In a series of seven studies, this paper examines acoustic characteristics of the spontaneous speech production of the English dative alternation ("gave the book to the boy/ the boy the book") as a function of the probability of the choice between alternating constructions. Probabilistic effects on the acoustic duration were observed in the…

Recent research has demonstrated that knowledge of real-world events plays an important role in guiding online language comprehension. The present study addresses the scope of event knowledge activation during the course of comprehension, specifically investigating whether activation is limited to those knowledge elements that align with the local…

We report two experiments investigating subject-verb and object-verb agreement in Basque. Participants repeated and completed preambles containing singular or plural subjects and objects in sentences with canonical subject-object-verb (SOV) or non-canonical object-subject-verb (OSV) order; in Experiment 2, they did so while remembering two…

Probabilistic expectations and memory limitations are central factors governing the real-time comprehension of natural language, but how the two factors interact remains poorly understood. One respect in which the two factors have come into theoretical conflict is the documentation of both "locality" effects, in which having more dependents…

Scalar implicatures often incur a processing cost in sentence comprehension tasks. We used a novel mouse-tracking technique in a sentence verification paradigm to test different accounts of this effect. We compared a two-step account, in which people access a basic meaning and then enrich the basic meaning to form the scalar implicature, against a…

In the present study we analyze how the cognitive system deals on-line with number agreement mismatches and whether this on-line process influences the off-line interpretation of the sentence. In two ERP experiments we monitored the on-line processing consequences of subject-verb agreement mismatches, focusing on the integration of a following…

Although sentences are thought to be generally easier to process when given information precedes new information, closer examination reveals that these preferences only manifest within some syntactic structures. Here, we examine the consequences of the relative ordering of given and new information ("information structure") for the on-line…

The scope of linguistic planning, i.e., the amount of linguistic information that speakers prepare in advance for an utterance they are about to produce, is highly variable. Distinguishing between possible sources of this variability provides a way to discriminate between production accounts that assume structurally incremental and lexically…

Two experiments using a sentence recall task tested the effect of animacy on syntactic processing in Japanese sentence production. Experiment 1 and 2 showed that when Japanese native speakers recalled transitive sentences, they were more likely to assign animate entities earlier positions in the sentence than inanimate entities. In addition,…

Previous research has shown that usage preferences (non-categorical constraints on the distribution of syntactic structures) shape many grammatical alternations. In the present study, we show that usage preferences also influence which alternate listeners report hearing when presented with acoustically degraded input. We investigated the English…

Words like "church" are polysemous, having two related senses (a building and an organization). Three experiments investigated how polysemous senses are represented and processed during sentence comprehension. On one view, readers retrieve an underspecified, core meaning, which is later specified more fully with contextual information. On another…

In previous research, rereading after a long lag versus a short lag led to greater performance on delayed tests but not on immediate tests. The current study tested two accounts of why the effects of rereading lag depend on test delay. The "levels of representation" ("LOR") "hypothesis" states that the effects reflect…

We aimed to determine whether semantic relatedness between an incoming word and its preceding context can override expectations based on two types of stored knowledge: real-world knowledge about the specific events and states conveyed by a verb, and the verb's broader selection restrictions on the animacy of its argument. We recorded event-related…

Scalar implicatures are inferences that arise when a weak expression is used instead of a stronger alternative. For example, when a speaker says, "Some of the children are in the classroom," she often implies that not all of them are. Recent processing studies of scalar implicatures have argued that generating an implicature carries a…

There is a general debate as to whether constituent representations are accessed in compound processing. The present study addresses this issue, exploiting the properties of Italian compounds to test the role of headedness and semantic transparency in constituent access. In a first experiment, a lexical decision task was run on nominal compounds.…