The modifier effect is the reduction in perceived likelihood of a generic property sentence, when the head noun is modified. We investigated the prediction that the modifier effect would be stronger for mutable than for central properties, without finding evidence for this predicted interaction over the course of five experiments. However…

Which repair strategy does the language system deploy when it gets garden-pathed, and what can regressive eye movements in reading tell us about reanalysis strategies? Several influential eye-tracking studies on syntactic reanalysis ([Frazier and Rayner, 1982], [Meseguer et al., 2002] and [Mitchell et al., 2008]) have addressed this question by…

Two related questions critical to understanding the predictive processes that come online during sentence comprehension are (1) what information is included in the representation created through prediction and (2) at what functional stage does top-down, predicted information begin to affect bottom-up word processing? We investigated these…

Constraint-based lexical models of language processing assume that readers resolve temporary ambiguities by relying on a variety of cues, including particular knowledge of how verbs combine with nouns. Previous experiments have demonstrated verb bias effects only in structurally complex sentences, and have been criticized on the grounds that such…

Our study addresses the scope of phonological advance planning during sentence production using a novel experimental procedure. The production of German sentences in various syntactic formats (SVO, SOV, and VSO) was cued by presenting pictures of the agents of previously memorized agent-action-patient scenes. To tap the phonological activation of…

Research on written language comprehension has generally assumed that the phonological properties of a word have little effect on sentence comprehension beyond the processes of word recognition. Two experiments investigated this assumption. Participants silently read relative clauses in which two pairs of words either did or did not have a high…

This study examined how 6-9 year-old English-speaking children and adults establish anaphoric dependencies during auditory sentence comprehension. Using eye-movement monitoring during listening and a corresponding sentence-picture judgment task, we investigated both the ultimate interpretation and the online processing of reflexives in comparison…

This paper investigates how readers process number ambiguous noun phrases in subject position. A speeded-grammaticality judgment experiment and two self-paced reading experiments were conducted involving number ambiguous subjects in German verb-end clauses. Number preferences for individual nouns were estimated by means of two questionnaire…

Across most languages, verbs produced by agrammatic aphasic individuals are frequently marked by syntactically and semantically inappropriate inflectional affixes, such as "Last night, I walking home." As per language production models, verb inflection errors in English agrammatism could arise from three potential sources: encoding the verbs'…

Three experiments investigated whether speakers use constituent ordering as a mechanism for avoiding ambiguities. In utterances like ''Jane showed the letter to Mary to her mother,'' alternate orders would avoid the temporary PP-attachment ambiguity (''Jane showed her mother the letter to Mary,'' or ''Jane showed to her mother the letter to…

The experimental studies presented in this paper exploit agreement attraction in order to examine the mechanisms underlying the production of subject-verb agreement in Slovak. Our experiments verify that the processes which specify the gender feature on past tense verbs are subject to interference from local nouns, and that the likelihood of…

When Tarzan asks Jane "Do you like my friends?" and Jane answers "Some of them," her underinformative reply implicates "Not all of them." This "scalar inference" arises when a less-than-maximally informative utterance implies the denial of a more informative proposition. Default Inference accounts (e.g.,…

Many recent models of language comprehension have stressed the role of distributional frequencies in determining the relative accessibility or ease of processing associated with a particular lexical item or sentence structure. However, there exist relatively few comprehensive analyses of structural frequencies, and little consideration has been…

This paper investigates how people resolve syntactic category ambiguities when comprehending sentences. It is proposed that people combine: (a) context-dependent syntactic expectations (top-down statistical information) and (b) context-independent lexical-category frequencies of words (bottom-up statistical information) in order to resolve…

In three structural priming experiments, we investigated temporarily ambiguous sentences such as "While the man was visiting the children who were surprisingly pleasant and funny played outside." Participants produced more transitive sentences following such temporarily ambiguous sentences than following unambiguous sentences that were…