Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy-channel model: They integrate both the real-world plausibility of the meaning--the prior--and the likelihood that the intended sentence may be corrupted into the perceived sentence. In this study, we test the noisy-channel model in Mandarin Chinese, a…

Subject-verb agreement errors are common in sentence production. Many studies have used experimental paradigms targeting the production of subject-verb agreement from a sentence preamble ("The key to the cabinets") and eliciting verb errors (… "*were shiny"). Through reanalysis of previous data (50 experiments; 102,369…

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)…

We investigate the processing of "wh" questions in Niuean, a VSO ergative-absolutive Polynesian language. We use visual-world eye tracking to examine how preference for subject or object dependencies is affected (a) by case marking of the subject (ergative vs. absolutive) and object (absolutive vs. oblique), and (b) by the transitivity…

We present a self-organizing approach to sentence processing that sheds new light on notional plurality effects in agreement attraction, using pseudopartitive subject noun phrases (e.g., "a bottle of pills"). We first show that notional plurality ratings (numerosity judgments for subject noun phrases) predict verb agreement choices in…

Children have difficulty comprehending novel verbs in the double object dative (e.g., "Fred blicked the dog a stick") as compared to the prepositional dative (e.g., "Fred blicked a stick to the dog"). We explored this pattern with 3 and 4 year olds (N = 60). In Experiment 1, we replicated the documented difficulty with the…