Two related questions critical to understanding the predictive processes that come online during sentence comprehension are (1) what information is included in the representation created through prediction and (2) at what functional stage does top-down, predicted information begin to affect bottom-up word processing? We investigated these…

Constraint-based lexical models of language processing assume that readers resolve temporary ambiguities by relying on a variety of cues, including particular knowledge of how verbs combine with nouns. Previous experiments have demonstrated verb bias effects only in structurally complex sentences, and have been criticized on the grounds that such…

Our study addresses the scope of phonological advance planning during sentence production using a novel experimental procedure. The production of German sentences in various syntactic formats (SVO, SOV, and VSO) was cued by presenting pictures of the agents of previously memorized agent-action-patient scenes. To tap the phonological activation of…

Early on during word recognition, letter positions are not accurately coded. Evidence for this comes from transposed-letter (TL) priming effects, in which letter strings generated by transposing two adjacent letters (e.g., "jugde") produce large priming effects, more than primes with the letters replaced in the corresponding position (e.g.,…

Research on written language comprehension has generally assumed that the phonological properties of a word have little effect on sentence comprehension beyond the processes of word recognition. Two experiments investigated this assumption. Participants silently read relative clauses in which two pairs of words either did or did not have a high…

The lexical bias effect (the tendency for phonological speech errors to create words more often than nonwords) has been debated for over 30 years. One account attributes the effect to a lexical editor, a strategic component of the production system that examines each planned phonological string, and suppresses it if it is a nonword. The…

This study examined how 6-9 year-old English-speaking children and adults establish anaphoric dependencies during auditory sentence comprehension. Using eye-movement monitoring during listening and a corresponding sentence-picture judgment task, we investigated both the ultimate interpretation and the online processing of reflexives in comparison…

This study examines the link between distributional patterns in the input and infants' acquisition of non-adjacent dependencies. In two Headturn Preference experiments, Dutch-learning 24-month-olds (but not 17-month-olds) were found to track the remote dependency between the definite article "het" and the diminutive suffix…

Two event-related potential experiments investigated the effects of syntactic and semantic context information on the processing of noun/verb (NV) homographs (e.g., park). Experiment 1 embedded NV-homographs and matched unambiguous words in contexts that provided only syntactic cues or both syntactic and semantic constraints. Replicating prior…

This paper investigates how readers process number ambiguous noun phrases in subject position. A speeded-grammaticality judgment experiment and two self-paced reading experiments were conducted involving number ambiguous subjects in German verb-end clauses. Number preferences for individual nouns were estimated by means of two questionnaire…

Counterfactual reasoning is valid reasoning arising from premises that are true in a hypothetical model, but false in actuality. Investigations of counterfactuals have concentrated on reasoning and production, but psycholinguistic research has been more limited. We report three eye-movement studies investigating the comprehension of counterfactual…

One of the most studied and least well understood phenomena in episodic memory is the word frequency effect (WFE). The WFE is expressed as a mirror pattern where uncommon low frequency words (LF) are better recognized than common high frequency words (HF) by way of a higher HR and lower FAR. One explanation for the HR difference is the early-phase…

The effects of within- versus between-languages (English-French) study and test on rates of bilingual children's and adults' true and false memories were examined. Children aged 6 through 12 and university-aged adults participated in a standard Deese-Roediger-McDermott false memory task using free recall and recognition. Recall results showed…

We examined the effects of letter-transposition in Hebrew in three masked-priming experiments. Hebrew, like English has an alphabetic orthography where sequential and contiguous letter strings represent phonemes. However, being a Semitic language it has a non-concatenated morphology that is based on root derivations. Experiment 1 showed that…

Models of visual word recognition have been assessed by both factorial and regression approaches. Factorial approaches tend to provide a relatively weak test of models, and regression approaches give little indication of the sources of models' mispredictions, especially when parameters are not optimal. A new alternative method, involving…