This study investigated whether Mandarin speakers interpret prosodic information as focus markers in a sentence-picture verification task. Previous production studies have shown that both Mandarin-speaking adults and Mandarin-speaking children mark focus by prosodic information (Ouyang and Kaiser in Lang Cogn Neurosc 30(1-2):57-72, 2014; Yang and…

Results from the present event-related potentials (ERP) study show that tones on Swedish word stems can rapidly pre-activate upcoming suffixes, even when the word stem does not carry any lexical meaning. Results also show that listeners are able to rapidly restore suffixes which are replaced with a cough. Accuracy in restoring suffixes correlated…

This study aims to investigate the effect of suprasegmental phonological training on connected-text reading comprehension of Chinese university students with different English reading proficiency levels. A sample of 160 freshmen was recruited and randomly divided into experimental and control groups, and the experimental group was given a 12-week…

The current study investigates preschool-age children's comprehension of scrambled sentences in Japanese. While scrambling has been known to be challenging for children, biasing them to exhibit non-adult-like interpretations (e.g., Hayashibe in "Descr Appl Linguist" 8:1-18, 1975; Sano in "Descr Appl Linguist" 10:213-233, 1977;…

The present study investigates the comprehension of syntactic and affective prosody in adults with autism spectrum disorder without accompanying cognitive deficits (ASD w/o cognitive deficits) as well as age-, education- and gender-matched unimpaired adults, while processing orally presented sentences. Two experiments were conducted: (a) an…

This study examines the effect of non-sentential context prosody pattern on lexical activation in Persian. For this purpose a questionnaire including target and non-target words is used. The target words are homographs with two possible stress patterns belonging to different syntactic categories. Participants are asked to read out the words aloud…

The ability to detect non-adjacent dependencies (i.e. between "a" and "b" in "aXb") in spoken input may support the acquisition of morpho-syntactic dependencies (e.g. "The princess 'is' kiss'ing' the frog"). Functional morphemes in morpho-syntactic dependencies are often marked by perceptual cues that render…

This paper discusses the influence of stationary (non-fluctuating) noise on processing and understanding of sentences, which vary in their syntactic complexity (with the factors canonicity, embedding, ambiguity). It presents data from two RT-studies with 44 participants testing processing of German sentences in silence and in noise. Results show a…

Two self paced listening experiments examined the role of prosodic phrasing in syntactic ambiguity resolution. In Experiment 1, the stimuli consisted of early closure sentences (e.g., "While the parents watched, the child sang a song.") containing transitive-biased subordinate verbs paired with plausible direct objects or intransitive-biased…

In Mandarin Chinese, word meaning is partially determined by lexical tone (Wang, 1973). Previous studies suggest that lexical tone is processed as linguistic information and not as pure tonal information (Gandour, 1998; Van Lanker & Fromkin, 1973). The current study explored the online processing of lexical tones. Event-related potentials were…