According to rational adaptation approaches of language processing, readers adjust their expectations of upcoming information depending on the distributional properties of the preceding language input. However, adaptation to sentence structures has not been systematically attested, especially not in second-language (L2) processing. To further our…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

Using Kuhn and McPartland's approach, 116 Chinese college students were recruited and asked to write as many sentences as possible beginning with "Chinese...," "Americans...," and "Japanese...." The population of sentences consisted of 258 adjectives, of which 96 described Chinese, 53 described Americans, and 109…