This article presents a self-paced reading study comparing the online processing of interclausal discourse relations in native speakers of English and German. The study aims to contribute to two overarching questions: First, it puts to the test the so-called causality-by-default hypothesis, which states that causality is a default assumption,…

Previous research has shown that talker identity and speaking style affect the processing of morphosyntactic violations. The present study examined whether speaking style modulates comprehension and subsequent production of case variants in German prepositional phrases across the life span. To this end, we conducted a sentence repetition and…

Narratives frequently represent perceptions that allow for multiple interpretations in terms of perspective: Perceptions can be interpreted from the narrator's viewpoint as well as the character's viewpoint. Two experiments examined the role of contextual viewpoint markers and verb tense in readers' interpretation of such ambiguous perceptions.…

Questions under Discussion (QUDs) have been suggested to influence the integration of individual utterances into a discourse-level representation. Previous work has shown that processing ungrammatical ellipses is facilitated when the elided material addresses an implicit QUD raised through a nonactuality implicature (NAIs). It is not clear,…

Grammatically masculine role-nouns (e.g., "Studenten"masc.'students') can refer to men and women but may favor an interpretation where only men are considered the referent. If true, this has implications for a society aiming to achieve equal representation in the workplace since, for example, job adverts use such role descriptions. To…

Understanding discourse connectives is an important step to achieving effective verbal communication. Yet, the ability of adult native speakers to understand the broad range of connectives found in most Indo-European languages has seldom been assessed. In this article we demonstrate that some adults have difficulties recognizing correct and…

For almost 80 years, Chinese linguists have been fascinated by sentences like "Pijiu ba, he dianr!" ("Beer, I'll have some!"), which look superficially like a jumbled-up version of "normal-order sentences." Numerous accounts have been proposed to explain their structure and meaning, but no consensus has been reached as to how their true essence…

Recognition judgments to the non-antecedents of a repeated-noun anaphor are slower and less accurate after than before the processing of the anaphor. Disagreement exists as to whether this pattern of performance reflects a bias shift carried out by a memory process associated with the recognition of a word that has previously occurred in the…

Gygax, Gabriel, Sarrasin, Oakhill, and Garnham (2008) showed that readers form a mental representation of gender that is based on grammatical gender in French and German (i.e., masculine supposedly interpretable as a generic form) but is based on stereotypical information in English. In this study, a modification of their stimulus material was…

Cataphoric pronouns have been characterized as being co-referential with a word that comes later. Considering that talk is produced in real time, with little benefit of knowing what is yet to come, participants understand cataphoric pro-forms to be projecting more talk. Projection is a crucial interactive resource, as it enables speakers to align…