The disambiguation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence in favor of a less preferred parse can lead to slower reading at the disambiguation point. This phenomenon, referred to as a garden-path effect, has motivated models in which readers initially maintain only a subset of the possible parses of the sentence, and subsequently require…

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…

Background: The purpose of the current study was to examine how the morphological structure of a real word or novel word affected the incidental vocabulary learning of participants and to examine how these target items are processed as they are read. In addition, we examined the roles of vocabulary depth and breadth in the process of incidental…

Recent studies in the second language acquisition of negation have focused on polarity items and their licensing contexts. Although several studies show a correlation between higher degrees of second language (L2) proficiency and the acquisition of the target L2 structures, less attention has been given to the relation between the acquisition of…

Reading is a critical neurodevelopmental skill for school-aged children, which requires a distributed network of brain regions including the cerebellum. However, we do not know how functional connectivity between the cerebellum and other brain regions contributes to reading. Here we used resting-state functional connectivity to understand the…

Background: German is exceptional in its use of noun capitalisation. It has been suggested that sentence-internal capitalisation as in German may benefit processing by specifically marking a noun and thus a noun phrase (NP). However, other cues, such as a determiner, can also indicate an NP. The influence of capitalisation on processing may thus…

The current study examined whether readers encode the thoughts of story characters. Participants read narratives in which characters were described as either needing or not needing to remember a list of words. Across several experiments readers recalled more words in a free recall task when the story character was described as making an effort to…

Seminal studies on negation revealed that negative sentences are difficult to process, as they require an extra mental step. Similarly, at the discourse level, concession has been repeatedly shown to be more complex than other relations such as result because it implies the denial of an inference. The affinity between negation and concession…

According to theories of validation, people routinely check incoming information against prior knowledge during comprehension. On these theories, information is validated if it fits with prior knowledge. Some researchers argue that information needs to be successfully validated before being incorporated into the situation model. We report five…

Fluency is the ability to read words, phrases, sentences, and stories accurately, with enough speed, and expression. It is important to remember that fluency is not an end in itself but a critical gateway to comprehension.

In the present article, we report two eye-tracking experiments on how Chinese readers segment incremental words while reading Chinese. Incremental words are multicharacter words containing a subset of characters that constitute another word (referred to as the "embedded word"). For example, in a word containing three characters ABC…

Previous research in alphabetic languages has shown that both position (external, internal) and distance (adjacent, nonadjacent) modulate letter position encoding during reading. To examine the generality of this pattern for a comprehensive model of word recognition and reading, we examined these effects during Chinese reading (i.e., an unspaced…

This study examined the effects of working memory (WM), structure, and salience on the processing of English relative clauses (RCs) and participial reduced relative clauses (PRRCs) by L1 Thai learners. Salience in this research is the phonological alterations required for irregular verbs to inflect into the past participial form. The study…

Informed by a theoretical model of satirical uptake, this study investigated processing behavior and comprehension of satirical news articles. Reading times for segments of minimally different satirical and non-satirical texts were collected using within-subjects (Experiment 1) and between-subjects (Experiment 2) designs. Segment reading times and…