"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…

Most words in natural languages are polysemous; that is, they have related but different meanings in different contexts. This one-to-many mapping of form to meaning presents a challenge to understanding how word meanings are learned, represented, and processed. Previous work has focused on solutions in which multiple static semantic…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether older adults exhibit reduced abilities in coordinating lexical retrieval and syntactic formulation during sentence production and whether an individual's working memory capacity predicts age-related changes in sentence production. Method: A total of 124 Korean-speaking individuals (79 young…

Meaning in language emerges from multiple words, and children are sensitive to multi-word frequency from infancy. While children successfully use cues from single words to generate linguistic predictions, it is less clear whether and how they use multi-word sequences to guide real-time language processing and whether they form predictions on the…

Understanding language requires readers and listeners to cull meaning from fast-unfolding messages that often contain conflicting cues pointing to incompatible ways of interpreting the input (e.g., "The cat was chased by the mouse"). This article reviews mounting evidence from multiple methods demonstrating that cognitive control plays…

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…

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,…

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…

This study investigated the effects of semantic transparency of Chinese suon Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners' incidental learning of word meanings in sentence-level reading and passage-level reading. The accuracy of the learners' lexical inferencing was compared among various types of words (transparent, semi-transparent, and opaque…

What is the processing cost of being garden-pathed by a temporary syntactic ambiguity? We argue that comparing average reading times in garden-path versus non-garden-path sentences is not enough to answer this question. Trial-level contaminants such as inattention, the fact that garden pathing may occur non-deterministically in the ambiguous…

The world's linguistic diversity is severely underrepresented in research on cognitive and neural aspects of language processing, with great consequences for our understanding of the relationship between language, cognition, and the human brain. The practical challenges of carrying out neurophysiological (but also behavioral) experiments under…

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…

In order to examine whether syntactic processing is a necessary prerequisite for semantic integration in Japanese, cortical activation was monitored while participants engaged in silent reading task. Congruous sentences (CON), semantic violation sentences (V-SEM), and syntactic violation sentences (V-SYN) were presented in the experiment. The…

Pronouns can sometimes covary with a non c-commanding quantifier phrase (QP). To obtain such 'telescoping' readings, a semantic representation must be computed in which the QP's semantic scope extends beyond its surface scope. Non-native speakers have been claimed to have more difficulty than native speakers deriving such non-isomorphic…

This study examines the referential context effect on second-language relative clause ambiguity resolution by proficient L1 Chinese learners who learn English as a foreign language (EFL) and investigates whether the ambiguity resolution process is constrained by individuals' working memory capacity (WMC). It presents a self-paced reading study and…