explanation on coherence building processes as undergraduates (n =51) read five complementary texts about natural selection and…

It has been well documented that formulaic language (such as collocations; e.g., "provide information") enjoys a processing advantage over novel language (e.g., "compare information"). In natural language use, however, many formulaic sequences are often inserted with words intervening in between the individual constituents…

The relative importance of phonological versus morphological processes in reading varies depending on the writing system's orthographic consistency and morphological complexity. This study investigated the interplay between phonology and morphology in Hebrew reading acquisition, a language offering a unique opportunity for such examination with…

This dissertation explores the role of memory in language processing, and specifically how interference during lexical encoding can result in downstream interference during retrieval. The dissertation merges insights from both the sentence processing literature as well as the study of memory in non-sentential contexts and focuses on two factors…

While the theoretical models of morphological processing in Roman alphabets indicate prelexical activation, a model established in Korean suggests postlexical activation. To extend the model of Korean morphological processing, this study examined within-scriptal (Hangul-Hangul prime-target pairs) and cross-scriptal (Hanja-Hangul prime-target…

Arguably, the most contentious debate in the field of eye movement control in reading has centered on whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel during reading. Chinese is character-based and unspaced, meaning the issue of how lexical processing is operationalized across potentially ambiguous, multicharacter strings is not…

The study tested how the Recency Preference and Predicate Proximity model (Gibson et al. in Cognition 59(1):23-59, 1996, https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(88)90004-2) plays out by examining the attachment preferences of native Russian speakers when processing locally ambiguous participial relative clause sentences with three potential NP…

This paper is part 5 of a series of workshops that examines the properties of some simple models of vocabulary networks. While previous workshops dealt with activating words in the network, this workshop focuses on vocabulary loss. We will simulate two possible ways of modelling attrition: (a) explicitly turning active words OFF, and (b) raising…

Purpose: This study aims to examine whether binocular vision plays a facilitating or impeding role in lexical processing during sentence reading in Chinese. Method: Adopting the revised boundary paradigm, we orthogonally manipulated the parafoveal and foveal viewing conditions (monocular vs. binocular) of target words (high- vs. low-frequency)…

Comprehenders generate expectations about upcoming lexical items in language processing using various types of contextual information. However, a number of studies have shown that argument roles do not impact neural and behavioral prediction measures. Despite these robust findings, some prior studies have suggested that lexical prediction might be…

This study used eye-tracking to investigate the real-time processing of phonetic and semantic radicals (components of Chinese characters that give clues to their pronunciation and meaning) by intermediate-level university Chinese foreign language (CFL) learners. Additionally, the study examined how knowledge and awareness of radicals affect…