It is controversial whether mood affects cognition by triggering specific processing strategies or by limiting processing resources. The current event-related potential (ERP) study pursued this issue by examining how mood modulates the processing of task relevant/irrelevant information. In question-answer pairs, a question context marked a critical word in the answer sentence as focus (and thus...

We examined free recall and metacognitive judgments of ambiguous sentences studied with and without clues to facilitate their comprehension. Sentences were either studied without clues, with clues meaningfully embedded, or with clues following a 10-s interval delay. After presentation, subjects made judgments of comprehension (JCOMPs) or judgments of learning (JOLs). Puzzling over the meaning o...

In traditional theories of language comprehension, syntactic and semantic processing are inextricably linked. This assumption has been challenged by the 'semantic illusion effect' found in studies using event related brain potentials. Semantically anomalous sentences did not produce the expected increase in N400 amplitude but rather one in P600 amplitude. To explain these findings, complex mode...

We examined the comprehension of different types of conditionals. We measured the reading time of sentences primed by different types of conditionals (Experiments 1 and 2). We found that the participants read not-p and not-q faster when it was primed by the conditional form p if q and they were slower to read p and q when it was primed by the conditional form p only if q. This effect disappeare...

Behavioral syntactic priming effects during sentence comprehension are typically observed only if both the syntactic structure and lexical head are repeated. In contrast, during production syntactic priming occurs with structure repetition alone, but the effect is boosted by repetition of the lexical head. We used fMRI to investigate the neuronal correlates of syntactic priming and lexical boos...

Reaction time to detect a phoneme target in a sentence was found to be faster when the word in which the target occurred formed part of the semantic focus of the sentence. Focus was determined by asking a question before the sentence; that part of the sentence which comprised the answer to the sentence was assumed to be focussed. This procedure made it possible to vary position offocus within t...

Agreement features participate in several grammatical dependencies such as subject-verb agreement and antecedent-reflexive binding. We explore whether there is any stage of sentence processing in which a linear structure-independent feature matching process occurs, e.g., as a means of identifying candidate antecedents which are then subject to further structural and semantic evaluation. Three s...

An event-related fMRI paradigm was used to investigate brain activity during the reading of sentences containing either a lexically ambiguous word or an unambiguous control word. Higher levels of activation occurred during the reading of sentences containing a lexical ambiguity. Furthermore, the activated cortical network differed, depending on: (1) whether the sentence contained a balanced (i....

Preliminary experiments showed that 5"s better recall a noun pair if they generate their own linking sentence for the pair than if they merely read an equivalent linking sentence. Initial attempts to explain this effect in terms of memory search activities or idiosyncratically high-associative mediators proved unproductive in later experiments reported here. The hypothesis was then offered that...

This study examines structural priming in an on-line reading task that compares reading performance by first and second language readers of English. Robust effects for priming were evident for the second, but not first, language readers, suggesting that priming may occur where there are insufficient sentence traces in memory to support sentence interpretation. The empirical results are simulate...