BACKGROUND A major problem patients encounter when reading about health related issues is document interpretation, which limits reading comprehension and therefore negatively impacts health care. Currently, searching for medical definitions from an external source is time consuming, distracting, and negatively impacts reading comprehension and memory of the material. METHODS SciReader was bui...

In human face-to-face communication, language comprehension is a multi-modal, situated activity. However, little is known about how we combine information from different modalities during comprehension, and how perceived communicative intentions, often signaled through visual signals, influence this process. We explored this question by simulating a multi-party communication context in which a ...

Evidence from 3 experiments reveals interference effects from structural relationships that are inconsistent with any grammatical parse of the perceived input. Processing disruption was observed when items occurring between a head and a dependent overlapped with either (or both) syntactic or semantic features of the dependent. Effects of syntactic interference occur in the earliest online measu...

Co-speech gestures are an integral part of human face-to-face communication, but little is known about how pragmatic factors influence our comprehension of those gestures. The present study investigates how different types of recipients process iconic gestures in a triadic communicative situation. Participants (N = 32) took on the role of one of two recipients in a triad and were presented with...

We investigated children's understanding of irony and sensitivity to irony's meanness and humor. In Study 1, 89 participants (5-6-year-olds, 8-9-year-olds, adults) heard ironic and literal criticisms, and literal compliments. Comprehension of irony emerged between 5 and 6 years of age. Ratings of humor increased with age; ratings of meanness did not (showing that all ages perceived irony as mor...

In human face-to-face communication, language comprehension is a multi-modal, situated activity. However, little is known about how we combine information from these different modalities, and how perceived communicative intentions, often signaled through visual signals, such as eye gaze, may influence this processing. We address this question by simulating a triadic communication context in whi...

We present a computational model of how partial comprehension of utterances in context may drive the acquisition of children’s earliest grammatical constructions. The model aims to satisfy convergent constraints from cognitive linguistics and crosslinguistic developmental evidence within a statistically driven computational framework. We examine how the tight coupling between contextually groun...