Languages differ from one another and must therefore be learned. Processing biases in word order can also differ across languages. For example, heavy noun phrases tend to be shifted to late sentence positions in English, but to early positions in Japanese. Although these language differences suggest a role for learning, most accounts of these…

The text-change detection task has been used to show that changes are more readily detected for words that fall under narrow focus than broad focus (Sturt, Sanford, Stewart, & Dawydiak, 2004), and that narrow focus appears to lead to finer semantic distinctions being held in the representation of the word. The present experiments apply the same…

Using evidence from eye-tracking studies, Van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, and Liversedge (2005) have argued against currently implemented constraint-based models of syntactic ambiguity resolution. The case against these competition models is based on a mismatch between reported patterns of reading data and the putative predictions of the models.…

It has been shown that the processing of irregular past-tense forms is affected by phonological factors that are inherent in the relationship of the past-tense forms to other words in the lexicon (rhyming families of irregulars) or to their base forms (vowel dominance effects). This paper addresses more ephemeral phonological effects. In a…

A central question for psycholinguistics concerns the role of grammatical constraints in online sentence processing. Many current theories maintain that the language processing mechanism constructs a parse or parses that are grammatically consistent with the whole of the perceived input each time it processes a word. Several bottom-up, dynamical…

This paper reports the results of a dual-task experiment which investigates the nature of working memory resources used in sentence comprehension. Participants read sentences of varying syntactic complexity (containing subject-and object-extracted relative clauses) while remembering one or three nouns (similar to or dissimilar from the…