We examined the impact of prospective information on the processing of information occurring within the present timeline of narrative stories. Participants read target sentences that were consistent with events occurring within a protagonist's present timeline but inconsistent with events in the protagonist's future. When prospective information…

This dissertation explores the role of memory in language processing, and specifically how interference during lexical encoding can result in downstream interference during retrieval. The dissertation merges insights from both the sentence processing literature as well as the study of memory in non-sentential contexts and focuses on two factors…

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…

Many digital reading applications have built-in features to control the presentation flow of texts by segmenting those texts into smaller linguistic units. Whether and how these segmentation techniques affect the readability of texts is largely unknown. With this background, the current study examined a recent proposal that a sentence-by-sentence…

Although research in sentence comprehension has suggested that processing long-distance dependencies involves maintenance between the elements that form the dependency, studies on maintenance of long-distance subject-verb (SV) dependencies are scarce. The few relevant studies have delivered mixed results using self-paced reading or…

In a self-paced reading study, we investigated how effects of biasing contexts in idiom processing interact with effects of idiom literality. Specifically, we tested if idioms with a high potential for literal interpretation (e.g., "break the ice") are processed differently in figuratively and literally biasing contexts than idioms with…

To examine deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students' awareness of phoneme repetition in Chinese sentence reading, two experiments were conducted in the self-paced, moving-window reading paradigm. The materials comprised sentences in which Chinese characters that sequentially followed each other shared similar spelling initials and finals in…

Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word…

We examined sixth graders' detection of inconsistencies in narrative and expository passages, contrasting participants who were monolingual speakers (N = 85) or Spanish-English DLLs (N = 94) when recruited in pre-kindergarten (PK). We recorded self-paced reading times and judgments about whether the text made sense, and took an independent measure…

This study examined the effect of mood on predictive sentence processing by older adults. A self-paced reading task was implemented among a group of younger adults and older adults to measure their performance in online sentence processing. Half of the sentences were highly predictable, whereas the other half were lowly predictable. Music was used…

The coherence threshold marks the point at which a reader has gained a sufficient comprehension level to move on in a text. Previous research has demonstrated that the readers' coherence threshold can be manipulated by increasing or decreasing task demands. The present experiments examined a manipulation of the coherence threshold within the text…

Using self-paced reading, the present study compared native English and adult L1-Korean-L2-English speakers' processing behaviors during online comprehension of underinformative scalar sentences and non-scalar sentences like "Some/All elephants have trunks and ears." Results indicate that native speakers showed online sensitivity (i.e.…

Previous work has ostensibly shown that readers rapidly adapt to less predictable ambiguity resolutions after repeated exposure to unbalanced statistical input (e.g., a high number of reduced relative-clause garden-path sentences), and that these readers grow to disfavor the a priori more frequent (e.g. main verb) resolution after exposure (Fine,…

The goal of the present set of experiments was to identify the conditions under which readers evoked prepotent-response inhibition to prevent interference from reactivated misconceptions. In Experiment 1, participants with varying inhibition ability read refutation texts that addressed common misconceptions and control texts. Overall, participants…

In this study participants read plausible and implausible sentences containing concessive and causal relations in Chinese, for instance, "[Although/Because] he has a talent for language, he [doesn't like/likes] learning English." In two self-paced reading experiments (Experiments 1 and 2), we consistently found the plausibility effect at…