We investigated the role of discourse context in relative clause processing. We first replicated Reali and Christiansen's (2007a) finding that pronominal object relative clauses are easier to process than analogous subject relative clauses (an effect which stands in contrast to previous research on pronominal relative clauses). We then analyzed…

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 &…

Listeners expect that a definite noun phrase with a pre-nominal scalar adjective (e.g., "the big"...) will refer to an entity that is part of a set of objects contrasting on the scalar dimension, e.g., size (Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers, & Carlson, 1999). Two visual world experiments demonstrate that uttering a referring expression with a…

Several theoretical accounts have been proposed with respect to the issue how quickly the implicit causality verb bias affects the understanding of sentences such as "John beat Pete at the tennis match, because he had played very well". They can be considered as instances of two viewpoints: the focusing and the integration account. The focusing…

Recently, several ERP studies have shown that the human language comprehension system anticipates words that are highly likely continuations of a given text. However, it remains an open issue whether the language comprehension system can also make predictions that go beyond a specific word. Here, we address the question of whether readers predict…

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…

Time reference in Indo-European languages is marked on the verb. With tensed verb forms, the speaker can refer to the past (wrote, has written), present (writes, is writing) or future (will write). Reference to the past through verb morphology has been shown to be particularly vulnerable in agrammatic aphasia and both agrammatic and…

There is mounting evidence that language users are sensitive to distributional information at many grain-sizes. Much of this research has focused on the distributional properties of words, the units they consist of (morphemes, phonemes), and the syntactic structures they appear in (verb-categorization frames, syntactic constructions). In a series…

Event-related brain potentials were recorded during RSVP reading to test the hypothesis that quantifier expressions are incrementally interpreted fully and immediately. In sentences tapping general knowledge ("Farmers grow crops/worms as their primary source of income"), Experiment 1 found larger N400s for atypical ("worms") than typical objects…

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 research tests whether comprehenders use their knowledge of typical events in real time to process verbal arguments. In self-paced reading and event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments, we used materials in which the likelihood of a specific patient noun ("brakes" or "spelling") depended on the combination of an agent and verb…

In this study, we investigate the relevance of inflectional paradigms and inflectional classes for lexical processing. We provide an information-theoretical measure of the divergence in the frequency distributions of two of the paradigms to which a word simultaneously belongs: the paradigm of the stem and the more general paradigm of the nominal…

We conducted a large-scale corpus analysis indicating that pronominal object relative clauses are significantly more frequent than pronominal subject relative clauses when the embedded pronoun is personal. This difference was reversed when impersonal pronouns constituted the embedded noun phrase. This pattern of distribution provides a suitable…

We use syntactic priming to test the abstractness of the sentence representations of young 3-year-olds (35-42 months). In describing pictures with inanimate participants, 18 children primed with passives produced more passives (11 with a strict scoring scheme, 16 with lax scoring) than did 18 children primed with actives (2 on either scheme) or 12…