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…

In experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference…

In English, the sentence "Mary didn't eat pizza or sushi" is assigned the "neither interpretation" (both disjuncts must be false). In Mandarin Chinese, the equivalent sentence is assigned the at least one interpretation (at least one disjunct must be false). The cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of negative…

This paper examines the effect of syntactic structures on referent predictability. Focusing on stimulus-experiencer (SE) verbs, we conducted two sentence-completion experiments in Chinese by contrasting SE verbs in three structures (active canonical, active "ba," and passive). The results showed that although verb semantics and discourse…

The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well-formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary…

This study aims at describing the functions of passive voice and how authors reflect their stance through those functions in Turkish academic discourse. Depending on the findings of a corpus based research, this study makes a counterpoint to functionalist views on the ground that passivization does not necessarily result in promoting agents in…

When native speakers judge the acceptability of novel sentences, they appear to implicitly take competing formulations into account, judging novel sentences with a readily available alternative formulation to be less acceptable than novel sentences with no competing alternative. Moreover, novel sentences with a competing alternative are more…

To test between two recent accounts of the early stages in the acquisition of negation, we conducted an elicited production study with 25 children, between 2;05 and 3;04 (mean 2;11). The experimental study produced a robust set of negative sentences, with considerable individual variation. Although 13 of the child participants mainly produced…

We document weak garden paths after intransitive verbs, modulated by intransitivity type, in the treatment of DP[subscript 1] V[subscript intransitive] DP[subscript 2] V[subscript 2] sequences as in "As the journalist arrived the editor postponed the meeting" in first language (L1) and second language (L2) sentence processing. In a…

We examined anaphora resolution in children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) to clarify whether (i) DLD is best understood as missing knowledge of certain linguistic operations/elements or as unreliable performance and (ii) if comprehension of sentences with anaphoric expressions as objects and exceptionally case marked (ECM)…

Findings from five experiments support the view that negation generates sarcastic utterance-interpretations by default. When presented in isolation, novel negative constructions ("Punctuality is not his forte," "Thoroughness is not her most distinctive feature"), free of semantic anomaly or internal incongruity, were…

This dissertation uses the processing of anaphoric relations to probe how linguistic information is encoded in and retrieved from memory during real-time sentence comprehension. More specifically, the dissertation attempts to resolve a tension between the demands of a linguistic processor implemented in a general-purpose cognitive architecture and…

A fundamental challenge for human cognition is perceiving and acting in a world in which the statistics that characterize available sensory data are non-stationary. This thesis focuses on this problem specifically in the domain of sentence comprehension, where linguistic variability poses computational challenges to the processes underlying…

Positive and negative quantifiers induce two very different perspectives in comprehenders--perspectives that have strong applications to rhetoric and communication. These are briefly reviewed. A potential mechanism, based on earlier work, is introduced, resting on the idea that negatively quantified sentences (like Not all of the boys went to the…

A word-by-word human sentence processing complexity metric is presented. This metric formalizes the intuition that comprehenders have more trouble on words contributing larger amounts of information about the syntactic structure of the sentence as a whole. The formalization is in terms of the conditional entropy of grammatical continuations, given…