Young word learners fail to discriminate phonetic contrasts in certain situations, an observation that has been used to support arguments that the nature of lexical representation and lexical processing changes over development. An alternative possibility, however, is that these failures arise naturally as a result of how word familiarity affects…

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.…

When an elided constituent and its antecedent do not match syntactically, the presence of a word implying the non-actuality of the state of affairs described in the antecedent seems to improve the example. ("This information should be released but Gorbachev didn't." vs. "This information was released but Gorbachev didn't.") We model this effect in…

There has been considerable psycholinguistic investigation into the conditions that allow separately introduced individuals to be joined into a plural set and represented as a complex reference object (e.g., Eschenbach et al., 1989; Garrod & Sanford, 1982; Koh & Clifton, 2002; Koh et al., 2008; Moxey, Sanford, Sturt, & Morrow, 2004; Sanford &…

Language comprehension requires recovering meaning from linguistic form, even when the mapping between the two is indirect. A canonical example is ellipsis, the omission of information that is subsequently understood without being overtly pronounced. Comprehension of ellipsis requires retrieval of an antecedent from memory, without prior…

Two eye-tracking experiments tested how pitch prominence on a prenominal adjective affects contrast resolution in Japanese adult and 6-year old listeners. Participants located two animals in succession on displays with multiple colored animals. In Experiment 1, adults' fixations to the contrastive target (pink cat [right arrow] GREEN cat) were…

This study examined 4-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's sensitivity to prosodic cues in resolving speech act ambiguities, using eye-movement recordings. Most previous on-line studies have focused on children's use of prosody in resolving structural ambiguities. Although children have been found to be sensitive to prosodic information, they use…

Intensional verbs like "want" select for clausal complements expressing propositions, though they can be perfectly natural when combined with a direct object. There are two interesting phenomena associated with intensional transitive expressions. First, it has been suggested that their interpretation requires enriched compositional operations,…

Although previous research has shown a processing facilitation for conjoined phrases that share the same structure, it is currently not clear whether this parallelism advantage is specific to particular syntactic environments such as coordination, or whether it is an example of more general effect in sentence comprehension. Here, we report three…

We used eyetracking to examine how tonal versus segmental information influence spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese. Participants heard an auditory word and were required to identify its corresponding picture from an array that included the target item ("chuang2" "bed"), a phonological competitor (segmental: chuang1 "window"; cohort:…

In dialog settings, conversational partners converge on similar names for referents. These "lexically entrained" terms [Garrod, S., & Anderson, A. (1987). "Saying what you mean in dialog: A study in conceptual and semantic co-ordination." "Cognition, 27," 181-218] are part of the common ground between the particular individuals who established the…

This eye-tracking study explores visual recognition of Dutch suffixed words (e.g., "plaats+ing" "placing") embedded in sentential contexts, and provides new evidence on the interplay between storage and computation in morphological processing. We show that suffix length crucially moderates the use of morphological properties. In words with shorter…

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…

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…

A sentence is readily understood and recalled when presented one word at a time using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) at 10 words/s [Potter, M. C. (1984). Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP): A method for studying language processing. In D. Kieras & M. Just (Eds.), "New methods in reading comprehension research" (pp. 91-118).…