Words direct visual attention in infants, children, and adults, presumably by activating representations of referents that then direct attention to matching stimuli in the visual scene. Novel, unknown, words have also been shown to direct attention, likely via the activation of more general representations of naming events. To examine the critical…

Purpose: Many models of language comprehension assume that listeners predict the continuation of an incoming linguistic stimulus immediately after its onset, based on only partial linguistic and contextual information. Their related developmental models try to determine which cues (e.g., semantic or morphosyntactic) trigger such prediction, and to…

Purpose: This study examines online speech processing in typically developing and late-talking 2-year-old children, comparing both groups' word recognition, word prediction, and word learning. Method: English-acquiring U.S. children, from the "When to Worry" study of language and social--emotional development, were identified as typical…

Purpose: Our goal is to understand how the different types of plural marking are understood and processed by children with cochlear implants (CIs): (a) how does salience affect the processing of plural marking, (b) how is this processing affected by the incomplete signal provided by the CIs, and (c) is it linked to individual factors such as…

We aimed to tackle the question about the time course of plausibility effect in on-line processing of Chinese nouns in temporarily ambiguous structures, and whether L2ers can immediately use the plausibility information generated from classifier-noun associations in analyzing ambiguous structures. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to…

The ability to process plural marking of nouns is acquired early: at a very young age, children are able to understand if a noun represents one item or more than one. However, little is known about how the segmental characteristics of plural marking are used in this process. Using eye-tracking, we aim at understanding how five to twelve-year old…

Why do infants learn some words earlier than others? Many theories of early word learning focus on explaining how infants map labels onto concrete objects. However, words that are more abstract than object nouns, such as "uh-oh," "hi," "more," "up," and "all-gone," are typically among the first to…

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms…

Background: German is exceptional in its use of noun capitalisation. It has been suggested that sentence-internal capitalisation as in German may benefit processing by specifically marking a noun and thus a noun phrase (NP). However, other cues, such as a determiner, can also indicate an NP. The influence of capitalisation on processing may thus…

With the purpose of promoting academic inclusion, it is essential for educators to understand the nature underlying poor reading comprehension in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In this study, we examined the time course of anaphor resolution during text comprehension in children and adolescents with ASD and a group of children with…

We studied English-learning children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words from sentences containing truth-functional negation (Exp1) and to use the semantics of negation to inform word meaning (Exp2). In Exp1, 22-month-olds (n = 21) heard dialogues introducing a novel verb in either negative-transitive "("Mary didn't blick the…

Although a large literature demonstrates that object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) are harder to process than subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs), there is less agreement regarding where during processing this difficulty emerges, as well as how best to explain these effects. An eye-tracking study by Staub, Dillon, and Clifton (2017)…

Evidence from neuropsychological studies of individuals with brain damage post-stroke has supported the separation of working memory (WM) capacities for semantic (word meaning) and phonological (speech sound) information. These separate capacities have been shown to play different roles in supporting multiword language production, with semantic WM…

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months)…

Eye tracking and event-related potentials (ERPs) have complementary advantages in the study of reading processes. We used eye tracking to extend ERP evidence of Helder et al. (2020) that word-to-text integration at the beginnings and ends of sentences is primarily determined by local text factors (antecedents in a previous sentence) but that…