A controversial issue in anaphoric processing has been whether processing preferences of anaphoric expressions are affected by the antecedent's grammatical role or surface position. Using eye tracking, Experiment 1 examined the comprehension of pronouns during reading, which revealed shorter reading times in the pronoun region and later regions…

The scrambling complexity hypothesis based on working memory or locality accounts as well as syntactic accounts have proposed that processing a scrambled structure is difficult. However, the locus of this difficulty in sentence processing remains debatable. Several studies on multiple languages have explored the effect of scrambling on sentence…

It has often been suggested that the role of Broca's region in sentence comprehension can be explained with reference to general cognitive mechanisms (e.g. working memory, cognitive control). However, the (language-related) basis for such proposals is often restricted to findings on English. Here, we argue that an extension of the database to…

Two Finnish language comprehension experiments are presented which suggest that the referential properties of pronouns and demonstratives cannot be reduced straightforwardly to the salience level of the antecedent. The findings, from a sentence completion study and visual world eye-tracking study, reveal an asymmetry in which features of the…

A psycholinguistic hypothesis regarding the use of interjections in spoken utterances, originally formulated by Ameka (1992b, 1994) for the English language, but not confirmed in the German-language research of Kowal and O'Connell (2004 a & c), was tested: The local syntactic isolation of interjections is paralleled by their articulatory isolation…