It has been reported that children's comprehension of complex structures is affected by temporary ambiguity. Yet, much less is known about its effect on children's comprehension of relative clauses (RCs). To fill this gap, the present study focused on Mandarin RCs, where temporary ambiguity often plays a role in the comprehension of…

Generic sentences such as "Birds lay eggs" are used frequently and effortlessly, but there is no simple quantitative rule that determines whether they are true or false. For instance, while "Birds lay eggs" is considered true, "Birds are female" is considered false, even though there are necessarily fewer birds that…

This article investigates how animacy in interaction with the syntactic function of a referent's antecedent determines the interpretation of different types of pronouns and demonstratives in German and Italian. The results of a sentence continuation task conducted in both languages show that Italian null pronouns and German p-pronouns have a…

Introduction: It is well documented that preschoolers with DLD produce first instances of sentential complement clause sentences later than same-age peers with typical language. However, it remains unknown whether children with DLD are limited in their production of a variety of sentential complement clause sentences. Aims: Using a sentence…

Eye-tracking studies tested the understanding of two types of speech acts (questions and assertions) in 14-, 18-, and 30-month-olds (N = 280; 149 females; ethnicity data collection forbidden, testing in 2021-2024). Experiments involved objects either hidden or visible for a speaker. By 14 months, when the speaker asked questions, infants focused…

It is well known that persons with aphasia (PWA) demonstrate deficits in sentence processing. Specifically, many show difficulties with syntactic re-analysis, or the ability to revise one's interpretation of a sentence due to a temporary ambiguity. Emerging evidence suggests that structural priming, individuals' tendency to unconsciously re-use a…

The present study aims at analysing the role of infinitival clauses (INFCs) in German child-adult dialogue. In German subject-less INFCs are a grammatical sentence pattern. Extensive corpora of spontaneous speech between 6 children aged 1;5 to 2;10 and adults were analysed applying structural and contextual analyses. We extended Freudenthal, Pine…

Writing is a complex activity requiring a wide range of skills. Sentence construction, a foundational writing skill, is necessary for paragraph and composition writing. Unfortunately, many current approaches to teaching writing place a priority on the product--focusing on teaching the process of writing lengthy pieces rather than providing…

This study investigated the effects of linear distance, agreement attraction, and working memory (WM) on the processing of English third-person singular subject-verb agreement by second language (L2) learners whose first language (L1) is Thai. Grounded in the Linear Distance Hypothesis (Gibson, 1998, 2000), the study hypothesized that linear…

Generative AIs such as Google Bard are known to be equipped with techniques and grammatical principles of human language based on a large corpus of text and code that allow them to generate natural-sounding language, and also identify and correct grammatical errors in human-written texts. Still, they are not perfect language generators, and this…

Segmentation is a cornerstone of language processing across levels of linguistic analysis, and yet, standard models of linguistic memory leave the role of higher-order segments in online comprehension understudied. This dissertation advances the Context-Sensitive Encoding (CSE) hypothesis: that implicit prosodic boundaries (Bader, 1998; J. Fodor,…

Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy-channel model: They integrate both the real-world plausibility of the meaning--the prior--and the likelihood that the intended sentence may be corrupted into the perceived sentence. In this study, we test the noisy-channel model in Mandarin Chinese, a…

People frequently struggle with comprehending the text they read and require more intensive support to develop proficiency in reading comprehension. Some find it perplexing observing all the elements and constituents of the paragraph theory. Good readers, however, can understand what a paragraph is by studying the conjunction relationships between…

What is the processing cost of being garden-pathed by a temporary syntactic ambiguity? We argue that comparing average reading times in garden-path versus non-garden-path sentences is not enough to answer this question. Trial-level contaminants such as inattention, the fact that garden pathing may occur non-deterministically in the ambiguous…

Reading can be regarded as a combination of lexical decoding and linguistic comprehension (Hoover and Gough in Read Writ Interdiscip J 2:127-160, 1990). In Chinese sentence reading, skilled readers' difficulties in phonological processing significantly enhance the 'wrap-up' effect (Li and Lin in J Deaf Stud Deaf Educ 25(4):505-516, 2020). To…