Can a single adjective immediately influence message-building during sentence processing? We presented participants with 168 sentence contexts, such as "His skin was red from spending the day at the …" Sentences ended with either the most expected word ("beach") or a low cloze probability completion ("pool"). Nouns…

We used event-related potentials to investigate how markedness impacts person agreement in English-speaking learners of L2-Spanish. Markedness was examined by probing agreement with both first-person (marked) and third-person (unmarked) subjects. Agreement was manipulated by crossing first-person subjects with third-person verbs and vice versa.…

The present study used event-related potentials to investigate whether the processing of grammatical gender agreement involving gender regular and irregular forms recruit the same or distinct neurocognitive mechanisms and whether different grammatical gender agreement conditions elicit the same or diverse ERP signals. Native speakers of Brazilian…

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and…

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the presence of predictions in language comprehension comes from event-related potential (ERP) studies which show that encountering an adjective whose gender marking is inconsistent with that of a highly expectable noun leads to an effect at the adjective. Until now the mechanism underlying this…

Understanding language requires the ability to compose the meanings of words into phrase and sentence meanings. Formal theories in semantics have framed the hypothesis that all instances of meaning composition, irrespective of the syntactic and semantic properties of the expressions involved, boil down to a unique formal operation, that is, the…

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…

Purpose: Recent findings in preschool children indicated novel adjective recall was enhanced when learned using repeated retrieval with contextual reinstatement (RRCR) compared to repeated study (RS). Recall was similar for learned pictures used during training and new (generalized) pictures with the same adjective features. The current study…

In 3 ERP experiments, we investigated how experienced L2 speakers process natural and correct syntactic input that deviates from their own, sometimes incorrect, syntactic representations. Our previous study (Lemhöfer, Schriefers, & Indefrey, 2014) had shown that L2 speakers do engage in native-like syntactic processing of gender agreement but…

The present study used event related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how native (L1) German-speaking second-language (L2) learners of English process sentences containing filler-gap dependencies such as "Bill liked the house (women) that Bob built some ornaments for __ at his workplace." Using an experimental design which allowed us to…

The perfective aspect marker in Chinese is partly functionally similar to inflectional suffixes in Indo-European languages but is non-inflectional and lexical in nature, lying thus at the semantics-syntax interface. This provides us with the opportunity to compare directly the syntactic and semantic constraints during second language (L2) sentence…

Numerous studies have found "subject gap preference" in relative clauses and cleft constructions in English, French, and other languages. In contrast, previous studies have reported "object gap preference" in cleft constructions in Japanese. However, the effect of integrating a filler and its gap may be influenced by the effect…

We examined sources of morphological variability in second language (L2) learners of Spanish whose native language (L1) is English, with a focus on L1-L2 similarity, morphological markedness, and knowledge type (receptive vs. expressive). Experiment 1 uses event-related potentials to examine noun-adjective number (present in L1) and gender…

Research to-date has not successfully demonstrated consistent neural distinctions for different types of ambiguity or explored the effect of grammatical class on semantic selection. We conducted a relatedness judgment task using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to further explore these topics. Participants judged…

There have been a number of behavioral and neural studies on the processing of syntactic gender and number agreement information, marked by different morpho-syntactic features during sentence comprehension. By using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, the present study investigated whether the processing of semantic gender information and…