The boundary effect, namely the infants' failures to compare small and large numerosities, is well documented in studies using visual stimuli. The prevailing explanation is that the numerical system used to process sets up to 3 is incompatible with the system employed for numbers >3. This study investigates the boundary effect in 10-month-old…

We report the results of one visual-world eye-tracking experiment and two referent selection tasks in which we investigated the effects of information structure in the form of prosody and word order manipulation on the processing of subject pronouns "er" and "der" in German. Factors such as subjecthood, focus, and topicality,…

The aim of the study is to examine the effect of sentential context on lexical ambiguity resolution in Greek adults and typically developing children. Context and word frequency are factors that can affect lexical processing, however, the role of them has not been thoroughly examined in Greek. To this aim, we assessed sentence context effects in…

Scalar implicatures (SIs) lie at the interface between semantics and pragmatics, and therefore have evoked great interest for language acquisition research. Many acquisition studies show that young children know the literal semantics of scalar items (like "some", "might", "start" and "or") but have…

Representing the base-10 structure of numbers is a challenging cognitive ability, unique to humans, but it is yet unknown how precisely this is done. Here, we examined whether and how literate adults represent a number's full syntactic structure. In 5 experiments, participants repeated number-word sequences and we systematically varied the order…

Structural priming is the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across sentences and can be divided into short-term (prime to immediately following target) and long-term (across an experimental session) components. This study investigates how nondeclarative memory could support both the transient, short-term and the persistent, long-term…

This study examines effects of memory load on the processing of scalar implicature via a dual-task paradigm using reading span and self-paced reading. Results indicate that participants showed online sensitivity to underinformative sentences (e.g., "Some birds have wings and beaks") at the end of the sentence. This online sensitivity…

This study investigates the interpretation of object-initial sentences in German-speaking children. We addressed the following questions: (1) Which morphosyntactic cues do children deploy to process object-initial sentences? (2) Which executive function (EF) abilities support them during this task? This study examined the effect of case and number…

We conducted a broad-coverage investigation of the effects of syntactic distance and word order on language processing against a dependency-annotated reading time corpus of English. A combined method of quantitative syntax and psycholinguistic analyses was adopted to yield converging evidence. It was found that (i) head-initial structures allow…

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement-clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief…

Background: Aphasia is often accompanied by impairment of non-language cognitive functions. Assessment of cognitive capacity in people with aphasia (PWA) with standard neuropsychological methods may be problematic due to their language difficulties. Numerous experimental studies indicate that P300 may be considered as an index of cognitive…

Metaphors are a common way to express creative language, yet the cognitive basis of figurative language production remains poorly understood. Previous studies found that higher creative individuals can better comprehend novel metaphors, potentially due to a more flexible semantic memory network structure conducive to remote conceptual combination.…

Purpose: Language production, a dynamic process involving real-time language processing, is crucial for children's language and communication development. To explore the early development of children's real-time language production, this study investigated Chinese preschool children's pausing strategies in narratives and their associations with…

The underlying cognitive mechanisms explaining why speakers sometimes make communication errors are not well understood. Some scholars have theorized that audience design engages automatic processes when a listener is present; others argue that it relies on effortful resources, even if a listener is present. We hypothesized that working memory is…

Purpose: This research investigated the nature of cognitive decline in prodromal Alzheimer's disease (AD), particularly in mild cognitive impairment, amnestic type (aMCI). We assessed language in aMCI as compared with healthy aging (HA) and healthy young (HY) with new psycholinguistic assessment of complex sentences, and we tested the degree to…