There is a growing body of evidence showing that conversational implicatures are rapidly accessed in incremental utterance interpretation. To date, studies showing incremental access have focussed on implicatures related to linguistic triggers, such as "some" and "or". We discuss three kinds of on-line model that can account for this data. A model…

The effects of word predictability and shared semantic similarity between a target word and other words that could have taken its place in a sentence on language comprehension are investigated using data from a reading time study, a sentence completion study, and linear mixed-effects regression modeling. We find that processing is facilitated if…

There is much debate over the degree to which language learning is governed by innate language-specific biases, or acquired through cognition-general principles. Here we examine the probabilistic language acquisition hypothesis on three levels: We outline a novel theoretical result showing that it is possible to learn the exact "generative model"…

Previous research has found that the single argument of unaccusative verbs (such as "fall") is reactivated during sentence processing, but the argument of agentive verbs (such as "jump") is not ( and ). An open question so far was whether this difference in processing is caused by a difference in thematic roles the verbs assign, or a difference in…

In a long-lag morphological priming experiment, Dutch (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals were asked to name pictures and read aloud words. A design using non-switch blocks, consisting solely of Dutch stimuli, and switch-blocks, consisting of Dutch primes and targets with intervening English trials, was administered. Target picture naming was facilitated…

A study combining artificial grammar and sentence comprehension methods investigated the learning and online use of probabilistic, nonadjacent combinatorial constraints. Participants learned a small artificial language describing cartoon monsters acting on objects. Self-paced reading of sentences in the artificial language revealed comprehenders'…

We examine the mechanisms that support interaction between lexical, phonological and phonetic processes during language production. Studies of the phonetics of speech errors have provided evidence that partially activated lexical and phonological representations influence phonetic processing. We examine how these interactive effects are modulated…

Recent studies suggest that basic effects which are markers of visual word recognition in Indo-European languages cannot be obtained in Hebrew or in Arabic. Although Hebrew has an alphabetic writing system, just like English, French, or Spanish, a series of studies consistently suggested that simple form-orthographic priming, or…

Fodor and Pylyshyn [Fodor, J. A., & Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1988). Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis. "Cognition," 28, 3-71] argue that connectionist models are not able to display systematicity other than by implementing a classical symbol system. This claim entails that connectionism cannot compete with the classical…

An increasing number of results in sentence and discourse processing demonstrate that comprehension relies on rich pragmatic knowledge about real-world events, and that incoming words incrementally activate such knowledge. If so, then even outside of any larger context, nouns should activate knowledge of the generalized events that they denote or…

Work in experimental psycholinguistics has shown that the processing of coordinate structures is facilitated when the two conjuncts share the same syntactic structure [Frazier, L., Munn, A., & Clifton, C. (2000). "Processing coordinate structures." "Journal of Psycholinguistic Research," 29(4) 343-370]. In the present paper, we argue that this…

Wrap-up effects in reading have traditionally been thought to reflect increased processing associated with intra- and inter-clause integration (Just, M. A. & Carpenter, P. A. (1980). A theory of reading: From eye fixations to comprehension. "Psychological Review, 87"(4), 329-354; Rayner, K., Kambe, G., & Duffy, S. A. (2000). The effect of clause…

In the present visual-world experiment, participants were presented with visual displays that included a target item that was a semantic associate of an abstract or a concrete word. This manipulation allowed us to test a basic prediction derived from the qualitatively different representational framework that supports the view of different…

This study shows that sensory priming facilitates reports of same-modality concepts in an attentional blink paradigm. Participants had to detect and report two target words (T1 and T2) presented for 53 ms each among a series of nonwords distractors at a frequency of up to 19 items per second. SOA between target words was set to 53 ms or 213 ms,…

Recent work on the acquisition of number words has emphasized the importance of integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives [Musolino, J. (2004). The semantics and acquisition of number words: Integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives. "Cognition 93", 1-41; Papafragou, A., Musolino, J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: Scalar…