Purpose: Lexical processing impairments such as delayed and reduced activation of lexical-semantic information have been linked to syntactic processing disruptions and sentence comprehension deficits in individuals with aphasia (IWAs). Lexical-level deficits can also preclude successful lexical encoding during sentence processing and amplify the…

The study tested how the Recency Preference and Predicate Proximity model (Gibson et al. in Cognition 59(1):23-59, 1996, https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1016/0010-0277(88)90004-2) plays out by examining the attachment preferences of native Russian speakers when processing locally ambiguous participial relative clause sentences with three potential NP…

Psycholinguistic research aims to understand how people make sense of language in their everyday lives. However, most of this research studies language under experimental conditions in which people are instructed to specifically monitor (and indicate) when there is a breakdown in their understanding. Moreover, there is an assumption that people…

Arai et al. (2007) showed that structural priming in the comprehension of English dative sentences only occurred when the verb was repeated between prime and target, suggesting a lexically-dependent mechanism of structure prediction. However, a recent study in Mandarin comprehension found abstract (verb-independent) structural priming and such…

When readers are asked to detect a target letter while reading for comprehension, they miss it more frequently when it is embedded in a frequent function word than in a less frequent content word. This missing-letter effect has been used to investigate the cognitive processes involved in reading. A similar effect, called the missing-phoneme effect…

The ability to think about nonpresent time is a crucial aspect of human cognition. Both the past and future imply a temporal displacement of an event outside the "now." They also intrinsically differ: The past refers to inalterable events; the future to alterable events, to possible worlds. Are the past and future processed similarly or…

Background: Individuals with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) may experience chronic cognitive-linguistic impairments that are difficult to evaluate with existing measures. Garden path sentences are linguistically complex sentences that lead readers down a path to an incorrect interpretation. Previous research indicates many individuals, with or…

Electrophysiology studies have identified two event-related potentials that are modulated by predictive processes during language comprehension: the N400 and a frontal positivity. The N400 is smaller when words are presented within highly restrictive sentences, indicating reduced lexical retrieval costs. Violations of strong predictions generate…

Reading comprehension requires readers to connect ideas within and across texts to produce a coherent mental representation. One important factor in that complex process regards the cohesion of the document(s). Here, we tackle the challenge of providing researchers and practitioners with a tool to visualize text cohesion both within (intra) and…

The use of the audio medium (e.g., audiobooks and podcasts) is proliferating in everyday and educational contexts. Yet, research investigating text processing in audio compared to the more commonly used print medium is limited in scope. Specifically, the research so far has majorly focused on younger learners or English language learners,…

Text comprehension is an essential skill in today's information-rich world, and self-explanation practice helps students improve their understanding of complex texts. This study was centered on leveraging open-source Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically FLAN-T5, to automatically assess the comprehension strategies employed by readers while…

"Little" words often carry complex meanings. Pronoun resolution is an essential component of comprehension. Skilled readers work to maintain text cohesion (i.e., they resolve the pronouns as needed.) Less proficient readers often are not as proficient in resolving pronouns. Limited pronoun resolution limits comprehension. This article…

Sentence production and comprehension both draw on linguistic knowledge, but current research is unclear on whether these fundamental language tasks involve similar or distinct competitive processes. Previous studies suggest that production and comprehension may involve similar conflict resolution processes, but that production may additionally…

Advances in machine learning (ML) are poised to contribute to our understanding of the linguistic processes associated with successful reading comprehension, which is a critical aspect of children's educational success. We used ML techniques to investigate and compare associations between children's reading comprehension and 260 linguistic…

Although much is known about supporting preschoolers' alphabet knowledge, less is known about instructional moves that support preschoolers' narrative comprehension or how preschoolers' developing cognitive skills may support their narrative comprehension development. This school-university partnership project examined relations of preschoolers'…