This paper presents results from a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese investigating attachment preferences for relative clauses to three ensuing potential nominal heads. Similar to previous results from the processing of English, Spanish and German, we observed the following non-monotonic preference ordering among the three attachment sites: most local, least local, intermediate. We disc...

This paper explores how verb meanings that differ in semantic complexity are processed and represented. In particular, we compare eventive verbs, which denote causally structured events, with stative verbs, which denote facts without causal structure. We predicted that the conceptually more complex eventive verbs should take longer to process than stative verbs. Two experiments, a lexical decis...

A study combining artificial grammar and sentence comprehension methods investigated the learning and online use of probabilistic, nonadjacent combinatorial constraints. Participants learned a small artificial language describing cartoon monsters acting on objects. Self-paced reading of sentences in the artificial language revealed comprehenders' sensitivity to nonadjacent combinatorial constra...

The results of several self-paced reading and eye-tracking studies (e.g., Pickering and Traxler, 2003) have been interpreted to suggest that readers do not use verb subcategorization preference as an early means for completing unbounded dependencies. Subsequent papers (e.g., Arai and Keller, 2013) have hypothesized that this finding may actually be due to the frequency of larger syntactic confi...

Readers differ considerably in their speed of self-paced reading. One factor known to influence fixation durations in reading is the preprocessing of words in parafoveal vision. Here we investigated whether individual differences in reading speed or the amount of information extracted from upcoming words (the preview benefit) can be explained by basic differences in extrafoveal vision--i.e., th...

This paper presents a simple self-paced motor imagery based brain-computer interface (BCI) to control a robotic wheelchair. An innovative control protocol is proposed to enable a 2-class self-paced BCI for wheelchair control, in which the user makes path planning and fully controls the wheelchair except for the automatic obstacle avoidance based on a laser range finder when necessary. In order ...

Object relative clauses (as in 1b) are more difficult to process than subject relative clauses (1a) (King and Just, 1991). Dependency Locality Theory (DLT; Gibson, 2000) accounts for this effect in terms of long-distance dependencies: The integration cost at in (1a) is lower than at in (1b) because just one argument () needs to be integrated in (1a), whereas in (1b), two arguments (chairman and...

In the present study we report two self-paced reading experiments that investigate antecedent retrieval processes in sentence comprehension by contrasting the real-time processing behavior of two different reflexive anaphors in Mandarin Chinese. Previous work has suggested that comprehenders initially evaluate the fit between the morphologically simple long-distance reflexive "ziji" and the clo...

Mixture of regressions (MoR) is the wellestablished and effective approach to model discontinuous and heterogeneous data in regression problems. Existing MoR approaches assume smooth joint distribution for its good anlaytic properties. However, such assumption makes existing MoR very sensitive to intra-component outliers (the noisy training data residing in certain components) and the inter-com...