Speakers show a remarkable tendency to align their productions with their interlocutors'. Focusing on sentence production, we investigate the cognitive systems underlying such alignment (syntactic priming). Our guiding hypothesis is that syntactic priming is a consequence of a language processing system that is organized to achieve efficient…

Numerous studies have reported an effect of prosodic information on parsing but whether prosody can impact even the initial parsing decision is still not evident. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the influence of contrastive intonation and visual context on processing temporarily ambiguous relative clause sentences in…

Listeners are often capable of adjusting to the variability contained in individual talkers' (speakers') speech. The vast majority of findings on talker adaptation are concerned with learning the contingency between "phonological" characteristics and talker identity. In contrast, the present study investigates representations at a more abstract…

The effects of word predictability and shared semantic similarity between a target word and other words that could have taken its place in a sentence on language comprehension are investigated using data from a reading time study, a sentence completion study, and linear mixed-effects regression modeling. We find that processing is facilitated if…

Structural priming paradigms have been influential in shaping theories of adult sentence processing and theories of syntactic development. However, until recently there have been few attempts to provide an integrated account that explains both adult and developmental data. The aim of the present paper was to begin the process of integration by…

According to Adams's Thesis, the acceptability of an indicative conditional sentence goes by the conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent. We test, for the first time, whether this thesis is descriptively correct and show that it is not; in particular, we show that it yields the wrong predictions for people's judgments of the…

Various recent studies attest that reading involves creating an implicit prosodic representation of the written text which may systematically affect the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in sentence comprehension. Research up to now suggests that implicit prosody itself depends on a partial syntactic analysis of the text, raising the question of…

Previous research has found that the single argument of unaccusative verbs (such as "fall") is reactivated during sentence processing, but the argument of agentive verbs (such as "jump") is not ( and ). An open question so far was whether this difference in processing is caused by a difference in thematic roles the verbs assign, or a difference in…

In most languages, most of the syntactic dependency relations found in any given sentence are projective: the word-word dependencies in the sentence do not cross each other. Some syntactic dependency relations, however, are non-projective: some of their word-word dependencies cross each other. Non-projective dependencies are both rarer and more…

We examine the nature of motor representations evoked during comprehension of written sentences describing hand actions. We distinguish between two kinds of hand actions: a functional action, applied when using the object for its intended purpose, and a volumetric action, applied when picking up or holding the object. In Experiment 1, initial…

When toddlers view an event while hearing a novel verb, the verb's syntactic context has been shown to help them identify its meaning. The current work takes this finding one step further to reveal that even in the absence of an accompanying event, syntactic information supports toddlers' identification of verb meaning. Two-year-olds were first…

A study combining artificial grammar and sentence comprehension methods investigated the learning and online use of probabilistic, nonadjacent combinatorial constraints. Participants learned a small artificial language describing cartoon monsters acting on objects. Self-paced reading of sentences in the artificial language revealed comprehenders'…

In this study, we focus on the conditions which permit people to assert a conditional statement of the form "if p then q" with conversational relevance. In a broadly decision-theoretic approach, also drawing on hypothetical thinking theory [Evans, J. St. B. T. (2007). "Hypothetical thinking: Dual processes in reasoning and judgement". Hove, UK:…

When faced with a sentence like, "Some of the toys are on the table", adults, but not preschoolers, compute a scalar implicature, taking the sentence to imply that not all the toys are on the table. This paper explores the hypothesis that children fail to compute scalar implicatures because they lack knowledge of relevant scalar alternatives to…

It is well known that sentences containing object-extracted relative clauses (e.g., "The reporter that the senator attacked admitted the error") are more difficult to comprehend than sentences containing subject-extracted relative clauses (e.g., "The reporter that attacked the senator admitted the error"). Two major accounts of this phenomenon…