An eye movement study of temporarily ambiguous closure sentences confirmed that the early closure penalty in a sentence like "While John hunted the frightened deer escaped" is larger for a simple past verb ("hunted") than for a past progressive verb ("was hunting"). The results can be explained by the observation that simple past tense verbs…

In this longitudinal study, quantitative and qualitative changes in responses of people with aphasia were examined on a phonemic fluency task. Eighteen patients were tested at 3-month intervals on the letters F-A-S while they received comprehensive, intensive treatment from 3 to 12 months post-stroke. They returned for a follow-up evaluation at an…

Chinese inflection differs from that of European languages in that it is fully parsable in the orthography, which raises the possibility that Chinese inflected forms may not show the surface frequency effects found in other languages. Five lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine this issue. They showed that surface frequency did…

In a recent "Cognition" paper ("Cognition" 85 (2002) B21), Bornkessel, Schlesewsky, and Friederici report ERP data that they claim "show that online processing difficulties induced by word order variations in German cannot be attributed to the relative infrequency of the constructions in question, but rather appear to reflect the application of…

Research on language comprehension has focused on the resolution of syntactic ambiguities, and most studies have employed garden-path sentences to determine the system's preferences and to assess its use of nonsyntactic sources information. A topic that has been neglected is how syntactically challenging but essentially unambiguous sentences are…

The aim of this study was to determine whether Hebrew readers reference phonological information for the silent processing of unpointed Hebrew nouns. A research paradigm in which participants were required to perform consecutive same/different judgments regarding the identicalness of members of stimulus pairs was used for answering this question.…

Meaning activation was estimated during (standard naming) and after (delayed naming) target presentation to chart the time course of priming effects during reading comprehension. Using sentences biasing homographs toward their dominant and subordinate meanings, two experiments evaluated context effects across three naming-cue delays: immediate,…

The simultaneous presence in a learner's grammar of two features that should be mutually exclusive (optionality) typifies second language acquisition. But generative approaches have no good means of accommodating the phenomenon. The paper proposes one approach, based on Truscott and Sharwood Smith's (2004) MOGUL framework. In this framework,…

When asked to recall the words from a just-presented target list, subjects occasionally recall words that were not on the list. These intrusions either appeared on earlier lists (prior-list intrusions, or PLIs) or had not appeared over the course of the experiment (extra-list intrusions). The authors examined the factors that elicit PLIs in free…

This article evaluates 2 competing models that address the decision-making processes mediating word recognition and lexical decision performance: a hybrid 2-stage model of lexical decision performance and a random-walk model. In 2 experiments, nonword type and word frequency were manipulated across 2 contrasts (pseudohomophone-legal nonword and…

Automated essay grading or scoring systems are no more a myth, but they are a reality. As of today, the human written (not hand written) essays are corrected not only by examiners/teachers but also by machines. The TOEFL exam is one of the best examples of this application. The students' essays are evaluated both by human and web based automated…

Although the role of working memory in sentence comprehension has received substantial attention, the nature of this relationship remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to examine the interaction between general, nonverbal working memory (WM) and sentence parsing (SP) in normal English-speaking adults. Accuracy and reaction times were…

Although there is a strong link between the right hemisphere and understanding emotional prosody in speech, there are few data on how the right hemisphere is implicated for understanding the emotive "attitudes" of a speaker from prosody. This report describes two experiments which compared how listeners with and without focal right hemisphere…

Verbal fluency is a widely used neuropsychological paradigm. In fMRI implementations, conventional unpaced (self-paced) versions are suboptimal due to uncontrolled timing of responses, and overt responses carry the risk of motion artifact. We investigated the behavioral and neurofunctional effects of response pacing and overt speech in semantic…

Despite the importance of phonemic awareness in beginning literacy, several studies have demonstrated that adults, including teacher trainees, have surprisingly poor phonemic skills. Three experiments investigated whether adults' responses in phonemic awareness and spelling segmentation tasks are based on units larger than single letters and…