Although sentences are thought to be generally easier to process when given information precedes new information, closer examination reveals that these preferences only manifest within some syntactic structures. Here, we examine the consequences of the relative ordering of given and new information ("information structure") for the on-line…

Linguistic dependencies between non-adjacent words have been shown to cause comprehension difficulty, compared with local dependencies. According to one class of sentence comprehension accounts, non-local dependencies are difficult because they require the retrieval of the first dependent from memory when the second dependent is encountered.…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

This paper reports the results of four dual-task experiments that were designed to determine the extent of domain-specificity of the verbal working memory resources used in linguistic integrations. To address this question, syntactic complexity was crossed in a 2x2 design with the complexity of a secondary task, which involved either (1)…

Proposes that the P600 component in event related potential research is not restricted to reanalysis processes, but reflects difficulty with syntactic integration processes in general. (Author/VWL)

Researchers have hypothesized that words that are highly related semantically are more likely to occur within the same intonational phrase (F. zzaq;, 1988; E. O. Selkirk, 1984). D. Watson and E. Gibson (2004) proposed that semantic closeness can be captured by using the argument/adjunct distinction, such that intonational boundaries are more…

Pickering and Barry's recent argument against the existence of empty categories (ECs) in human sentence processing is disputed. It is argued here that ECs may still play a linking role between thematic role assigners and wh-phrases. One possible parsing algorithm is given that accounts for Pickering and Barry's data. (28 references) (Author/LB)

Presents two questionnaire experiments that investigated the processing complexity of a variety of nested constructions in Japanese. The results are discussed in terms of the syntactic-prediction locality theory. (Author/VWL)

This paper reports the results of a dual-task experiment which investigates the nature of working memory resources used in sentence comprehension. Participants read sentences of varying syntactic complexity (containing subject-and object-extracted relative clauses) while remembering one or three nouns (similar to or dissimilar from the…

Provides new evidence from Spanish and English self-paced reading experiments on relative clause attachment sites. Suggests that a principle like Late Closure is universally operative in the human parser. Proposes that a second factor is the principle of Predicate Proximity. Discusses the origins and predictions of the theory combining these two…

This paper reports results from a self-paced reading study in Chinese that demonstrates that object-extracted relative clause structures are less complex than corresponding subject-extracted structures. These results contrast with results from processing other Subject-Verb-Object languages like English, in which object-extracted structures are…