Recent studies have demonstrated that saccadic programming in reading is not only determined by low-level visual factors. High-level morphological effects on saccade have been shown in two morphologically rich languages. In the present study, we examined the underlying mechanism of such morphological influences by comparing the processes of…

While a large body of work in sentence comprehension has explored how different types of linguistic information are used to guide syntactic parsing, less is known about the effect of discourse structure. This study investigates this question, focusing on the main and subordinate discourse contrast manifested in the distinction between restrictive…

The integration of semantic information of compound words with context is a crucial aspect of reading comprehension. In two eye-tracking experiments, we used two-character and four-character Chinese lexicalized and novel compound words to investigate how Chinese readers integrate semantic information of compound words with contexts in the present…

It is well known that persons with aphasia (PWA) demonstrate deficits in sentence processing. Specifically, many show difficulties with syntactic re-analysis, or the ability to revise one's interpretation of a sentence due to a temporary ambiguity. Emerging evidence suggests that structural priming, individuals' tendency to unconsciously re-use a…

In Chinese reading, the possibility and mechanism of semantic parafoveal processing has been debated for a long time. To advance the topic, "semantic preview benefit" in Chinese reading was reexamined, with a specific focus on how it is affected by the semantic relatedness between preview and target words at the two-character word level.…

Rastle et al. (2004) reported that true (e.g., walker) and pseudo (e.g., corner) multi-morphemic words prime their stem words more than form controls do (e.g., brothel priming BROTH) in a masked priming lexical decision task. This data pattern has led a number of models to propose that both of the former word types are "decomposed" into…

This study examined how linguistic complexity features contribute to second language (L2) processing effort by analyzing the Dutch English-L2 learners' eye movements from GECO and MECO, two eye-tracking corpora. Processing effort was operationalized as reading rate, mean fixation duration, regression rate, skipping rate, and mean saccade…

Segmentation is a cornerstone of language processing across levels of linguistic analysis, and yet, standard models of linguistic memory leave the role of higher-order segments in online comprehension understudied. This dissertation advances the Context-Sensitive Encoding (CSE) hypothesis: that implicit prosodic boundaries (Bader, 1998; J. Fodor,…

Previous work on individual differences has revealed limitations in the ability of existing measures (e.g., working memory) to predict language processing. Recent evidence suggests that an individual's sensitivity to detect the statistical regularities present in language (i.e., "chunk sensitivity") may significantly modulate online…

Language comprehension requires a complex series of decisions under uncertainty. This is especially obvious when one string may have multiple different interpretations, whether due to lexical ambiguity, or the potential for an inference beyond literal content. This dissertation profiles how the human system for language comprehension times those…

It has been well documented that formulaic language (such as collocations; e.g., "provide information") enjoys a processing advantage over novel language (e.g., "compare information"). In natural language use, however, many formulaic sequences are often inserted with words intervening in between the individual constituents…

The relative importance of phonological versus morphological processes in reading varies depending on the writing system's orthographic consistency and morphological complexity. This study investigated the interplay between phonology and morphology in Hebrew reading acquisition, a language offering a unique opportunity for such examination with…

Idioms entail a competition between bottom-up and top-down activations of literal and figurative meanings. The present study explored the involvement of cognitive control in processing Hebrew ambiguous idioms. Fifty subjects have completed a self-paced reading task and a response inhibition, stop-signal task (SST). Subjects read 26 matched pairs…

Reading is a fascinating cognitive process through which individuals perceive arbitrary symbols on a page and turn them into vivid mental representations of text. Most available evidence supports an embodied explanation for how readers are capable of such representations--they recruit supralinguistic brain regions in order to mentally simulate the…

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…