Sarcasm, or sarcastic irony, involves expressing a message that is often opposite of the literal meaning of what is being said, in a way that may sound bitter, or caustic (Gibbs, 1986). In the past, sarcasm has been viewed as a method of introducing the possibility of alternative interpretations of a discourse, by creating ambiguity as to the…

Children look longer at a familiar object when presented with either correct pronunciations or small mispronunciations of consonants in the object's label, but not following larger mispronunciations. The current article examines whether children display a similar graded sensitivity to different degrees of mispronunciations of the vowels in…

We examined how age of acquisition in Spanish heritage speakers and L2 learners interacts with implicitness vs. explicitness of tasks in gender processing of canonical and non-canonical ending nouns. Twenty-three Spanish native speakers, 29 heritage speakers, and 33 proficiency-matched L2 learners completed three on-line spoken word recognition…

This article investigates whether and how L2 sentence processing is affected by memory constraints that force serial parsing. Monitoring eye movements, we test effects of working memory on L2 relative-clause attachment preferences in a sample of 75 late-adult German learners of English and 25 native English controls. Mixed linear regression…

We investigate the hypothesis that our conceptual systems provide two formally distinct ways of representing categories by investigating the manner in which lexical nominals (e.g., "tree," "picnic table") and phrasal nominals (e.g., "black bird," "birds that like rice") are interpreted. Four experiments found that lexical nominals may be mapped…

In this study we explore listeners' sensitivity to vowel to vowel (VV) coarticulation, using both event-related potential (ERP) and behavioral methodologies. The stimuli used were vowels "colored" by the coarticulatory influence of other vowels across one, three or five intervening segments. The paradigm used in the ERP portion of the study was…

Various theories of developmental language impairments have sought to explain these impairments in modality-specific ways--for example, that the language deficits in SLI or Down syndrome arise from impairments in auditory processing. Studies of signers with language impairments, especially those who are bilingual in a spoken language as well as a…

Over the past years functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has substantially contributed to the understanding of language and its neural correlates. In contrast to other imaging techniques, fNIRS is well suited to study language function in healthy and psychiatric populations due to its cheap and easy application in a quiet and natural…

Linguistics and Communication Disorders are considered two different disciplines by most students and scholars in both fields as well as by researchers working in other relevant fields such as psychology and education. However, most core disorders, disabilities and delays in communicative ability directly concern language, especially in…

This dissertation uses the processing of anaphoric relations to probe how linguistic information is encoded in and retrieved from memory during real-time sentence comprehension. More specifically, the dissertation attempts to resolve a tension between the demands of a linguistic processor implemented in a general-purpose cognitive architecture and…

So far, the comprehension and production language modes have typically been studied separately in generative second language acquisition research, with the focus shifting from one to the other. This article revisits the asymmetric relationship between comprehension and production by examining the second language (L2) acquisition of the noun phrase…

Investigating the neuronal network underlying language processing may contribute to a better understanding of how the brain masters this complex cognitive function with surprising ease and how language is acquired at a fast pace in infancy. Modern neuroimaging methods permit to visualize the evolvement and the function of the language network. The…

Syntactic structure has been considered an integral component of agreement computation in language production. In agreement error studies, clause-boundedness (Bock & Cutting, 1992) and hierarchical feature-passing (Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol, 2002) predict that local nouns within clausal modifiers should produce fewer errors than do those within…

This dissertation introduces and evaluates a new methodology for studying aspects of human language processing and the factors to which it is sensitive. It makes use of the phoneme restoration illusion (Warren, 1970). A small portion of a spoken sentence is replaced by a burst of noise. Listeners typically mentally restore the missing phoneme(s),…

Our understanding of the relationships between lexical and phonological development has been enhanced in recent years by increased interest in this area from language scientists, psychologists and phonologists. This review article provides a summary of research, highlighting similarities and differences across studies. It is suggested that the…