"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms…

The integration of semantic information of compound words with context is a crucial aspect of reading comprehension. In two eye-tracking experiments, we used two-character and four-character Chinese lexicalized and novel compound words to investigate how Chinese readers integrate semantic information of compound words with contexts in the present…

In Chinese reading, the possibility and mechanism of semantic parafoveal processing has been debated for a long time. To advance the topic, "semantic preview benefit" in Chinese reading was reexamined, with a specific focus on how it is affected by the semantic relatedness between preview and target words at the two-character word level.…

Language comprehension requires a complex series of decisions under uncertainty. This is especially obvious when one string may have multiple different interpretations, whether due to lexical ambiguity, or the potential for an inference beyond literal content. This dissertation profiles how the human system for language comprehension times those…

Previous work has ostensibly shown that readers rapidly adapt to less predictable ambiguity resolutions after repeated exposure to unbalanced statistical input (e.g., a high number of reduced relative-clause garden-path sentences), and that these readers grow to disfavor the a priori more frequent (e.g. main verb) resolution after exposure (Fine,…

Idioms entail a competition between bottom-up and top-down activations of literal and figurative meanings. The present study explored the involvement of cognitive control in processing Hebrew ambiguous idioms. Fifty subjects have completed a self-paced reading task and a response inhibition, stop-signal task (SST). Subjects read 26 matched pairs…

This dissertation explores the role of memory in language processing, and specifically how interference during lexical encoding can result in downstream interference during retrieval. The dissertation merges insights from both the sentence processing literature as well as the study of memory in non-sentential contexts and focuses on two factors…

The purpose of this article aims to analyze the effect of word-word space in written Chinese to advanced non-native speakers when they read and process Mandarin texts. The participants have performed one online reaction time experiment and another one offline pencil-paper test. The results indicate that the structure of word segmentation in…

The study tested how the Recency Preference and Predicate Proximity model (Gibson et al. in Cognition 59(1):23-59, 1996, https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(88)90004-2) plays out by examining the attachment preferences of native Russian speakers when processing locally ambiguous participial relative clause sentences with three potential NP…

This paper explores the processes underlying verb metaphoric extension. Work on metaphor processing has largely focused on noun metaphor, despite evidence that verb metaphor is more common. Across three experiments, we collected paraphrases of simple intransitive sentences varying in semantic strain--for example, "The motor complained"…

Statistical learning (SL) plays a key role in literacy acquisition. Studies have increasingly revealed the influence of distributional statistical properties of words on visual word processing, including the effects of word frequency (lexical level) and mappings between orthography, phonology, and semantics (sub-lexical level). However, there has…

The disambiguation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence in favor of a less preferred parse can lead to slower reading at the disambiguation point. This phenomenon, referred to as a garden-path effect, has motivated models in which readers initially maintain only a subset of the possible parses of the sentence, and subsequently require…

Previous research has shown that rhyme and meter--although enhancing prosodic processing ease and memorability--also tend to make semantic processing more demanding. Using a set of rhymed and metered proverbs, as well as nonrhymed and nonmetered versions of these proverbs, the present study reveals this hitherto unspecified difficulty of…

This study used eye-tracking to investigate the real-time processing of phonetic and semantic radicals (components of Chinese characters that give clues to their pronunciation and meaning) by intermediate-level university Chinese foreign language (CFL) learners. Additionally, the study examined how knowledge and awareness of radicals affect…

Background: A significant portion of adults struggle to read at a basic level. Word reading (defined here as decoding and word recognition) appears to play a pivotal role for this population of readers; however, less is known about how word reading relates to other important semantic processes (e.g., vocabulary, sentence processing) known to…