The present study investigated oscillatory brain dynamics during self-paced sentence-level processing. Participants read fully correct sentences, sentences containing a semantic violation and "sentences" in which the order of the words was randomized. At the target word level, fixations on semantically unrelated words elicited a lower-beta band (13-18 Hz) desynchronization. At the sentence leve...

This study investigated how knowledge of causality representations affects the reading in Japanese. In Experiment 1, 24 participants read events presented in cause-to-effect or effect-to-cause order without causal conjunctions. The latter received longer reading times and more regressions than the former even when probability and predictability were balanced. Experiment 2 examined whether this ...

Grouping words into meaningful chunks is a fundamental process for fluent reading. The present study is an attempt to understand the relationship between chunking and second language (L2) reading fluency. The effects of text segmentation on comprehension, rate, and regression in L2 reading were investigated using a self-paced reading task in a moving-window condition. The participants were inte...

The entropy-reduction hypothesis claims that the cognitive processing difficulty on a word in sentence context is determined by the word's effect on the uncertainty about the sentence. Here, this hypothesis is tested more thoroughly than has been done before, using a recurrent neural network for estimating entropy and self-paced reading for obtaining measures of cognitive processing load. Resul...

A mechanism of predictions for language implies that the parser has to build up potential upcoming continuations and then evaluate them given the evidence. We show that the difficulty produced by the mismatch between the actual continuation and the predictions is modulated by cognitive control as measured by a modification of the Stroop task. We ran a self-paced reading task in German using a p...

We outline four ways in which uncertainty might affect comprehension difficulty in human sentence processing. These four hypotheses motivate a self-paced reading experiment, in which we used verb subcategorization distributions to manipulate the uncertainty over the next step in the syntactic derivation (single step entropy) and the surprisal of the verb’s complement. We additionally estimate w...

The current paper presents a self-paced reading experiment investigating the processing time-course of unfamiliar metonymy relying on context that is either permanent (such as Producer-for-product metonymy) or circumstantial (i.e. Reference Transfer). Reading Time results for both metonymy types show significant differences from a Nonsensical control condition, but do not show significant diffe...

In the present study, self-paced reading and event-related potential experiments were conducted to explore the roles commas play in reading complex sentences in Japanese, a language in which punctuation rules are less strictly imposed. The results strongly indicated that commas could immediately activate a complex-sentence structure and affect the processing of the following inputs; however, th...