Implicit learning theories suggest that we update syntactic knowledge based on prior experience (e.g., Chang et al., 2006). To determine the limits of the extent to which implicit learning can influence syntactic processing, we investigated whether structural priming effects persist up to 1 month postexposure, and whether they persist less long in…

Structural priming refers to the tendency of speakers to repeat syntactic structures across sentences. We investigated the extent to which structural priming persists with age and whether the effect depends upon highly abstract syntactic representations that only encompass the global sentence structure or whether representations are specified for…

We investigated age-related differences in syntactic comprehension in young and older adults. Most previous research found no evidence of age-related decline in syntactic processing. We investigated elementary syntactic comprehension of minimal sentences (e.g., I cook), minimizing the influence of working memory. We also investigated the…

Structural priming is the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across sentences and can be divided into short-term (prime to immediately following target) and long-term (across an experimental session) components. This study investigates how nondeclarative memory could support both the transient, short-term and the persistent, long-term…

Reading comprehension is the product of constructing a coherent mental model of a text. Although some of the processes that are necessary to construct such a mental model are executed incrementally, others are deferred to the end of the clause or sentence, where integration processing is wrapped up before the reader progresses further in the text.…

How do children know the sentence "the glass is empty and not empty" is inconsistent? One possibility is that they are sensitive to the formal structure of the sentences and know that a proposition and its negation cannot be jointly true. Alternatively, they could represent the 2 state of affairs referred to and realize that these are…