To understand a discourse the reader needs to recover the relations between the discourse elements as intended by the writer Writers can and very often do help the reader along by providing explicit lexical signals of the intended discourse relations through the use of lexicalised discourse markers In this paper we present a novel approach for generating texts containing multiple embedded rheto...

The complexity of eye-movement control during reading allows measurement of many dependent variables, the most prominent ones being fixation durations and their locations in words. In current practice, either variable may serve as dependent variable or covariate for the other in linear mixed models (LMMs) featuring also psycholinguistic covariates of word recognition and sentence comprehension....

Reading requires the orchestration of visual, attentional, language-related, and oculomotor processing constraints. This study replicates previous effects of frequency, predictability, and length of fixated words on fixation durations in natural reading and demonstrates new effects of these variables related to 144 sentences. Such evidence for distributed processing of words across fixation dur...

The modern study of language is guided by four principal questions. First, what is it that you know when you know a language? Language is a system of knowledge, and characterizing that system of knowledge in the mature adult speaker is the domain of linguistics. Second, how is that knowledge acquired? Language acquisition research and psycholinguistics concern themselves with the range of quest...

Gesticulation is the kind of unconscious, idiosyncratic and unconventional gestures humans do in conversation or narration. This chapter reviews efforts made to harness the expressiveness of gesticulation in virtual humans and proposes one such model. First, psycholinguistics research is overviewed so as to understand how gesticulation occurs in humans. Then, relevant computer graphics and comp...

Across the centuries, people have been fascinated with infants’ first words. This fascination is not a special characteristic of parents of young children, developmental psychologists or psycholinguistics. Instead, this fascination is widespread, and infants’ first words can serve as entry points to heated discussions of topics as far ranging as innate knowledge, the nature of intelligence, and...

UNLABELLED This study investigates whether the experience of stuttering can result from the speaker's anticipation of his words being misrecognized. Twelve adults who stutter (AWS) repeated single words into what appeared to be an automatic speech-recognition system. Following each iteration of each word, participants provided a self-rating of whether they stuttered on it and the computer then ...

Recent work in adult psycholinguistics has demonstrated that activation of semantic representations begins long before phonological processing is complete. This incremental propagation of information across multiple levels of analysis is a hallmark of adult language processing but how does this ability develop? In two experiments, we elicit measures of incremental activation of semantic represe...