Three experiments tested theories of syntactic representation by assessing "stem-exchange" errors ("hates the record"[right arrow]"records the hate"). Previous research has shown that in stem exchanges, speakers pronounce intended nouns ("REcord") as verbs ("reCORD"), yielding syntactically well-formed utterances. By "lexically based" theories,…

Cantonese shape classifiers encode perceptual information that is characteristic of their associated nouns, although certain nouns are exceptional. For example, the classifier "tiu" occurs primarily with nouns for long-narrow-flexible objects (e.g., scarves, snakes, and ropes) and also occurs with the noun for a (short, rigid) key. In 3…

Many comprehension theories assert that increasing the distance between elements participating in a linguistic relation (e.g., a verb and a noun phrase argument) increases the difficulty of establishing that relation during on-line comprehension. Such "locality effects" are expected to increase reading times and are thought to reveal properties…

An online picture description methodology was used to investigate the interaction between lexical and syntactic information in spoken sentence production. In response to arrays of moving pictures, participants generated prepositional sentences, such as "The apple moves towards the dog," as well as coordinate noun phrase sentences, such…

In the language domain, most studies of error monitoring have been devoted to language production. However, in language perception, errors are made as well and we are able to detect them. According to the monitoring theory of language perception, a strong conflict between what is expected and what is observed triggers reanalysis to check for…

It is well known that sentences containing object-extracted relative clauses (e.g., "The reporter that the senator attacked admitted the error") are more difficult to comprehend than sentences containing subject-extracted relative clauses (e.g., "The reporter that attacked the senator admitted the error"). Two major accounts of this phenomenon…

Event-related brain potentials were recorded during RSVP reading to test the hypothesis that quantifier expressions are incrementally interpreted fully and immediately. In sentences tapping general knowledge ("Farmers grow crops/worms as their primary source of income"), Experiment 1 found larger N400s for atypical ("worms") than typical objects…

Building on P. H. Allum and L. Wheeldon (2007), the authors conducted 5 experiments to investigate the scope of lexical access during spoken sentence production in Japanese and English. Speakers described pairs of pictured objects, and on critical trials, 1 object was previewed. In Japanese, sentence onset is speeded by the preview of each of the…

In some theories of sentence comprehension, linguistically relevant lexical knowledge, such as selectional restrictions, is privileged in terms of the time-course of its access and influence. We examined whether event knowledge computed by combining multiple concepts can rapidly influence language understanding even in the absence of selectional…

This study examines the effect of proficiency and similarity between the first and the second language on grammatical gender processing in L2. In three experiments, we manipulated gender agreement violations within the determiner phrase (DP), between the determiner and the noun (Experiment 1), the postposed adjective and the noun (Experiment 2)…

A robust result in research on the production of grammatical agreement is that speakers are more likely to produce an erroneous verb with phrases such as "the key to the cabinets", with a singular noun followed by a plural one, than with phrases such as "the keys to the cabinet", where a plural noun is followed by a singular. These asymmetries are…

In this study, we examine explicit information and aptitude within processing instruction. Forty-six learners of German in their third semester of study were divided into two groups: those who received explicit information prior to treatment (+EI) and those who did not (-EI). Participants also took the grammatical sensitivity portion of the Modern…

The process of reading aloud bare nouns in alphabetic languages is immune to semantic context effects from pictures. This is accounted for by assuming that words in alphabetic languages can be read aloud relatively fast through a sub-lexical grapheme-phoneme conversion (GPC) route or by a direct route from orthography to word form. We examined…

The present study investigates children's bias when interpreting novel noun-noun compounds (e.g. "kig donka") that refer to combinations of novel objects (kig and donka). More specifically, it investigates children's understanding of modifier-head relations of the compounds and their preference for HAS or LOCATED relations (e.g. a donka that HAS a…

The CARIN theory (C. L. Gagne & E. J. Shoben, 1997) proposes that people use statistical knowledge about the relations with which modifiers are typically used to facilitate the interpretation of modifier-noun combinations. However, research on semantic patterns in compounding has suggested that regularities tend to be associated with pairings of…