Many psycholinguistic studies examine how people parse sentences in isolation; however, years of work in discourse processing have shown that sentence-level interpretations are influenced at some stage by discourse-level information. Evidence over the past 20 years remains mixed as to the temporal dynamics of such top-down interactions. In…

This study investigates whether cross-linguistic differences affect how adult second language (L2) learners use different types of verb subcategorization information for prediction in real-time sentence comprehension. Using visual world eye-tracking, we tested if first language (L1) German and L1 Turkish intermediate-to-advanced learners of L2…

Natural languages contain systematic relationships between verb meaning and verb argument structure. Artificial language learning studies typically remove those relationships and instead pair verb meanings randomly with structures. Adult participants in such studies can detect statistical regularities associated with words in these languages and…

The Topic Hypothesis posits that Chinese language learners progress through a developmental sequence comprising five stages (Gao, 2009; Wang, 2011), which includes the Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) structure at stage 4 and the ba-construct at stage 5. According to this hypothesis, learners typically master the OSV structure before acquiring the…

Previous research on 4-6-year-olds' interpretations of adjunct control has observed non-adult-like behavior for sentences like "John called Mary before running to the store." Several studies have aimed to identify a grammatical source of children's errors. This study tests the predictions of grammatical and extragrammatical accounts by…

In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds' real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to "SVO" or "OVS" sentences containing active…

Research consistently shows that adults engaged in tutored acquisition benefit from explicit instruction in several linguistic domains. For preschool children, it is often assumed that such explicit instruction does not make a difference. In the present study, we investigated whether explicit instruction affected young learners in acquiring a…

The representational product of sentence comprehension is the result of the interplay between episodic and semantic memory and our knowledge of the grammatical devices of our language which guide how we retrieve information from these systems. Past participles, being a part of speech derived from verbs but used in a prenominal position (e.g. words…

This paper investigates the interpretation that Italian-speaking children and adults assign to negative sentences with disjunction and negative sentences with conjunction. The aim of the study was to determine whether children and adults assign the same interpretation to these types of sentences. The Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al.,…

Purpose: This study examines the contribution of number morphology to language comprehension abilities among children with specific language impairment (SLI) and age-matched controls. It addresses the question of whether number agreement facilitates the comprehension accuracy of object-initial declarative sentences. According to the predictions of…

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…

This dissertation explores the relationship between the parser and the grammar in error-driven retrieval by examining the mechanism underlying the illusory licensing of subject-verb agreement violations ("agreement attraction"). Previous work motivates a two-stage model of agreement attraction in which the parser predicts the verb's…

The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well-formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary…

This study investigates L2 learners' ability to use morphosyntactic gender as a predictive cue during the processing of Hindi agreement dependencies. Nine L2 learners of low-intermediate proficiency and nine highly proficient multilingual speakers who consider Hindi one of their dominant languages were tested using a speeded picture-selection…

This paper reports on an experimental study addressing second language acquisition of English quantifiers by Arabic speakers. Due to several differences found between Arabic and English regarding types, meanings and functions of quantifiers, Arabic learners encounter challenges in mastering them properly. Unlike English, Arabic does not make lots…