In two self-paced reading experiments, subject relative clauses (e.g., 'the woman who saw the man') were read faster than object relative clauses ('the woman who the man saw') in Japanese. Previous formulations of working-memory factors do not predict the patterns observed. A preference to complete fragments as object relative clauses indicates that ambiguity and expectation are unlikely to exp...

This study uses a moving windows self-paced reading task to assess both text comprehension and processing time of authentic texts and these same texts simplified to beginning and intermediate levels. Forty-eight second language learners each read 9 texts (3 different authentic, beginning, and intermediate level texts). Repeated measures ANOVAs reported linear effects of text type on reading tim...

Reading is an essential skill for functioning in modern society, fundamental to achievement and success. Yet, an alarming proportion of students have significant difficulties with reading. Research indicates that computer assisted instruction (CAI) can provide an effective educational tool to help poor readers. This case study investigates the effectiveness of a CAI reading tutorial in helping ...

This paper presents the results of a sentence completion study and a self-paced reading experiment involving a relative clause attachment ambiguity. Our results provide evidence that comprehenders resolve local structural ambiguity during incremental sentence processing by combining expectations about upcoming discourse continuations with their knowledge of typical relationships between event p...

We report the results of one acceptability rating study and two self-paced reading studies on form-meaning mismatch in interpretation past-under-past complement clauses English. Across three experiments, we find an off-line on-line preference for backward-shifted interpretation, line with predictions structural approach to ambiguity when assuming a processing morphological transparent interpret...

In order to assess the role of visual, lexical, and contextual information on word identification during Korean sentence reading, a self-paced reading experiment was conducted. It was found, in regard to word length variables, that the number of syllables and the number of visual features affected reading times significantly, but the other sub-lexical units (i.e., phonemes and letters) did not....

This article examines the role of mode of acquisition (MoA) of word meanings in reading comprehension: children acquire word meanings using perceptual information (e.g., hearing, seeing, or smelling the referent) and/or linguistic information (e.g., verbal explanations). A total of 72 deaf and 99 hearing children between 7 and 15 years of age performed a self-paced reading task. Comprehension s...

This study investigated deaf adolescents' implicit and explicit awareness of subject-verb number agreement. In Experiment 1, a self-paced reading task, the reading times of deaf and hearing children (matched for reading and chronological age, mean=8;3 and 13;10 years) increased when sentences contained disagreeing subject-verb number markers. However, deaf adolescents' slowing occurred later in...

This paper investigates factors which contribute to the complexity of English sentences with long-distance dependencies. Two hypotheses were compared: (1) increased referential processing between the endpoints of a dependency increases processing difficulty at the completion of the dependency (Gibson, 1998, 2000; Warren & Gibson, 2002) and (2) increased similarity between NPs awaiting role-assi...