This article presents a series of three experiments investigating the processing of nested epistemic expressions, utterances containing two epistemic modals in one clause, such as "he 'certainly may' have forgotten." While some linguists claim that in a nested epistemic expression one modal is semantically embedded within the scope of…

Causal sequences can be segmented into cause and effect. However, some argue causal relations in discourse are by default in "effect-cause" order. Others claim "cause-effect" order is easier to process and the default way of expressing causality, due to iconicity. We conducted experiments testing participants' production…

The goal of this study was to examine predictions derived from the Lexical Quality Hypothesis regarding relations among word decoding, working-memory capacity, and the ability to integrate new concepts into a developing discourse representation. Hierarchical Linear Modeling was used to quantify the effects of three text properties (length,…

Four experiments investigate the influence of topic status and givenness on how speakers and writers structure sentences. The results of these experiments show that when a referent is previously given, it is more likely to be produced early in both sentences and word lists, confirming prior work showing that givenness increases the accessibility…