The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings,…

Syllepsis (in one meaning of the term) is most commonly thought of as an ungrammatical construction which can in certain contexts function as a figure of speech. Yet the common view is at odds with syllepsis occurring in well-written prose that we experience neither as ungrammatical nor as figurative; and with its being largely ignored by literary…

We demonstrate a U-shaped developmental trajectory in the interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences, with 4-year-olds and adults, but not 5-year-olds, accessing inverse scope. These results argue against any view that treats 5-year-olds failures as resulting from immaturity of a single mechanism. Instead, we propose that this developmental…

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.…

Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that a variety of contextual factors can influence the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous structures, but psycholinguistic experimentation inherently does not allow for the investigation of the role that these factors play in natural (uncontrolled) language use. We use regression modeling in…

A prevalent assumption in text comprehension research is that many aspects of text processing are automatic, with automaticity typically defined in terms of properties (e.g., speed and effort). The present research advocates conceptualization of automaticity in terms of underlying mechanisms and evaluates two such accounts, a…