The current study combined sentence plausibility judgment and self-paced reading tasks to examine the comprehension strategies and processing patterns of Chinese deaf individuals when comprehending written Chinese sentences with syntactic-semantic cue conflicts. Similar to findings from previous crosslinguistic studies on deaf readers, the Chinese…

Many bilinguals switch languages in daily-life conversations. Although this usually happens within sentence context and with another speaker, most research on the cognitive mechanisms underlying the production of language switches has studied individual words. Here, we examined how context influences both switching frequency and the temporal cost…

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,…

Listeners make use of contextual cues during continuous speech processing that help overcome the limitations of the acoustic input. These semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic cues facilitate prediction of upcoming words and/or reduce the lexical search space by inhibiting activation of contextually inappropriate words that share phonological…

There is substantial evidence that children's apparent omission of grammatical morphemes in utterances such as "She play tennis" and "Mummy eating" is in fact errors of commission in which contextually licensed unmarked forms encountered in the input are reproduced in a context-blind fashion. So how do children stop making such…

In the long history of psycholinguistic research on verifying negative sentences, an often-reported finding is that participants take longer to correctly judge negative sentences true than false, while being faster to judge their positive counterparts true (e.g. Clark & Chase, Cogn Psychol 3(3):472-517, 1972; Carpenter & Just, Psychol Rev…

Seminal studies on negation revealed that negative sentences are difficult to process, as they require an extra mental step. Similarly, at the discourse level, concession has been repeatedly shown to be more complex than other relations such as result because it implies the denial of an inference. The affinity between negation and concession…

This dissertation explores how items encountered in the comprehension of language are stored in memory and subsequently accessed. Processing and comprehending language frequently requires the retrieval of items in memory so that a current linguistic element can be assigned an interpretation. For example, in a sentence such as "Miles loved his…

The present study investigates the role of three structural factors ("word order," "case-marking," and "verbal morphology") in the comprehension of the Korean suffixal passive by Korean-speaking children. To measure the relative impact of each factor on the comprehension of the passive, we devise a novel method where…

Limited language experience in childhood is common among deaf individuals, which prior research has shown to lead to low levels of language processing. Although basic structures such as word order have been found to be resilient to conditions of sparse language input in early life, whether they are robust to conditions of extreme language delay is…

Natural languages contain systematic relationships between verb meaning and verb argument structure. Artificial language learning studies typically remove those relationships and instead pair verb meanings randomly with structures. Adult participants in such studies can detect statistical regularities associated with words in these languages and…

The study of word-to-text integration (WTI) provides a window on incremental processes that link the meaning of a word to the preceding text. We review a research program using event-related potential indicators of WTI at sentence beginnings, thus localizing sources of integration to prior text meaning independently of the current sentence. The…

This study aims to investigate adult L2 speakers' use of different types of information in the comprehension of pragmatic inferences by examining L1-Mandarin Chinese L2-English speakers' sensitivity to cues "all" and "any" in scalar implicature (SI) computation for "some." This article and our experimental setup does…

Previous studies using artificial languages suggest that sentence production can be guided by verb-specific as well as verb-general statistics present in the language input. Here we investigated whether the statistical properties of ongoing input in the speakers' native language systematically affected their sentence production. Three experiments…

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…