The systems underlying incremental sentence comprehension are, in general, highly successful -- comprehenders typically understand sentences of their native language quickly and accurately. The occasional failure of the system to deliver an appropriate representation of a sentence is therefore potentially illuminating. There are many ways the…

Decades of psycholinguistics research have shown that human sentence processing is highly incremental and predictive. This has provided evidence for expectation-based theories of sentence processing, which posit that the processing difficulty of linguistic material is modulated by its probability in context. However, these theories do not make…

Children between the ages of seven and nine years were given metalinguistic tasks and measures of field dependence-independence (FDI). Results showed a common basis for FDI and metalinguistic problems requiring high levels of control of linguistic processing but not for FDI and problems requiring high levels of analysis of linguistic knowledge.…