In order to examine whether syntactic processing is a necessary prerequisite for semantic integration in Japanese, cortical activation was monitored while participants engaged in silent reading task. Congruous sentences (CON), semantic violation sentences (V-SEM), and syntactic violation sentences (V-SYN) were presented in the experiment. The…

The relationship between working memory (WM) and language processing has been extensively investigated in cognitive research. Previous studies mostly obtain evidence from measuring the involvement of WM in complex syntactic structures reported with well-established processing asymmetry, e.g., relative clauses (RCs) in English. Rarely considered is…

In sentence comprehension, negative sentences tend to elicit more processing cost than affirmative sentences. A growing body of work has shown that pragmatic context is an important factor that contributes to negation comprehension cost. The nature of this pragmatic effect, however, is yet to be determined. In 4 behavioral experiments, the current…

This dissertation investigates the interplay between the implicit knowledge that learners have of a nonnative language and their processing of that language, examining two types of relative clauses (RCs) in English: gapped RCs (e.g., "the man that they hired") and resumptive RCs (e.g., *"the man that they hired him").…

A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that explain and predict this difficulty can be broadly divided into two kinds, expectation-based and memory-based. In this work, we present a new model of incremental sentence…

The involvement load hypothesis (ILH), which predicts the lexical learning potential of tasks, assumes that writing sentences (SW) and compositions (CW) using novel target words (TWs) lead to similar lexical gains. However, research on the issue is scarce and contradictory. One possibility is that the higher cognitive load of CW hinders learning…

Referential gaze has been shown to benefit language processing in situated communication in terms of shifting visual attention and leading to shorter reaction times on subsequent tasks. The present study simultaneously assessed both visual attention and, importantly, the immediate cognitive load induced at different stages of sentence processing.…

This study used wrap-up effects on eye movements to assess the relationship between online reading behavior and comprehension. Participants, assessed on measures of reading, vocabulary, and spelling, read short passages that manipulated whether a syntactic boundary was "unmarked" by punctuation, "weakly marked" by a comma, or…

This study aims at comparing the effect of single- and dual-annotation modes, working memory (WM), and three tasks of different involvement loads (sentence writing, close deletion, and paragraph writing) on passive and active vocabulary development of proficient English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. While listening to an expository text,…

Do you know what happens in mind when we encounter a novel word while reading a newspaper, a paragraph or a short story? Via eye tracking technique, this study aimed to gather clues about how our mind reacts to an unknown word while we read in another language by examining word familiarity effects on eye movements during EFL reading. After a…

Purpose: The cognitive load generated by online speech production may vary with the nature of the speech task. This article examines 3 speech tasks used in voice therapy carry-over exercises, in which a patient is required to adopt and automatize new voice behaviors, ultimately in daily spontaneous communication. Method: Twelve subjects produced…

Purpose: In this study, the authors assessed the influence of masking level (29% or 71% sentence perception) and test modality on the processing load during language perception as reflected by the pupil response. In addition, the authors administered a delayed cued stimulus recall test to examine whether processing load affected the encoding of…

Second language (L2) learners have been found to experience difficulty in tasks that require the integration of discourse-pragmatic properties with syntactic and semantic properties (Sorace and Serratrice, 2009; Tsimpli and Sorace, 2006; Valenzuela, 2006). The present article investigates the sources of L2 difficulty in a phenomenon where multiple…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the new Cognitive Spare Capacity Test (CSCT), which measures aspects of working memory capacity for heard speech in the audiovisual and auditory-only modalities of presentation. Method: In Experiment 1, 20 young adults with normal hearing performed the CSCT and an independent battery of…

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…