While previous research has provided insights into vocabulary learning through extensive reading, the differential effects of word frequency and word class on active form and passive meaning word recognition remain less understood. By evaluating learners' post-test performance in active form recognition and passive meaning recognition, this study…

Speech planning is a sophisticated process. In dialog, it regularly starts in overlap with an incoming turn by a conversation partner. We show that planning spoken responses in overlap with incoming turns is associated with higher processing load than planning in silence. In a dialogic experiment, participants took turns with a confederate…

This paper shows the need to triangulate different approaches in Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research to fully understand late bilinguals' interlanguage grammars. Methodologically, we show how experimental and corpus data can be (and should be) triangulated by reporting on a corpus study (Lozano and Mendikoetxea in…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences (["la petite 'ferme'"] ["est très jolie"] "the small farm is very…

Extensive evidence has shown that presentation of a word (target) following a related word (prime) results in faster reaction times compared to unrelated words. Two primes preceding a target have been used to examine the effects of multiple influences on a target. Several studies have observed greater, or additive, priming effects of multiple…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether and when individuals with aphasia and healthy controls use lexical and prosodic information during on-line sentence comprehension. Individuals with aphasia and controls (n = 12 per group) participated in a self-paced listening experiment. The stimuli were early closure sentences, such as "While…

Humans have special abilities in processing hierarchical, recursive structures. Here we investigated how an upcoming word embedded in a hierarchical structure is semantically integrated into the prior representation during sentence comprehension. Participants read Chinese sentences with a complex verb argument structure "subject…

Access to morphological structure during lexical processing has been established across a number of languages; however, it remains unclear which constituents are held as mental representations in the lexicon. The present study examined the auditory recognition of different noun types across 2 experiments. The critical manipulations were…

An event-related potential experiment was conducted to investigate the temporal neural dynamics of animacy processing in the interpretation of classifier-noun combinations. Participants read sentences that had a non-canonical structure, "object noun" + "subject noun" + "verb" + "numeral-classifier" + "adjective". The object noun and its classifier…

The present article investigates spatial- and social-cognitive processes in toddlers' mapping of concepts to real-world events. In 2 studies we explore how event segmentation might lay the groundwork for extracting actions from the event stream and conceptually mapping novel verbs to these actions. In Study 1, toddlers demonstrated the ability to…

Previous research has found that the recent processing of a linguistic form (e.g. word or syntactic pattern) facilitates its reuse. A separate line of research has found that the appearance of a linguistic form in certain structural contexts (e.g. the focus position of a cleft sentence) can increase the likelihood of a form's reuse. However, these…

In three eyetracking studies, we investigated the role of conceptual plurality in initial parsing decisions in temporarily ambiguous sentences with reciprocal verbs (e.g., "While the lovers kissed the baby played alone"). We varied the subject of the first clause using three types of plural noun phrases: conjoined noun phrases ("the bride and the…

Speakers are known to make subject-verb agreement errors both when a number-mismatching noun intervenes between the head of the subject phrase and the verb (e.g., "*The key to the cabinets are on the table") and in configurations in which there is a number-mismatching noun that does not intervene (e.g., "*The cabinets that the key open are on the…

An event-related potential (ERP) study was conducted to investigate the temporal neural dynamics of semantic integration processes at different levels of syntactic hierarchy during Chinese sentence reading. In a hierarchical structure, "subject noun" + "verb" + "numeral" + "classifier" + "object noun," the object noun is constrained by selectional…

This study investigated noun-verb retrieval patterns of 30 adults with chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia and 67 typical adults, to determine if schizophrenia affected nouns (associated with temporal lobe function) differently from verbs (associated with frontal lobe function). Stimuli were homophonic homographic homonyms, balanced according…