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…

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…

Prediction is one characteristic of the human mind. But what does it mean to say the mind is a "prediction machine" and "inherently forward looking" as is frequently claimed? In natural languages, many contexts are not easily predictable in a forward fashion. In English, for example, many frequent verbs do not carry unique…

This paper is part 5 of a series of workshops that examines the properties of some simple models of vocabulary networks. While previous workshops dealt with activating words in the network, this workshop focuses on vocabulary loss. We will simulate two possible ways of modelling attrition: (a) explicitly turning active words OFF, and (b) raising…

Comprehenders generate expectations about upcoming lexical items in language processing using various types of contextual information. However, a number of studies have shown that argument roles do not impact neural and behavioral prediction measures. Despite these robust findings, some prior studies have suggested that lexical prediction might be…

Recent studies in the second language acquisition of negation have focused on polarity items and their licensing contexts. Although several studies show a correlation between higher degrees of second language (L2) proficiency and the acquisition of the target L2 structures, less attention has been given to the relation between the acquisition of…

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms…

This study examines effects of memory load on the processing of scalar implicature via a dual-task paradigm using reading span and self-paced reading. Results indicate that participants showed online sensitivity to underinformative sentences (e.g., "Some birds have wings and beaks") at the end of the sentence. This online sensitivity…

Informally speaking, presuppositions are meaning components which are part of the common ground for speakers in a conversation, that is, background information which is taken for granted by interlocutors. The current literature suggests an immediate processing of presuppositions, starting directly on the word triggering the presupposition. In the…

This study investigated second language learners' processing of ambiguous words (e.g., "bank": [1] a financial institution, [2] an edge of a river/lake) and whether these learners are able to activate the secondary meaning as quickly as they do with the dominant meaning. English L2 and L1 participants used a window paradigm to perform a…

Informed by a theoretical model of satirical uptake, this study investigated processing behavior and comprehension of satirical news articles. Reading times for segments of minimally different satirical and non-satirical texts were collected using within-subjects (Experiment 1) and between-subjects (Experiment 2) designs. Segment reading times and…

This study examined how Chinese native speakers (NSs) and second language (L2) learners process compound words. The findings showed that they used the hybrid model of coexistence for whole word and morphemes; and were influenced by word frequency, semantic transparency, and word structure. The results revealed that two groups of participants used…

This study investigates the interpretation of object-initial sentences in German-speaking children. We addressed the following questions: (1) Which morphosyntactic cues do children deploy to process object-initial sentences? (2) Which executive function (EF) abilities support them during this task? This study examined the effect of case and number…

Since corpus linguistics gained popularity as a methodology in the latter half of the 20th century, second language acquisition research has seen the emergence of work investigating formulaic language, such as idioms, lexical bundles, and collocations. A collocation is a string of words that co-occur more routinely than probability would predict,…