Alienable possessive constructions in Biakic stand out with respect to the South Halmahera-West New Guinea language family which they belong. This article investigates origins of innovative alienable forms Biakic, constitutes an example grammaticalization from predicative attributive possession. It describes marking possession for each four languages, examining form markers, their position poss...

We present the conditional probability calculator CCPC for predicting word-by-word processing difficulties in human sentence comprehension. This system, in conjunction with weighted grammars and the linking hypothesis Entropy Reduction (Hale, 2006), derives the subject-object asymmetry in Italian relative clauses, including the animacy effect of head nouns.

Based on a review of the neuroimaging literature, I argue that the resources allocated for processing syntactically complex sentences (i.e., object-extracted relative clauses) are domain-general. Overlapping brain areas are activated by OR clauses and by effortful executive tasks such as storing information in verbal working memory, resolving conflict among competing representations, and switch...

To investigate the relationship of functions that underlie the processing of complex sentences, we conducted a self-pacedreading experiment on single and multiple center embedded subjectand object-extracted relative clauses, accompanied by three tests to measure individual differences. Our data suggest that inhibition and executive functions are better predictors for individual differences in s...

Models of interference in sentence processing claim that object relative clauses are harder to process than subject relatives due to interference between the subject and object noun phrase. The interference effect for object relatives at the verb should be more pronounced when the two noun phrases retrieved from memory are similar. To test this, two eye tracking experiments manipulated whether ...