Dynamical models of sentence processing

Manuscript Information Sheet Title: Dynamical Models of Sentence Processing

Sentence Processing Among Native vs. Nonnative Speakers: Implications for Critical Period Hypothesis

The present study intended to investigate the processing behavior of 2 groups of L2 learners of English (high and mid in proficiency) and a group of English native speakers on English active and passive reduced relative clauses. Three sets of tasks, an offline task, and 2 online tasks were conducted. Results revealed that the high-proficiency group’s performance was the same as that of the nati...

Do Heavy-NP Shift Phenomenon and Constituent Ordering in English Cause Sentence Processing Difficulty for EFL Learners?

Heavy-NP shift occurs when speakers prefer placing lengthy or “heavy” noun phrase direct objects in the clause-final position within a sentence rather than in the post-verbal position. Two experiments were conducted in this study, and their results suggested that having a long noun phrase affected the ordering of constituents (the noun phrase and prepositional phrase) by advanced Iranian EFL le...

The Psychological Reality of Local Coherences in Sentence Processing

Dynamical systems of language processing predict that sentence processing complexity is not only a function of the globally coherent structure ranging from the beginning of the sentence to its current point of processing, but also a function of locally coherent sub-parses. This paper presents an experiment that tests whether locally coherent, yet globally false continuations affect on-line anom...

Canonicity Effect on Sentence Processing of Persian-speaking Broca’s Patients

Introduction: Fundamental notions of mapping hypothesis and canonicity were scrutinized in Persian-speaking aphasics.  Methods: To this end, the performance of four age-, education-, and gender matched Persian-speaking Broca's patients and eight matched healthy controls in diverse complex structures were compared via the conduction of two tasks of syntactic comprehension and grammaticality jud...