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…

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…

"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…

We test children's distributive and collective sentence interpretations and the variables that predict them. In our first experiment, we establish that adult English collective sentences with "the" or "some" in the subject are categorically collective in their interpretations. We further demonstrate that children's collective…

Research on agrammatism has revealed that the nature of linguistic impairment is systematic and interpretable. Non-canonical sentences are more impaired than those of canonical sentences. Previous studies on Japanese (Hiroshi et al. 2004; Chujo 1983; Tamaoka et al. 2003; Nakayama 1995) report that aphasic patients take longer Response Time (RT)…

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called "ambiguity advantage," that is, faster processing of ambiguous sentences compared with unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible…

Plant lexicons in Sundanese proverbs have symbolized the ethnic group's identity since they have existed in the Sundanese natural environment, and represented Sundanese worldview. The objectives of the research were to discover the plant lexicons in Sundanese proverbs, their use, and their representation of human beings in the Sundanese ethnic…

This study aimed to investigate the production of stress in English compound nouns and phrasal verbs by L1 Thai learners. Based on the Interlanguage Hypothesis (Corder, 1982; Selinker, 1972), it was hypothesized that (1) there is a positive relationship between English proficiency levels and accuracy in stress assignment in compound nouns and…

In this article we look at some of the structural properties of second language (L2) Japanese WH questions. In Japanese the WH words are licensed to remain "in situ" by the prosodic contiguity properties of the phrases which have no prosodic boundaries between the WH word and the question particle. In a rehearsed-reading, sentence…

This study explored the differences in the writings produced by both male and female students in colleges of education in Ghana with respect to syntactic complexity. The study was based on a corpus of two hundred examination essays which were collected from two hundred students in Assin Fosu, Wesley and Presbyterian colleges of education who took…

Italian relative clauses like "Il bambino che bacia la mamma" 'the child that kisses the mom' are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigating the role of semantic…

Two recent books (Jiang, 2014, "Advances in Chinese as a second language"; Wang, 2013, "Grammatical development of Chinese among non-native speakers") provide new resources for exploring the role of processing in acquiring Chinese as a second language (L2). This review article summarizes, assesses and compares some of the…

This article provides the first systematic analysis of early subject omission in a creole language. Basing our analysis on a longitudinal corpus of natural production of Jamaican Creole (JC), we observe that early subject drop is robustly attested for several months. Early subject omission is basically confined to the clause initial position,…

Development of child language is tremendously complex, remarkable and wondrous. In a second language acquisition context, a child can acquire his second language in either acquiring both languages at the same time or learning the second language after mastering the first one. This present research is concerned to describe the syntactical…

This study examined Spanish-Welsh (in Patagonia) and Welsh-English (in North Wales) bilingual children's and adults' processing of sentences in which two noun phrases acted as arguments of a verb. The goal was to determine the relative importance of distinct cues to the identification of the subject in the bilinguals' processing of their two…