Syntactic complexity effects have been investigated extensively with respect to comprehension (e.g., Demberg & Keller, 2008; Gibson, 1998, 2000; Gordon et al., 2001, 2004; Grodner & Gibson, 2005; King & Just, 1991; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Lewis et al., 2006; McElree et al., 2003; Wanner & Maratsos, 1978). According to one…

Work in theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics suggests that human linguistic knowledge forms a continuum between individual lexical items and abstract syntactic representations, with most linguistic representations falling between the two extremes and taking the form of lexical items stored together with the syntactic/semantic contexts in…

Linguistic dependencies between non-adjacent words have been shown to cause comprehension difficulty, compared with local dependencies. According to one class of sentence comprehension accounts, non-local dependencies are difficult because they require the retrieval of the first dependent from memory when the second dependent is encountered.…

For every claim in the neuroimaging literature about a particular brain region supporting syntactic processing, there exist other claims implicating the target region in different linguistic processes, and, in many cases, in non-linguistic cognitive processes (e.g., Blumstein, 2009). We argue that traditional group analysis methods in neuroimaging…

This paper reports the results of four dual-task experiments that were designed to determine the extent of domain-specificity of the verbal working memory resources used in linguistic integrations. To address this question, syntactic complexity was crossed in a 2x2 design with the complexity of a secondary task, which involved either (1)…

This paper reports the results of a dual-task experiment which investigates the nature of working memory resources used in sentence comprehension. Participants read sentences of varying syntactic complexity (containing subject-and object-extracted relative clauses) while remembering one or three nouns (similar to or dissimilar from the…