Conference interpreters form a special case of language users because the simultaneous interpretation practice requires very specific lexical processing. Word comprehension and production in respective languages is performed under strict time constraints and requires constant activation of the involved languages. The present experiment aimed at…

The goal of this dissertation is to investigate the real-time sentence processing of Korean both by native speakers and learners in terms of the availability and the effectiveness of different types of information in the structural prediction. Built on the crosslinguistically contrastive findings between Japanese in Yoshida (2006) and Chinese in…

The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of Socio-Economic Status (SES) on Hebrew-speaking children's developing ability to pluralize nouns and mark adjectives in agreement with them. Participants were 180 gradeschool children from mid-high SES and 180 peers from low SES, in six consecutive grade levels. The task consisted of 32…

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…

Although previous research has shown a processing facilitation for conjoined phrases that share the same structure, it is currently not clear whether this parallelism advantage is specific to particular syntactic environments such as coordination, or whether it is an example of more general effect in sentence comprehension. Here, we report three…

The study of the neural basis of syntactic processing has greatly benefited from neuroimaging techniques. Research on syntactic processing in bilinguals has used a variety of techniques, including mainly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potentials (ERP). This paper reports on a functional near-infrared spectroscopy…

In order to identify the causes of inflectional variability in adult second-language (L2) acquisition, this study investigates lexical and syntactic aspects of gender processing in real-time L2 production and comprehension. Twenty advanced to near-native adult first language (L1) English speakers of L2 German and 20 native controls were tested in…

In this study, the influence of plausibility information on the real-time processing of locally ambiguous ("garden path") sentences in a nonnative language is investigated. Using self-paced reading, we examined how advanced Greek-speaking learners of English and native speaker controls read sentences containing temporary subject-object…

This study examines whether adult second language (L2) learners of an ungendered first language (L1) are sensitive to gender congruency (grammatical feature absent in the L1) and noun animacy (semantic feature present in the L1) when processing L2 gender concord and whether L2 proficiency level determines such sensitivity. To address these…

In this brief rejoinder, we respond to Farmer, Monaghan, Misyak, and Christiansen (2011). We argue that the data still do not support the claim that reading time is affected by the phonological typicality of a word for its part of speech. We also question Farmer et al.'s claim that interleaving syntactic structures in an experiment modifies…

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…

Generic sentences (e.g., "Birds lay eggs") convey generalizations about entire categories and may thus be an important source of knowledge for children. However, these sentences cannot be identified by a simple rule, requiring instead the integration of multiple cues. The present studies focused on 3- to 5-year-olds' (N = 91) use of…

Healthy aging is characterized by a number of changes on brain structure and function. Several neuroimaging studies have shown an age-related reduction in hemispheric asymmetry on various cognitive tasks, a phenomenon captured by Cabeza (2002) in the Hemispheric Asymmetry Reduction in Older Adults (HAROLD) model. Although this phenomenon is…

The spelling of many disyllabic English word endings holds cues to their grammatical category, beyond obvious inflectional endings such as "-ing" for verbs. For example, some letter sequences are clearly associated with nouns (e.g., "-oon") and others with verbs (e.g., "-erge"). This study extended recent research by Arciuli and Cupples (2006),…

Lexical priming, whereby a prime word facilitates recognition of a related target word (e.g., "nurse" [right arrrow] "doctor"), is typically attributed to association strength, semantic similarity, or compound familiarity. Here, the authors demonstrate a novel type of lexical priming that occurs among unassociated, dissimilar,…