Gibson's Dependency Locality Theory (DLT) [Gibson, E. 1998. "Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies." "Cognition," 68, 1-76; Gibson, E. 2000. "The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity." In A. Marantz, Y. Miyashita, & W. O'Neil (Eds.), "Image,…

Participant's eye-movements were recorded while they read locally ambiguous sentences. Evidence for processing difficulty was found when the interpretation of the initially preferred misanalysis clashed with that of the globally correct analysis, demonstrating the persistence of the earlier interpretation. Processing difficulty associated with the…

K. Rayner, A. Pollatsek, D. Drieghe, T. J. Slattery, and E. D. Reichle argued that the R. Kliegl, A. Nuthmann, and R. Engbert corpus-analytic evidence for distributed processing during reading should not be accepted because (a) there might be problems of multicollinearity, (b) the distinction between content and function words and the skipping…

Noun-noun combinations like "dog scarf" are common in everyday discourse but often have more than one interpretation. How do language users arrive at an interpretation of the relationship between the two nouns? This paper reports three expression-picture matching experiments that used a priming paradigm to investigate the influence of modifier and…

This study investigates brain responses to violations of information structure in wh-question-answer pairs, with particular emphasis on violations of focus assignment in it-clefts (It was the queen that silenced the banker). Two types of ERP responses in answers to wh-questions were found. First, all words in the focus-marking (cleft) position…

Two experiments explored the representational basis for anticipatory eye movements. Participants heard "the man will drink ..." or "the man has drunk ..." (Experiment 1) or "the man will drink all of ..." or "the man has drunk all of ..." (Experiment 2). They viewed a concurrent scene depicting a full glass of beer and an empty wine glass (amongst…

This article reviews the role of relevance in text processing. It argues that relevance instructions provided by instructors and texts help readers identify text segments that are germane to a reading goal. A taxonomy of relevance instructions is presented and four basic types of relevance manipulations are considered (i.e., targeted segments,…

Theories of spoken word production generally assume a distinction between at least two types of phonological processes and representations: lexical phonological processes that recover relatively arbitrary aspects of word forms from long-term memory and post-lexical phonological processes that specify the predictable aspects of phonological…

To what extent do bilinguals have a single, integrated representation of syntactic information? According to Hartsuiker et al. (2004) [Hartsuiker, R. J., Pickering, M. J., & Veltkamp, E. (2004). "Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish-English bilinguals." "Psychological Science," 15,…

An unresolved issue in the study of sentence comprehension is whether the process of gap-filling is mediated by the construction of empty categories (traces), or whether the parser relates fillers directly to the associated verb's argument structure. We conducted an event-related potentials (ERP) study that used the violation paradigm to examine…

Three experiments examined disambiguation effect, the attachment of novel nouns to unfamiliar objects, and the effect of preexposure to similar sounding words in 2-year olds. Preexposure was found to alter subjects' disambiguation of novel nouns, attesting to the importance of phonological working memory in toddlers' decisions about the likely…

The sentence The secretary began the memo requires specifying what event the secretary began, because the memo does not refer to an event. McElree, Traxler, Pickering, Seely, and Jackendoff (2001) and Traxler, Pickering, and McElree (2002) found evidence from both self-paced reading and eye-tracking that such sentences caused processing…

Much experimental work in psycholinguistics suggests that fully specified syntactic and semantic interpretations are obtained incrementally. The finding that interpretation takes place incrementally is very robust and underlies our own view of sentence processing as well; however, most of this work tends to test very simple interpretive judgments…

It has been claimed that the typical RVF/LH advantage for word recognition is reduced or eliminated for imageable, as compared to nonimageable, nouns. To determine whether such word-class effects vary depending on the stimulus list context in which the words are presented, we varied the proportion of high- and low-image words presented in a…

Similarity between component speech sounds influences language processing in numerous ways. Explanation and detailed prediction of linguistic performance consequently requires an understanding of these basic similarities. The research reported in this paper contrasts two broad classes of approach to the issue of phoneme similarity-theoretically…