All communication systems rely on sets of rules that must generally be followed for successful communication to be possible; in the case of human language, these rules are given by the grammar. However, despite these rules, there is considerable variation that has been noted across the grammar. In this dissertation, I explore one understudied…

Sentences that have more than one possible meaning are said to be syntactically ambiguous (SA). Because the correct interpretation of these sentences can be unclear, resolving SA sentences can be cognitively demanding for children, particularly with regards to inhibitory control (IC). In this study we provide three lines of evidence supporting the…

This article investigates how children acquire word order generalizations from ambiguous and infrequent input. We focus on verb placement in Norwegian relative and complement clauses. In two elicitation experiments we explore where children (age 3-7) place verbs in three embedded clauses types: one requiring a purely syntactic generalization and…

Temporarily ambiguous sentences that are disambiguated in favor of a less preferred parse are read more slowly than their unambiguous counterparts. This slowdown is referred to as a "garden path effect." Recent self-paced reading studies have found that this effect decreased over the course of the experiment as participants were exposed…

Understanding language requires readers and listeners to cull meaning from fast-unfolding messages that often contain conflicting cues pointing to incompatible ways of interpreting the input (e.g., "The cat was chased by the mouse"). This article reviews mounting evidence from multiple methods demonstrating that cognitive control plays…

Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it's been interpreted, which is…

Previous work has ostensibly shown that readers rapidly adapt to less predictable ambiguity resolutions after repeated exposure to unbalanced statistical input (e.g., a high number of reduced relative-clause garden-path sentences), and that these readers grow to disfavor the a priori more frequent (e.g. main verb) resolution after exposure (Fine,…

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…

Grammatical description of the sentence generation for the particular language is usually split into special morphological and Syntactical modules applied autonomously: the variance of morphological forms posed into the enumeration of constructional augmentations produces the enormous list of possible expositions of structural complexity paying no…

The study tested how the Recency Preference and Predicate Proximity model (Gibson et al. in Cognition 59(1):23-59, 1996, https://doi-org.bibliotheek.ehb.be/10.1016/0010-0277(88)90004-2) plays out by examining the attachment preferences of native Russian speakers when processing locally ambiguous participial relative clause sentences with three potential NP…

We aimed to tackle the question about the time course of plausibility effect in on-line processing of Chinese nouns in temporarily ambiguous structures, and whether L2ers can immediately use the plausibility information generated from classifier-noun associations in analyzing ambiguous structures. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to…

Situations of language contact are often the norm for sign languages. This article investigates a case of unimodal contact between Cena, a young sign language in its third generation that is used in a small rural community in Brazil, and Libras, the national sign language of Brazil. Our analysis concerns one by-product of this contact: reiterative…

The meaning of positive polar questions (PPQs) is relatively straightforward, so the truth conditions of PPQs can be decided easily. In contrast, the meaning of negative polar questions (NPQs) may vary, and simple yes-no answers to NPQs have seemingly unpredictable interpretations. For example, a simple yes answer to a PPQ like 'Did you have lunch…

The disambiguation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence in favor of a less preferred parse can lead to slower reading at the disambiguation point. This phenomenon, referred to as a garden-path effect, has motivated models in which readers initially maintain only a subset of the possible parses of the sentence, and subsequently require…

This study investigates children's identification of prosodic focus in Hungarian, a language in which syntactic focus-marking is mandatory. Assuming that regular syntactic focus-marking diminishes the disambiguating role of prosodic marking in acquisition, we expected that in sentences in which focus is only disambiguated by prosody, adult-like…