Breaking down complex words into smaller meaningful units (e.g., "unhappy = un- + happy"), known as morphemes, is vital for skilled reading as it allows readers to rapidly compute word meanings. There is agreement that children rely on reading experience to acquire morphological knowledge in English; however, the nature of this…

Reading morphologically complex words requires analysis of their morphemic subunits (e.g., play + er); however, the positional constraints of morphemic processing are still little understood. The current study involved three unprimed lexical decision experiments to directly compare the positional encoding of stems and affixes during reading and to…

The integration of semantic information of compound words with context is a crucial aspect of reading comprehension. In two eye-tracking experiments, we used two-character and four-character Chinese lexicalized and novel compound words to investigate how Chinese readers integrate semantic information of compound words with contexts in the present…

Illusions of grammaticality have often been used to probe the properties of the human sentence processor in syntactic activities like subject--verb agreement, reflexive binding, and negative polarity item (NPI) licensing. Originally, NPI licensing in processing was thought to be a product of cue-based retrieval. Mounting evidence that the NPI…

German-speaking children between ages 2 and 3 mostly use the preposition ohne ('without') in an adult-like way, to express the absence of something. In this article we present surprising results from a corpus study suggesting that in this age group, absence can also be expressed using the sequence mit ohne 'with without'. We argue that this…

This paper reports on a young Korean boy's target-like and non-target-like uses of the Korean negation marker "ani" to express various types of negation in Korean, observed approximately between the ages of 2;2 and 2;5. Besides the target-like usage of "ani" as a sentential adverb for a 'no' response, he used "ani" in…

This paper reports on a young Korean boy's target-like and non-target-like uses of the Korean negation marker "ani" to express various types of negation in Korean, observed approximately between the ages of 2;2 and 2;5. Besides the target-like usage of "ani" as a sentential adverb for a 'no' response, he used "ani" in…

Rastle et al. (2004) reported that true (e.g., walker) and pseudo (e.g., corner) multi-morphemic words prime their stem words more than form controls do (e.g., brothel priming BROTH) in a masked priming lexical decision task. This data pattern has led a number of models to propose that both of the former word types are "decomposed" into…

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) regularly use the bare form of verbs (e.g., dance) instead of inflected forms (e.g., danced). We propose an account of this behavior in which processing difficulties of children with DLD disproportionally affect processing novel inflected verbs in their input. Limited experience with inflection…

The current study investigated whether age-related changes in the conceptualization of social groups influences interpretation of the pronoun we. Sixty-four 2- and 4-year-olds (N = 29 female, 50 White-identifying) viewed scenarios in which it was ambiguous how many puppets performed an activity together. When asked who performed the activity, a…

In Spanish, the plural form in plural dominant frequency pairs, like "diente/dientes" [tooth/teeth], occurs more frequently than the corresponding singular form. On the other hand, for the singular dominant frequency pairs such as "cometa/cometas" [kite/kites], the singular form is more common than the plural. The recognition…

Purpose: The present study tested parafoveal morphological processing during sentence reading with two eye-tracking experiments, making use of an implicit measurement of morphological awareness. In Chinese and Korean, each character form typically corresponds to multiple mental lexicons, leading to morphological ambiguity. Method: Using the…

While the theoretical models of morphological processing in Roman alphabets indicate prelexical activation, a model established in Korean suggests postlexical activation. To extend the model of Korean morphological processing, this study examined within-scriptal (Hangul-Hangul prime-target pairs) and cross-scriptal (Hanja-Hangul prime-target…

In the long history of psycholinguistic research on verifying negative sentences, an often-reported finding is that participants take longer to correctly judge negative sentences true than false, while being faster to judge their positive counterparts true (e.g. Clark & Chase, Cogn Psychol 3(3):472-517, 1972; Carpenter & Just, Psychol Rev…

Previous studies across languages (English, Spanish, French) have argued that perceptual salience and cue reliability can explain cross-linguistic differences in early comprehension of verbal agreement. Here we tested this hypothesis further by investigating early comprehension in Greek, where markers have high salience and reliability (compared…