Do the cognitive benefits of "interleaving"--the method of alternating between two or more skills or concepts during training--extend to foreign language learning? In four experiments, we investigated the efficacy of interleaved versus conventional blocked practice for teaching adult learners to conjugate Spanish verbs in the…

Previous evidence suggests that grammatical constraints have a rapid influence during language comprehension, particularly at the level of word categories (noun, verb, preposition). These findings are in conflict with a recent study from Angele, Laishley, Rayner, and Liversedge (2014), in which sentential fit had no early influence on word…

Previous analyses of the Spanish deictic verbs "venir" "to come", "ir" "to go", traer "to bring" and "llevar" "to take" have drawn upon Fillmore's (1975) series of lectures on deixis in noting that speakers of Spanish forbid the use of the verbs "venir" and…

Syntactic priming occurs when structural information from one sentence influences processing of a subsequently encountered sentence (Bock, 1986; Ledoux et al., 2007). This article reports 2 eye-tracking experiments investigating the effects of a prime sentence on the processing of a target sentence that shared aspects of syntactic form. The…

One of the central questions in speech production is how speakers decide which entity to assign to which grammatical function. According to the lexical hypothesis (e.g., Bock & Levelt, 1994), verbs play a key role in this process (e.g., "send" and "receive" result in different entities being assigned to the subject…

Taking up analytical issues raised primarily in Dixon (2000) and Dixon & Aikhenvald (2000), this dissertation combines descriptive work with a medium-sized (50-language) typological study. Chapter 1 situates the dissertation against a concise survey of typological-functional work on causative constructions from the last few decades, and…