Various recent studies attest that reading involves creating an implicit prosodic representation of the written text which may systematically affect the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in sentence comprehension. Research up to now suggests that implicit prosody itself depends on a partial syntactic analysis of the text, raising the question of…

In most languages, most of the syntactic dependency relations found in any given sentence are projective: the word-word dependencies in the sentence do not cross each other. Some syntactic dependency relations, however, are non-projective: some of their word-word dependencies cross each other. Non-projective dependencies are both rarer and more…

It is well known that sentences containing object-extracted relative clauses (e.g., "The reporter that the senator attacked admitted the error") are more difficult to comprehend than sentences containing subject-extracted relative clauses (e.g., "The reporter that attacked the senator admitted the error"). Two major accounts of this phenomenon…

Two experiments assessed whether 7-year-old children activate semantic information from sub-word orthography. Children made category decisions to visually-presented words, some of which contained an embedded word (e.g., "hip" in s"hip"). In Experiment 1 children were slower and less accurate to classify words if they contained an embedded word…

Wrap-up effects in reading have traditionally been thought to reflect increased processing associated with intra- and inter-clause integration (Just, M. A. & Carpenter, P. A. (1980). A theory of reading: From eye fixations to comprehension. "Psychological Review, 87"(4), 329-354; Rayner, K., Kambe, G., & Duffy, S. A. (2000). The effect of clause…

Small numbers are spontaneously associated with left space and larger numbers with right space (the SNARC effect), for example when classifying numbers by parity. This effect is often attributed to reading habits but a causal link has so far never been documented. We report that bilingual Russian-Hebrew readers show a SNARC effect after reading…

The nature of the memory processes that support language comprehension and the manner in which information packaging influences online sentence processing were investigated in three experiments that used eye-tracking during reading to measure the ease of understanding complex sentences in Korean. All three experiments examined reading of embedded…

Provides new evidence from Spanish and English self-paced reading experiments on relative clause attachment sites. Suggests that a principle like Late Closure is universally operative in the human parser. Proposes that a second factor is the principle of Predicate Proximity. Discusses the origins and predictions of the theory combining these two…

Studied 51 dyslexic children, 51 age-matched normal readers, and 27 younger normal readers to explore whether there are different subtypes of developmental dyslexia, and whether developmental dyslexia represents delay or deviance. Found evidence to support two subtypes: surface and phonological dyslexia. (DR)

Claims that writing systems that constitute a species of graphic systems, such as pictures and charts, are distinctive in that they bear a direct relation to speech. Argues that writing serves as a model for various properties of speech including sentences, words, and phonemes. Concludes that literacy contributes to conceptual structure of…