Facilitated identification of predictable words during online reading has been attributed to the generation of predictions about upcoming words. But highly predictable words are relatively infrequent in natural texts, raising questions about the utility and ubiquity of anticipatory prediction strategies. This study investigated the contribution of…

This study examined the effect of mood on predictive sentence processing by older adults. A self-paced reading task was implemented among a group of younger adults and older adults to measure their performance in online sentence processing. Half of the sentences were highly predictable, whereas the other half were lowly predictable. Music was used…

There are numerous studies showing processing advantages for collocations, but none of them so far takes into account the fact that the morphological form of a collocation varies to fit the context. Questions whether collocations retain their processing advantage when their morphological form changes and how or if different morphological forms of…

We examined the developmental relationship between cognitive-linguistic skills (nonverbal IQ, vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatised naming [RAN]), home environment factors (direct teaching, shared book reading, access to literacy resources, parents' expectations, family's socioeconomic status [SES]), and pinyin letter knowledge in…

Reading acquisition is based on a set of preliteracy skills that lay the foundation for future reading abilities. Phonological awareness--the ability to identify and manipulate the sound units of oral language--has been reported to play a central role in reading acquisition. However, current evidence is mixed with respect to its universal…

This study examines the effect of textual enhancement on learners' attention to and learning of multiword units from captioned audiovisual input. We adopted a within-participants design in which 28 learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) watched a captioned video containing enhanced (underlined) and unenhanced multiword units. Using…

We examined the contribution of rapid automatized naming (RAN) components (articulation time, pause time, and pause time consistency) to reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling in a sample of 257 German children (139 boys, 118 girls; M[subscript age] = 5.60 years, SD = 0.31) followed from kindergarten to Grade 1. In kindergarten,…

This study investigates the processing of long-distance syntactic dependencies by native speakers of Slovenian (L1) who are advanced learners of Italian as a second language (L2), compared with monolingual Italian speakers. Using a self-paced reading task, we compare sensitivity of the early-acquired L2 learners to syntactic anomalies in their L2…

It is well known that information from spoken language is integrated into reading processes, but the nature of these links and how they are acquired is less well understood. Recent evidence has suggested that predictions about the written form of newly learned spoken words are already generated prior to print exposure. We extend this work to…

Metonymic words have multiple related meanings, such as "college", as in the building ("John walked into the college") or the educational institution ("John was promoted by the college"). Most researchers have found support for direct access models of metonymy but one recent study, Lowder and Gordon (2013), found…

We document weak garden paths after intransitive verbs, modulated by intransitivity type, in the treatment of DP[subscript 1] V[subscript intransitive] DP[subscript 2] V[subscript 2] sequences as in "As the journalist arrived the editor postponed the meeting" in first language (L1) and second language (L2) sentence processing. In a…

One crucial property of verbal jokes is that the punchline usually contains an incongruency that has to be resolved by updating the situation model representation. In the standard pragmatic model, these processes are considered to require cognitive effort. However, only few studies compared jokes to texts requiring a situation model revision…

This research investigated whether text reading and copying involve visual attention-processing skills. Children in grades 3 and 5 read and copied the same text. We measured eye movements while reading and the number of gaze lifts (GL) during copying. The children were also administered letter report tasks that constitute an estimation of the…

Despite the growing number of studies highlighting the complex process of acquiring second language (L2) word recognition skills, comparatively little research has examined the relationship between word recognition and passage-level reading ability in L2 learners; further, the existing results are inconclusive. This study aims to help fill the…

Cognitive interest is a motivation to acquire information that is caused by a cognitive and emotional state of uncertainty about the meaning of a text. It can, therefore, be expected to increase if a text raises an issue in readers' mind without resolving it. In support of this expectation, the results of 3 experiments show that the readers'…