When an elided constituent and its antecedent do not match syntactically, the presence of a word implying the non-actuality of the state of affairs described in the antecedent seems to improve the example. ("This information should be released but Gorbachev didn't." vs. "This information was released but Gorbachev didn't.") We model this effect in…

This paper presents findings from two eye-tracking studies designed to investigate the role of metrical prosody in silent reading. In Experiment 1, participants read stress-alternating noun-verb or noun-adjective homographs (e.g. "PREsent", "preSENT") embedded in limericks, such that the lexical stress of the homograph, as determined by context,…

Although previous research has shown a processing facilitation for conjoined phrases that share the same structure, it is currently not clear whether this parallelism advantage is specific to particular syntactic environments such as coordination, or whether it is an example of more general effect in sentence comprehension. Here, we report three…

The present study investigates how semantic constraint of a sentence context modulates language-non-selective activation in bilingual visual word recognition. We recorded Dutch-English bilinguals' eye movements while they read cognates and controls in low and high semantically constraining sentences in their second language. Early and late…

People report recognizing discourse inferences at rates that approach target acceptance. Brainerd et al. [Brainerd, C. J., Wright, R., Reyna, V. F., & Mojardin, A. H. (2001). "Conjoint recognition and phantom recollection." "Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27", 307-329] proposed that…

Five experiments used ERPs and eye tracking to determine the interplay of word-level and discourse-level information during sentence processing. Subjects read sentences that were locally congruent but whose congruence with discourse context was manipulated. Furthermore, critical words in the local sentence were preceded by a prime word that was…

The mechanisms underlying nonword pronunciation have a been a focus of debates over dual-route and connectionist models of reading aloud. The present study examined two aspects of nonword naming: spelling-sound consistency effects and variability in the pronunciations assigned to ambiguous nonwords such as MOUP. Performance of a parallel…

Prepositions and verb aspect help guide narrative comprehension by indicating the parts of motion events that are most prominent. Grammatical categories that are important for conveying event structure also help construct a mental model of the events of the narrative. (SED)

Describes two experiments that look at how a reader identifies and represents the major topics in a text and their interrelationships. The first experiment demonstrates that readers show on-line sensitivity to the organization of major text topics. The second experiment investigates the nature of such on-line processing of topic structure. (SED)

Describes experiments on how readers understand a narrative. Results suggest that readers combine information about the characters, events, and places with information about their order of mention in order to assign referents and that this is part of the process of constructing a model that represents the narrative description. (SED)

Discusses four experiments that examine the influence of script contexts on the visual recognition of words. Findings indicate that script contexts exert an influence over the processes involved in visual word recognition and that this influence is sustained longer than would be predicted from simple word priming. (SED)

This eye movement study investigated the use of two types of segmentation cues in processing long Finnish compounds. The cues were related to the vowel quality properties of the constituents and properties of the consonant starting the second constituent. In Finnish, front vowels never appear with back vowels in a lexeme, but different quality…

In two experiments, we examined the recent claim (Stewart, Pickering, & Sanford, 2000) that verb-based implicit causality information is used during sentence-final clausal integration only. We did so by looking for mid-sentence reading delays caused by pronouns that are inconsistent with the bias of a preceding implicit causality verb (e.g.,…