This study investigates how L2 learners of German (English L1) process structural and semantic information when reading German sentences. In a timed comprehension task, intermediate and advanced L2 learners of German read sentences that varied according to word order (subject-first versus object-first) and subject animacy (inanimate subject versus…

This study examined two issues: (a) whether there are gains in accurate and speedy comprehension of second language (L2) pragmatic meaning over time and (b) whether the gains are associated with cognitive processing ability and the amount of language contact in an L2 environment. Forty-four college students in a US institution completed three…

We used a cross-modal priming procedure to explore the processing of irregular and regular English verb forms in both monolinguals and bilinguals (Serbian-English, Chinese-English). Materials included irregular nested stem (drawn-DRAW), irregular change stem (ran-RUN), and regular past tense-present tense verb pairs that were either low…

The family size of the constituents of compound words, or the number of compounds sharing the constituents, affects English-speaking children's compound segmentation. This finding is consistent with a usage-based theory of language acquisition, whereby children learn abstract underlying linguistic structure through their experience with particular…

English sentences containing the universal quantifiers "each", "every", and "all" are highly complex structures in view of the subtleties of their scope properties and resulting ambiguities. This study explored the acquisition of universal quantifier sentences as reflected in the performance of three diverse college-level student groups on a…

In six analyses using the Child Language Data Exchange System known as CHILDES, we explored whether and how parents and their 1.5- to 5-year-old children talk about writing. Parent speech might include information about the similarity between print and speech and about the difference between writing and drawing. Parents could convey similarity…

Any person who has taught Spanish as a second language or who has interacted with a non-native speaker of Spanish can easily tell that mastering the correct use of the copulas "ser" and "estar" is very difficult in both spoken and written production. But L2 learners are not alone. The Spanish copulas also present difficulty and frustration for L2…

This paper tests two claims about the thematic roles Agent and Patient: first, that they can be decomposed into more primitive features, as laid out in Dowty's (1991) Proto-Roles Hypothesis; and second, that these properties can be inferred directly from the grammatical roles subject and object. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants rated the…

It has been shown that harmonic structure may influence the processing of phonemes whatever the extent of participants' musical expertise [Bigand, E., Tillmann, B., Poulin, B., D'Adamo, D. A., & Madurell, F. (2001). The effect of harmonic context on phoneme monitoring in vocal music. "Cognition," 81, B11-B20]. The present study goes a step further…

Processing language requires the retrieval of concepts from memory in response to an ongoing stream of information. This retrieval is facilitated if one can infer the gist of a sentence, conversation, or document and use that gist to predict related concepts and disambiguate words. This article analyzes the abstract computational problem…

Although advances in diffusion tensor imaging have enabled us to better study the anatomy of the inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF), its function remains poorly understood. Recently, it was suggested that the subcortical network subserving the language semantics could be constituted, in parallel with the inferior occipitofrontal fasciculus, by…

Through recording the streaming x- and y-coordinates of computer-mouse movements, we report evidence that visual context provides an immediate constraint on the resolution of syntactic ambiguity in the visual-world paradigm. This finding converges with previous eye-tracking results that support a constraint-based account of sentence processing, in…

Through the use of a new serial naming task, the authors investigated implicit learning of repeating sequences of abstract semantic categories. Participants named objects (e.g., table, shirt) appearing in random order. Unbeknownst to them, the semantic categories of the objects (e.g., furniture, clothing) followed a repeating sequence.…

The authors present a computational model that builds a holographic lexicon representing both word meaning and word order from unsupervised experience with natural language. The model uses simple convolution and superposition mechanisms to learn distributed holographic representations for words. The structure of the resulting lexicon can account…

Previous laterality studies have implicated the right hemisphere in the processing of metaphors, however it is not clear if this result is due to metaphoricity per se or another aspect of semantic processing. Three divided visual field experiments varied metaphorical and literal sentence familiarity. We found a right hemisphere advantage for…