Ninety-two subjects solved a series of problems without enough time to finish and worked either at a pace and in an order determined by the experimenter (experimenter-paced) or at their own pace and order under self-administered time deadlines (self-paced). Self-pacing resulted in superior performance on rote and poorer performance on cognitive problems relative to experimenter-paced groups. Se...

This study investigates the degree to which referential context information influences structural ambiguity resolution preferences in non-native sentence comprehension, using both an off-line questionnaire and an on-line self-paced reading task. The critical target sentences contained prepositional phrases (PPs) modifying either the verb phrase (VP) or the preceding noun phrase (NP), as in Bill...

Verbs like begin and enjoy have been assumed to select for events and would coerce an entity-denoting complement to an event in semantic representation; such type-shifting operation engenders additional processing cost. However, recent studies show that this effect is observable only for aspectual verbs (e.g. begin), but not psychological verbs (e.g. enjoy), suggesting the set of “coercion verb...

In the processing of subject-verb agreement, non-subject plural nouns following a singular subject sometimes "attract" the agreement with the verb, despite not being grammatically licensed to do so. This phenomenon generates agreement errors in production and an increased tendency to fail to notice such errors in comprehension, thereby providing a window into the representation of grammatical n...

Multi-task learning is a paradigm, where multiple tasks are jointly learnt. Previous multi-task learning models usually treat all tasks and instances per task equally during learning. Inspired by the fact that humans often learn from easy concepts to hard ones in the cognitive process, in this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning framework that attempts to learn the tasks by simultaneo...

It is currently unclear how effective un-medicated, self-paced alcohol withdrawal is in reducing alcohol consumption in alcohol dependent clients. To address this question, the current study examined the reduction in alcohol consumption, assessed by breath alcohol and drink diary self-report, of 405 alcohol-dependent clients over a 10-day, un-medicated, self-paced alcohol reduction program that...

This paper investigates, in English, the widely reported mismatch asymmetry, or plural attraction production of subject-verb agreement and relatively less observed reversed singular comprehension. Through a self-paced reading experiment, read-aloud task pen-and-paper questionnaire, we examined whether is genuine effect comprehension it could be due to experimental materials few studies that it....

The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis links production strategies with comprehension processes, predicting that speakers will utilize flexibility in encoding in order to increase uniformity in the rate of information transmission, as measured by surprisal (Jaeger, 2010). Evidence in support of UID comes primarily from studies focusing on word-level effects, e.g. demonstrating that su...