We present a visual world eye-tracking study on Tseltal (a Mayan language) and investigate whether verbal information can be used to anticipate an upcoming referent. Basic word order in transitive sentences in Tseltal is Verb--Object--Subject (VOS). The verb is usually encountered first, making argument structure and syntactic information…

Constructivist approaches to language acquisition predict that form-function mappings are derived from distributional patterns in the input, and their contextual embedding. This requires a detailed analysis of the input, and the integration of information from different contingencies. Regarding the acquisition of morphology, it is shown which…

Scholars of language development have long been challenged to understand the development of functional categories. Traditionally, it was assumed that children's language development initially relies on lexical elements, while functional elements become accessible only at later periods; and that it is lexical growth which bootstraps grammatical…

Natural languages make prolific use of conventional constituent-ordering patterns to indicate "who did what to whom," yet the mechanisms through which these regularities arise are not well understood. A series of recent experiments demonstrates that, when prompted to express meanings through silent gesture, people bypass native language…

This study is aimed to re-examine the Interface Hypothesis via investigating the adult L2 acquisition of the word order variation of numeral classifier indefinites at the syntax-semantics and syntax-discourse interfaces in L2 Chinese. A computerized acceptability judgment task was administered to 41 advanced and intermediate adult Korean learners…

This study investigated whether cross-linguistic differences affect semantic prediction. We assessed this by looking at two languages, Dutch and Turkish, that differ in word order and thus vary in how words come together to create sentence meaning. In an eye-tracking task, Dutch and Turkish four-year-olds (N = 40), five-year-olds (N = 58), and…

This study investigates preverbal structural and semantic processing in Japanese, a head-final language, using the maze task. Two sentence types were tested--simple scrambled sentences (Experiment 1) and control sentences (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that even for simple, mono-clausal Japanese sentences, (1) there are online processing…

The scrambling complexity hypothesis based on working memory or locality accounts as well as syntactic accounts have proposed that processing a scrambled structure is difficult. However, the locus of this difficulty in sentence processing remains debatable. Several studies on multiple languages have explored the effect of scrambling on sentence…

This paper examines the influence of context on the processing of category names embedded in sentences. The investigation focuses on the nature of information available immediately after such a word is heard as well as on the dynamics of adaptation to context. An on-line method (Cross Modal Lexical Priming) was used to trace how this process…

This study investigates how L2 learners of German (English L1) process structural and semantic information when reading German sentences. In a timed comprehension task, intermediate and advanced L2 learners of German read sentences that varied according to word order (subject-first versus object-first) and subject animacy (inanimate subject versus…

The authors present a computational model that builds a holographic lexicon representing both word meaning and word order from unsupervised experience with natural language. The model uses simple convolution and superposition mechanisms to learn distributed holographic representations for words. The structure of the resulting lexicon can account…

An event-related potentials (ERPs) study examined word-to-text integration processes across sentence boundaries. In a two-sentence passage, the accessibility of a referent for the first content word of the second sentence (the target word) was varied by the wording of the first sentence in one of the following ways: lexically (explicitly using…

This article presents findings from a year-long study of how intermediate second language (L2) learners of German (English first language) used case markings, word order, and semantic information when comprehending individual German sentences. The results showed that the learners relied on word order and semantic information, but did not…

We report two experiments examining the role of concreteness and word phonological neighborhood characteristics on immediate serial recall. In line with previous findings concreteness, word frequency, and larger neighborhood size are associated with better serial recall. Both concreteness and word neighborhood size were also positively associated…

In 4 experiments the authors used a variant of the picture-word interference paradigm to investigate whether there is a temporal overlap in the activation of words during sentence production and whether there is a flow of semantic and phonological information between them. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that 2 semantically related nouns produce…