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…

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have language difficulties of unknown origin. Syntactic profiles are atypical, with poor performance on non-canonical structures, e.g. object relatives, suggesting a localized deficit. However, existing analyses using ANOVAs are problematic because they do not systematically address unequal…

A number of previous studies showed that comprehenders make use of lexically based constraints such as subcategorization frequency in processing structurally ambiguous sentences. One piece of such evidence is lexically specific syntactic priming in comprehension; following the costly processing of a temporarily ambiguous sentence, comprehenders…

Focusing on children's production of the dative alternation in English, we examine whether children's choices are influenced by the same factors that influence adults' choices, and whether, like adults, they are sensitive to multiple factors simultaneously. We do so by using mixed-effect regression models to analyse child and child-directed…

This study examines syntactic and morphological aspects of the production and comprehension of pronouns by 99 typically developing French-speaking children aged 3 years, 5 months to 6 years, 5 months. A fine structural analysis of subject, object, and reflexive clitics suggests that whereas the object clitic chain crosses the subject chain, the…

Two visual-world eye-movement experiments investigated the nature of syntactic priming during comprehension--specifically, whether the priming effects in ditransitive prepositional object (PO) and double object (DO) structures (e.g., "The wizard will send the poison to the prince/the prince the poison") are due to anticipation of structural…

This article investigates the information structure of verb-second (V2) declaratives in Swedish, German, and nonnative German. Even though almost any type of element can occur in the so-called prefield, the clause-initial preverbal position of V2 declaratives, we have found language-specific patterns in native-speaker corpora: The frequencies of…

We examine the time-course of semantic structure formation during real-time sentence comprehension. We do this through the lens of aspectual coercion, a semantic combinatorial operation that lacks morpho-syntactic reflections, yet is indispensable for sentence interpretation. We describe two experiments. Experiment 1 replicates the results of a…

Prepositional phrase attachment was investigated in temporarily ambiguous sentences. Both attachment site (noun phrase or verb phrase) and argument status (argument or adjunct) were manipulated to test the hypothesis that arguments are processed differently than adjuncts. Contrary to this hypothesis, some previous research suggested that arguments…

The degree to which native and non-native readers interpret English sentences incrementally was investigated by examining plausibility effects on reanalysis processes. Experiment 1 required participants to read sentences word by word and to make on-line plausibility judgements. The results showed that natives and non-natives immediately computed…

Investigated the source of agrammatic aphasic patients' difficulty comprehending semantically reversible sentences. Found approximately equal distributions of three distinct patterns. Results conflict with explanations of comprehension failure which state that a single pattern of performance on sentence structures characterizes comprehension of…