People often speak indirectly. For example, "It's cold in here" might be intended not only as a comment on the temperature but also as a request to turn on the heater. How are comprehenders' inferences about a speaker's intentions informed by their ability to reason about the speaker's mental states, that is, "mentalizing?" We…

Most research in psycholinguistics relies on online measures such as reading time to inform and test theories of language comprehension. However, the value of offline measures such as question-answering performance is sometimes overlooked in sentence processing work. Consequently, psycholinguists do not yet understand how the tasks and measures…

Several theoretical proposals tried to account for the meaning open-endedness of metaphors in literature and for the effortful process they trigger in readers. However, very few experiments have tackled the neurophysiological underpinnings of literary metaphor. Here we used Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) to explore the temporal dynamics of…

One of the major aims of discourse-processing literature is to understand whether and when readers form discourse-level representations online. To test this, two word-by-word, self-paced reading experiments investigated the time course of integrating incoming information about the protagonist into the unfolding discourse-level representation in…

Language is an intrinsically open-ended system. This fact has led to the widely shared assumption that readers and listeners do not predict upcoming words, at least not in a way that goes beyond simple priming between words. Recent evidence, however, suggests that readers and listeners do anticipate upcoming words "on the fly" as a text…

Much experimental work in psycholinguistics suggests that fully specified syntactic and semantic interpretations are obtained incrementally. The finding that interpretation takes place incrementally is very robust and underlies our own view of sentence processing as well; however, most of this work tends to test very simple interpretive judgments…

Accessibility is one of the most important challenges at the intersection of linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of text and discourse processing. Linguists have shown how linguistic indicators of referential coherence show a systematic pattern: Longer linguistic forms (like full lexical NPs) tend to be used when referents are relatively low…

When accounting for the usage of some linguistic form, one can refer to its discourse profile, all concomitant features frequently co-occurring with that form in discourse, or abstract a more general claim about its discourse function, referring only to the necessary and sufficient conditions for the proper occurrence of the form. This article…