In the domain of discourse processing, it has been claimed that older adults (60-0-year-olds) are less likely to encode and remember some kinds of information from texts than young adults. The experiment described here shows that they do make a particular kind of inference to the same extent that college-age adults do. The inferences examined 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…

We report a series of ERP and eye-tracking experiments investigating, (a) whether English-French learners can process grammatical gender online, (b) whether cross-linguistic similarities influence this ability, and (c) whether the syntactic distance between elements affects agreement processing. To address these questions we visually presented…

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…

Bilinguals who are fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and English often produce "code-blends"--simultaneously articulating a sign and a word while conversing with other ASL-English bilinguals. To investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying code-blend processing, we compared picture-naming times (Experiment 1) and semantic categorization…

Although previous research has suggested that the processing of compound words involves the integration of the constituents, not much is known about what integration entails. Three experiments suggest that integration draws on both linguistic and conceptual knowledge about the constituents and the compound word; ease of processing (as reflected by…

This study clarifies the involvement of short- and long-term memory in novel word-form learning, using the Hebb repetition paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants recalled sequences of visually presented syllables (e.g., "la"-"va"-"bu"-"sa"-"fa"-"ra"-"re"-"si"-"di"), with one particular (Hebb) sequence repeated on every third trial. Crucially,…

The present study explored when and how the top-down intention to speak influences the language production process. We did so by comparing the brain's electrical response for a variable known to affect lexical access, namely word frequency, during overt object naming and non-verbal object categorization. We found that during naming, the…

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,…

We investigate the effects of word characteristics on episodic recognition memory using analyses that avoid Clark's (1973) "language-as-a-fixed-effect" fallacy. Our results demonstrate the importance of modeling word variability and show that episodic memory for words is strongly affected by item noise (Criss & Shiffrin, 2004), as measured by the…

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…

In three experiments we compared the performance of native English speakers to that of Spanish-English and Dutch-English bilinguals on a masked morphological priming lexical decision task. The results do not show significant differences across the three experiments. In line with recent meta-analyses, we observed a graded pattern of facilitation…

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…

Grammatical agreement makes different demands on speakers of different languages. Being widespread in the languages of the world, the features of agreement systems offer valuable tests of how language affects deep-seated domains of human cognition and categorization. Number agreement is one such domain, with intriguing evidence that typological…

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…