The study tested how the Recency Preference and Predicate Proximity model (Gibson et al. in Cognition 59(1):23-59, 1996, https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(88)90004-2) plays out by examining the attachment preferences of native Russian speakers when processing locally ambiguous participial relative clause sentences with three potential NP…

This study examined structural priming during online second language (L2) comprehension. In two self-paced reading experiments, 64 intermediate to advanced Chinese learners of English as a foreign language read coordinated noun phrases where the conjuncts had either the same structure or different structures. Experiment 1 showed that the second…

Legal language is characterized by its specialized lexicology, often formed through derivational processes such as affixation, nominalization, and semantic derivation, making legal texts more challenging to understand. This research examined how university students majoring in legal English linguistics recognize, interpret, and manage the…

Domain restriction is a pervasive if often neglected part of discourse comprehension. Speakers and authors implicitly limit the domain of discourse of quantifiers (e.g., "everyone") and noun phrases (e.g., "the girls"). Our previous research shows that an initial temporal or locative prepositional phrase (PP), which introduces…

We present computational modeling results based on a self-paced reading study investigating number attraction effects in Eastern Armenian. We implement three novel computational models of agreement attraction in a Bayesian framework and compare their predictive fit to the data using k-fold cross-validation. We find that our data are better…

Health translation has gotten considerable attention recently because language diversity in multilingual societies often leads to language barriers. The present study evaluates the linguistic comprehensibility of translations in the "Health Translations Website" from the Victorian Government of Australia using the patient-oriented and…

Previous developmental studies of conjunction have focused on the syntax of phrasal and sentential coordination (Lust, 1977; de Villiers, Tager-Flusberg & Hakuta, 1977; Bloom, Lahey, Hood, Lifter & Fiess, 1980, among others). The present study examined the flexibility of children's interpretation of conjunction. Specifically, when two…

The aim of the present work was to investigate the processing of coreferential relations, focusing on their relationship with the working memory. In a reading process, it is essential that readers continuously perform mental operations that involve the working memory, such as storing, retrieving, and manipulating information. For this reason, it…

Learning to paraphrase supports both writing ability and reading comprehension, particularly for less skilled learners. As such, educational tools that integrate automated evaluations of paraphrases can be used to provide timely feedback to enhance learner paraphrasing skills more efficiently and effectively. Paraphrase identification is a popular…

Some pronouns can refer to entities that vary widely in scope. In some cases, the referent might be a noun phrase, and in other cases it might be a whole proposition. In the cases of pronouns with a noun phrase antecedent, an already existing referent is reactivated from the preceding context. In the case of pronouns with a propositional…

We investigated whether readers use the low-level cue of proper noun capitalization in the parafovea to infer syntactic category, and whether this results in an early update of the representation of a sentence's syntactic structure. Participants read sentences containing either a subject relative or object relative clause, in which the relative…

Two experiments used eyetracking during reading to examine the processing of the matrix verb following object and subject relative clauses. The experiments show that the processing of the matrix verb following an object relative is indeed slowed compared to the processing of the same verb following a subject relative. However, this difficulty is…

This study aims to establish whether the processing of different connectives (e.g., "and," "but") and different coherence relations (addition, contrast) can be modulated by a structural feature of the connected segments--namely, parallelism. While "but" is mainly used to contrast two expressions, "and"…

There are numerous studies demonstrating facilitated processing of cognates relative to noncognates for bilinguals, providing evidence that bilingual lexical access is language nonselective. We tested whether cross-language activation affects comprehension of larger units of meaning, focusing specifically on comprehension of anaphoric references.…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to examine the development of past tense counterfactual (PTCF) sentences ("If the dog had stayed in the house, he would not have bitten the police officer") in young adolescents and young adults, addressing both production and comprehension. The goal was to determine if growth occurs during…