Probabilistic expectations and memory limitations are central factors governing the real-time comprehension of natural language, but how the two factors interact remains poorly understood. One respect in which the two factors have come into theoretical conflict is the documentation of both "locality" effects, in which having more dependents…

We aimed to determine whether semantic relatedness between an incoming word and its preceding context can override expectations based on two types of stored knowledge: real-world knowledge about the specific events and states conveyed by a verb, and the verb's broader selection restrictions on the animacy of its argument. We recorded event-related…

When an elided constituent and its antecedent do not match syntactically, the presence of a word implying the non-actuality of the state of affairs described in the antecedent seems to improve the example. ("This information should be released but Gorbachev didn't." vs. "This information was released but Gorbachev didn't.") We model this effect in…

Three structural priming experiments investigated how monotransitive and intransitive structures are represented. Experiment 1 showed that priming from intransitives was stronger when the verb was the same in prime and target than when it was different, but monotransitive priming was unaffected by verb repetition. We argue that the activation of…

Previous work has suggested that the difficulty normally associated with processing an object-extracted relative clause (ORC) compared to a subject-extracted relative clause (SRC) is increased when the head noun phrase (NP1) is animate and the embedded noun phrase (NP2) is inanimate, compared to the reverse animacy configuration. Two eye-tracking…

Previous research suggests that English-speaking children comprehend agent-patient verb passives earlier than experiencer-theme verb passives (Maratsos, Fox, Becker, & Chalkley, 1985). We report three experiments examining whether such effects reflect delayed acquisition of the passive syntax or instead are an artifact of the experimental task,…

We investigate whether people might come to produce utterances that they regard as ungrammatical by examining the production of ungrammatical verb-construction combinations (e.g., "The dancer donates the soldier the apple") after exposure to both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. We contrast two accounts of how such production might take…

Two experiments addressed how novel verbs come to be represented in the auditory input lexicon, and how the inflected forms of such novel words are acquired and recognised. Participants were introduced to new spoken forms as uninflected verbs. These varied in whether they contained a final /d/ (e.g., "confald" or "confal"). Either immediately…

The present experiments demonstrate that children as young as five years old (M = 5:2) generalize beyond their input on the basis of minimal exposure to a novel argument structure construction. The novel construction that was used involved a non-English phrasal pattern: VN[subscript 1]N[subscript 2], paired with a novel abstract meaning:…

Several theoretical accounts have been proposed with respect to the issue how quickly the implicit causality verb bias affects the understanding of sentences such as "John beat Pete at the tennis match, because he had played very well". They can be considered as instances of two viewpoints: the focusing and the integration account. The focusing…

In the present study we analyze how the cognitive system deals on-line with number agreement mismatches and whether this on-line process influences the off-line interpretation of the sentence. In two ERP experiments we monitored the on-line processing consequences of subject-verb agreement mismatches, focusing on the integration of a following…

Time reference in Indo-European languages is marked on the verb. With tensed verb forms, the speaker can refer to the past (wrote, has written), present (writes, is writing) or future (will write). Reference to the past through verb morphology has been shown to be particularly vulnerable in agrammatic aphasia and both agrammatic and…

Intensional verbs like "want" select for clausal complements expressing propositions, though they can be perfectly natural when combined with a direct object. There are two interesting phenomena associated with intensional transitive expressions. First, it has been suggested that their interpretation requires enriched compositional operations,…

Research has shown that following a sentence fragment such as "John impressed Mary because...," people are most likely to refer to John, whereas following "John admired Mary because...," Mary is the preferred referent. Two written completion experiments investigated whether such semantic biases affect the choice of anaphor (pronouns vs. names).…

Constraint-based lexical models of language processing assume that readers resolve temporary ambiguities by relying on a variety of cues, including particular knowledge of how verbs combine with nouns. Previous experiments have demonstrated verb bias effects only in structurally complex sentences, and have been criticized on the grounds that such…