We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the time course and distribution of brain activity while adults performed (1) a sequential learning task involving complex structured sequences and (2) a language processing task. The same positive ERP deflection, the P600 effect, typically linked to difficult or ungrammatical syntactic…

Hungarian is a language with morphological case marking and relatively free word order. These typological characteristics make it a good ground for testing the crosslinguistic validity of theories on processing sentences with relative clauses. Our study focused on effects of structural factors and processing capacity. We tested 43 typically…

A common characteristic of subject-predicate agreement errors (usually termed attraction errors) in complex noun phrases is an asymmetrical pattern of error distribution, depending on the inflectional state of the nouns comprising the complex noun phrase. That is, attraction is most likely to occur when the head noun is the morphologically…

Although it is often claimed that verbal abilities are relatively well maintained across the adult lifespan, certain aspects of language production have been found to exhibit cross-sectional differences and longitudinal declines. In the current project age-related differences in controlled and naturalistic elicited language production tasks were…

We investigate linguistic relativity effects by examining whether the grammatical count/mass distinction in English affects English speakers' semantic representations of noun referents, as compared with those of Japanese speakers, whose language does not grammatically distinguish nouns for countability. We used two tasks which are sensitive to…

Previous studies have examined cross-serial and embedded complement clauses in West Germanic in order to distinguish between different types of working memory models of human sentence processing, as well as different formal language models. Here, adult plasticity in the use of these constructions is investigated by examining the response of…

Using the speeded-grammaticality judgment task, shows that factors that regulate garden path strength in ambiguous sentences also have an influence on processing of corresponding ungrammatical sentences in that they determine how reliably the ungrammaticality is detected. Argues that this processing correlation provides evidence for serial parsing…

In three experiments we investigated the locus of the frequency effect in lexical access and the mechanism of gender feature selection. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to produce gender-marked verb plus pronominal clitic utterances in Italian (e.g., "portalo" (bring it [masculine]) in response to a written verb and pictured object. We…

Presents the results of three experiments investigating the time course of grammaticality judgement. The high correlations among the experiments suggest that the incremental tasks assigned were tapping into the same decision-making process as is found online. The article discusses the findings' implications for the error types that do and do not…