Most of the previous studies focused on lexical and syntactic features in adapted texts while little attention has been paid to the structural complexity from the perspective of the amount of information. In this study, we intend to examine the differences in structural complexity in adapted texts from the perspective of the amount of information…

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…

Studies of lexical coverage are valuable because they reveal the importance of vocabulary knowledge to comprehension. Lexical profiling research is also extremely useful because it indicates the vocabulary knowledge necessary to understand different text types such as novels, newspapers, academic lectures, television programs, and movies.…

In 2 experiments, the authors used an eye tracking while reading methodology to examine how different configurations of common noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases (NPs) influenced the difference in processing difficulty between sentences containing object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Results showed that processing difficulty was…

Lexical compounds in English are constrained in that the non-head noun can be an irregular but not a regular plural (e.g. mice eater vs. *rats eater), a contrast that has been argued to derive from a morphological constraint on modifiers inside compounds. In addition, bare nouns are preferred over plural forms inside compounds (e.g. mouse eater…

This article presents three studies that investigate when syntactic constraints become available during the processing of long-distance backwards pronominal dependencies ("backwards anaphora" or "cataphora"). Earlier work demonstrated that in such structures the parser initiates an active search for an antecedent for a pronoun, leading to gender…

The nature of the memory processes that support language comprehension and the manner in which information packaging influences online sentence processing were investigated in three experiments that used eye-tracking during reading to measure the ease of understanding complex sentences in Korean. All three experiments examined reading of embedded…

A study investigated the combinatorial semantics of nouns and verbs in sentences: specifically, the phenomenon of meaning adjustment under semantic strain, in an effort to discover whether there are orderly processes of adjustment, and if so, to describe them. The study comprised three experiments. Experiments 1 and 2, tested the hypothesis that…

Reports on a study comparing the nouns in the Dolch word list with four recently published word lists to determine which nouns are most frequently used. (RB)

This study controlled the gender context of sentence cues containing nouns and pronouns and asked children to draw pictures depicting the situations described in them. Subjects were 220 elementary students from the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. Each child drew responses to cues for only one form. The experimenter allowed them 4 minutes per cue…

A variable time delay naming latency paradigm was used to investigate the processing of noun-verb lexical ambiguities (e.g., "watch") in syntactic contexts that biased either the noun or the verb reading. Results support a two-stage model in which all reading of ambiguous words are initially accessed, followed by suppression of…

According to a theory of textual cohesion, anaphoric references and noun phrase organizers may serve as cohesive ties linking separate sentences into unified paragraphs. This study revealed that only the noun phrase organizer condition was significant in promoting comprehension and indicated no difference in time scores by paragraph condition.…

A study investigated the effects of presentation mode and type of content on young children's recall of nouns in a scripted narrative. Forty-nine children in the second month of first grade were presented a fictional narrative in which were embedded 18 target nouns classified as high-scripted, medium-scripted, or low-scripted. Subjects then viewed…

Adjective noun-noun word triplets were presented in an acquisition encoding context to second and fourth graders and college students to determine if they were compatible with trace information in memory and change with age. (HOD)

Reports that primary school children learned high imagery nouns in fewer trials than low imagery nouns and that second-grade children learned the nouns in fewer trials than did first-grade children. (FL)