Overtensing (the use of an inflected form in place of a nonfinite form, e.g. *"didn't broke" for target "didn't break") is common in early syntax. In a ChiLDES-based study of 36 children acquiring English, I examine the effects of phonological and lexical factors. For irregulars, errors are more common with verbs of low frequency and when…

The contribution of the left inferior prefrontal cortex in semantic processing has been widely investigated in the last decade. Converging evidence from functional imaging studies shows that this region is involved in the "executive" or "controlled" aspects of semantic processing. In this study, we report a single case study of a patient, PW, with…

In this study, we use an auditory picture-word interference task to examine an anomic individual, NP. NP produced semantic errors in picture naming, but his comprehension was relatively well preserved. In the task, pictures to be named were accompanied by semantically, phonologically or unrelated distractors, presented at onsets ranging from…

Most naming treatments in aphasia either assume a phonological or semantic emphasis or a combination thereof. However, it is unclear whether semantic or phonological treatments recruit the same or different cortical areas in chronic aphasia. Employing three persons with aphasia, two of whom were non-fluent, the present study compared changes in…

This article examines the acquisition of Korean imperfective markers, the progressive "-ko iss-" and the resultative "-a iss-," with a view to understanding how tense/aspect morphology expands beyond prototype associations with inherent aspects of the verbs. We hypothesized that "-a iss-" will develop later than "-ko iss-," but that the…

The goal of this study was to examine the effect of the linguistic distance between a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) on neural activity during second language relative to first language processing. We compared different L1-L2 pairs in which different linguistic features characterize linguistic distance. Chinese and Korean native…

The ubiquitous left-hemisphere advantage in visual word processing can be accounted for in different ways. Competing theories have been tested recently using cAsE-aLtErNaTiNg words to investigate boundary conditions for the typical effect. We briefly summarize this research and examine the disagreements and commonalities across the theoretical…

The present research explores whether obtaining semantic negative priming from a single ignored word depends on whether that word is either consciously or unconsciously perceived. On each trial a prime word was briefly displayed and followed either immediately or after a delay by a pattern mask. The mask offset was followed by a probe display…

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,…