Studies monitoring eye-movements in scenes containing entities have provided robust evidence for incremental reference resolution processes. This paper addresses the less studied question of whether depicted event scenes can affect processes of incremental thematic role-assignment. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants inspected…

Two eye movement experiments explored the roles of verbal subcategorization possibilities and transitivity biases in the processing of heavy NP shift sentences in which the verb's direct object appears to the right of a post-verbal phrase. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences in which a prepositional phrase immediately followed the verb,…

Dijkstra and Van Heuven sketch the BIA+ model for visual word processing in bilinguals. BIA+ differs in a number of respects from its predecessor, BIA, the leading implemented model of bilingual visual word recognition. Notably, BIA+ contains a new processing component that deals with task demands. BIA+ has not been computationally implemented yet…

Four experiments support the hypothesis that syntactically relevant information about verbs is encoded in the lexicon in semantic event templates. A verb's event template represents the participants in an event described by the verb and the relations among the participants. The experiments show that lexical decision times are longer for verbs with…

The gap/gapless processing debate in the psycholinguistics literature contrasts two processing models: one that assumes the trace-based Government and Binding (or Principles and Parameters) Grammar and the (augmented) Active Filler Strategy and one that assumes the traceless Dependency Categorial Grammar and the Principle of Dependency Formation.…

To what extent does language acquisition recruit domain-general processing mechanisms? In this dissertation, evidence concerning this question is garnered from the study of individual differences in infant speech perception and their predictive value with respect to language development in early childhood. In the first experiment, variation in the…

Second language acquisition (SLA) researchers strive to understand the language and exchanges that learners generate in synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). Doughty and Long (2003) advocate replacing open-ended SCMC with task-based language teaching (TBLT) design principles. Since most task-based SCMC (TB-SCMC) research addresses an…

A previous explanation of the sex difference on so-called perceptual speed tests was in terms of a female advantage in accessing and using phonological name codes in making item comparisons. That explanation was extended to a task involving alphabetical transformations without the requirement for comparison of perceptually available items. A…

Investigations of language processing in aphasia have increasingly implicated performance factors such as slowed activation and/or rapid decay of linguistic information. This approach is supported by studies utilizing a communication system ("SentenceShaper"[TM]) which functions as a "processing prosthesis." The system may reduce the impact of…

In this paper we present the "grounded adaptive agent" computational framework for studying the emergence of communication and language. This modeling framework is based on simulations of population of cognitive agents that evolve linguistic capabilities by interacting with their social and physical environment (internal and external symbol…

Lexical tone languages make up the majority of all known languages of the world, but the role of tone in lexical processing remains unclear. In the present study, four form priming experiments examined the role of Mandarin tones in constraining lexical activation and the time course of the activation. When a prime and a target were related…

Three phoneme monitoring experiments examined the manner in which additional processing time influences spoken word recognition. Experiment 1a introduced a version of the phoneme monitoring paradigm in which a silent interval is inserted prior to the word-final target phoneme. Phoneme monitoring reaction time decreased as the silent interval…

We explore the hypothesis that induction of holistic or analytic strategies influences comprehension and processing of highly contextualized expressions of ordinary language, such as irony. Twenty undergraduate students were asked to categorize as coherent or incoherent a group of sentences. Each sentence completed a previous story, so that they…

The present study examines whether children reactivate a moved constituent at its gap position and how children's more limited working memory span affects the way they process filler-gap dependencies. 46 5-7 year-old children and 54 adult controls participated in a cross-modal picture priming experiment and underwent a standardized working memory…

This paper investigates the shared or independent nature of grammatical gender representations in the bilingual mental lexicon and the role word form similarity (as in the case of cognates) plays in these representations. In a translation task from Greek (L1) to German (L2), nouns that had the same gender in both languages were translated faster…