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…

This study is an extension of Nahatame's (2018) research that demonstrated the effects of causal and semantic relations between sentences on second language (L2) text processing. Employing eye tracking, this study aimed to examine whether these effects appear during more natural, uninterrupted reading processes and to identify the time course of…

Underspecification and coercion are two prominent interpretive mechanisms to account for meaning variability beyond compositionality. While there is plentiful evidence that natural language meaning constitution exploits both mechanisms, it is an open issue whether a concrete phenomenon of meaning variability is an instance of underspecification or…

Mental representations formed from words or phrases may vary considerably in their feature-based complexity. Modern theories of retrieval in sentence comprehension do not indicate how this variation and the role of encoding processes should influence memory performance. Here, memory retrieval in language comprehension is shown to be influenced by…

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…

Two experiments offer clear support for an interactive view of sentence comprehension; semantic factors do interact with syntactic factors. (RL)

Two experiments examined the effects on recall of encoding and retrieval "depth" (the extent to which subjects process the semantic as well as the phonetic and orthographic attributes of verbal material), encoding-retrieval cue compatability, and subject versus experimenter generation of cues. In the first experiment, 117 undergraduates, divided…

"Levels of processing" is an explanatory framework postulating that differences in memory processing quality or effort affect the duration of the memory trace. Using recall (immediate, one week, or two week) for connected discourse processed under three semantic and three orthographic interference conditions, as well as a noninterference…

Describes a means of characterizing one of many semantic aspects of young children's comprehension ("necessity for linking"). This semantic aspect is then used to experimentally clarify sentence processing results that are ambiguous at the syntactic level. (HOD)

Three studies were conducted in an attempt to replicate previous research concluding that semantic meaning is accessed in the absence of conscious awareness. A pattern mask was used to interrupt the processing of stimulus words after 30 milliseconds; at this duration subjects were not able to identify the stimulus words or even to determine…

A study investigated the inferential processing involved in the comprehension of a class of complex predicates (such as "remember to,""manage to,""fail to," and "neglect to") that are known as implicative. The subjects, 64 college students, were timed while they drew inferences from syntactically affirmative…

Discusses a sequential, three-stage model of how nonliteral expressions are understood, as proposed in recent linguistic, philosophical, and psychological studies. Testing the model's implication that nonliteral meanings of sentences are ignored whenever literal meanings are plausible, finds evidence that both meanings are processed simultaneously…

Raises problem of affective acceptance by teachers and student teachers of psycholinguistic formulations appearing to run counter to intuitive notions of the reading process. Presents three psycholinguistic formulations operationalized via several modified reading experiences. Demonstrates use by the reader of multiple information sources and…

Examines the performance of normal and disabled readers in recognizing whether orally presented letter strings represent real words. Finds that disabled readers have difficulty in making available the full range of semantic cues when processing stimuli in an acoustic form, supporting a verbal-processing deficit hypothesis of reading disability.…

As the first title in the new series, "New Directions in Communication Disorders Research: Integrative Approaches", this volume discusses a unique phenomenon in cognitive science, single-word reading, which is an essential element in successful reading competence. Single-word reading is an interdisciplinary area of research that incorporates…