Most research in psycholinguistics relies on online measures such as reading time to inform and test theories of language comprehension. However, the value of offline measures such as question-answering performance is sometimes overlooked in sentence processing work. Consequently, psycholinguists do not yet understand how the tasks and measures…

Although metaphors are essential tools in everyday communication and educational settings, the literature lacks evidence of effective training tools to promote metaphor comprehension in typical development. Grounding in theoretical pragmatics, we developed a novel metaphor comprehension training (MetaCom) for school-age children that focuses on…

This dissertation investigates processing of English and Japanese relative clause (RC) sentences by native speakers and second/foreign language (L2) learners. Particularly, the relationship between the sentence processing and individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity was examined. The main question addressed in this study is whether…

To study the relationship between inferences made on standardized reading tests and item difficulty, 50 items on the reading comprehension section of the Metropolitan Achievement Test were analyzed independently in this study by two raters using four general categories of inferences: (1) reference inferences, (2) between proposition inferences,…

This research explored the fundamental processes involved in comprehending linguistic material: the duration of the process, the sequence of processes, and the sources of errors. One project examined the comprehension of affirmative and negative sentences that are read and verified with respect to a picture. A model developed to account for the…