It is now a common practice to compare models of human language processing by predicting participant reactions (such as reading times) to corpora consisting of rich naturalistic linguistic materials. However, many of the corpora used in these studies are based on naturalistic text and thus do not contain many of the low-frequency syntactic constructions that are often required to distinguish pr...

Immediate effects of verb-specific syntactic (subcategorization) information were found in a cross-modal naming experiment, a self-paced reading experiment, and an experiment in which eye movements were monitored. In the reading studies, syntactic misanalysis effects in sentence complements (e.g., "The student forgot the solution was...") occurred at the verb in the complement (e.g., was) for m...

The interpretation of logical metonymies like begin the book has traditionally been explained by assuming the existence of complex lexical entries containing information about event knowledge (qualia roles: reading the book/writing the book). Qualia structure provides concrete constraints on interpretation, which are however too rigid to be cognitively plausible. We suggest generalized event kn...

Mental representations formed from words or phrases may vary considerably in their feature-based complexity. Modern theories of retrieval in sentence comprehension do not indicate how this variation and the role of encoding processes should influence memory performance. Here, memory retrieval in language comprehension is shown to be influenced by a target's representational complexity in terms ...

People have the capability to process text three times faster than they would naturally read it, yet many current theories of sentence processing rely on natural reading times as a proxy for processing difficulty. How can people read material so quickly in spite of information processing limitations suggested by sentence processing theories? One possibility is that surprisal effects on reading ...

To locate the underlying cause of biological gender errors of oral English pronouns by proficient Chinese-English learners, two self-paced reading experiments were conducted to explore whether the reading time for each 'he' or 'she' that matched its antecedent was shorter than that in the corresponding mismatch situation, as with native speakers of English. The critical manipulation was to see ...

Psycholinguistic and cognitive psychology studies involving self-paced reading (SPR) paradigm are usually carried out in conventional laboratory settings. This is mainly due to the need for accurate response time measurements in such experiments. This project explores the potentials and limitations of web-based SPR experiments. The existing timing component of WebExp2, an experiment generator, ...

Five experiments used self-paced reading time to examine the ways in which complex noun phrases (both conjoined NPs and possessive NPs) inuence the interpretation of referentially dependent expressions. The experimental conditions contrasted the reading of repeated names and pronouns referring to components of a complex NP and to the entire complex NP. The results indicate that the entity intr...

Recognizing the speech acts in our interlocutors’ utterances is a crucial prerequisite for conversation. However, it is not a trivial task given that the form and content of utterances is frequently underspecified for this level of meaning. In the present study we investigate participants’ competence in categorizing speech acts in such action-underspecific sentences and explore the time-course ...

In two self-paced, sentence-by-sentence reading experiments we examined the difference in the processing of Spanish discourses with repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns in emphatic and non-emphatic contexts. In Experiment 1, repeated names and overt pronouns caused a processing delay when they referred to salient antecedents in non-emphatic contexts. In Experiment 2, both processin...