Understanding cognitive effort expended during assessments is essential to improving efficiency, accuracy, and accessibility within these assessments. Pupil dilation is commonly used as a psychophysiological measure of cognitive effort, yet research on its relationship with effort expended specifically during language processing is limited. The…

We report the results of one visual-world eye-tracking experiment and two referent selection tasks in which we investigated the effects of information structure in the form of prosody and word order manipulation on the processing of subject pronouns "er" and "der" in German. Factors such as subjecthood, focus, and topicality,…

Prior research has shown that various types of conventional multiword chunks are processed faster than matched novel strings, but it is unclear whether this processing advantage extends to variant multiword chunks that are less formulaic. To determine whether the processing advantage of multiword chunks accommodates variations in the canonical…

In sentences such as "Some dogs are mammals," the literal semantic meaning ("Some 'and possibly all' dogs are mammals") conflicts with the pragmatic meaning ("'Not all' dogs are mammals," known as a "scalar implicature"). Prior work has shown that adults vary widely in the extent to which they adopt the…

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement-clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief…

While cognitive changes in aging and neurodegenerative disease have been widely studied, language changes in these populations are less well understood. Inflecting novel words in a language with complex inflectional paradigms provides a good opportunity to observe how language processes change in normal and abnormal aging. Studies of language…

The bilingual advantage hypothesis contends that the management of two languages in the brain is carried out through domain-general mechanisms, and that bilinguals possess a performance advantage over monolinguals on (nonlinguistic) tasks that tap these processes. Presently, there is evidence both for and against such an advantage. Interestingly,…

Parallel language activation in bilinguals leads to competition between languages. Experience managing this interference may aid novel language learning by improving the ability to suppress competition from known languages. To investigate the effect of bilingualism on the ability to control native-language interference, monolinguals and bilinguals…