Publications by authors named "Elsi Kaiser"

Perspective-taking is fundamental for language comprehension, including the interpretation of subjective adjectives (e.g., , and ).

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Background: Public health organizations have begun to use social media to increase awareness of health harm and positively improve health behavior. Little is known about effective strategies to disseminate health education messages digitally and ultimately achieve optimal audience engagement.

Objective: This study aims to assess the difference in audience engagement with identical antismoking health messages on three social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) and with a referring link to a tobacco prevention website cited in these messages.

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This study uses a response mouse-tracking paradigm to examine the role of sub-phonemic information in online lexical ambiguity resolution of continuous speech. We examine listeners' sensitivity to the sub-phonemic information that is specific to the ambiguous internal open juncture /s/-stop sequences in American English (e.g.

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Background: Social media offers promise for communicating the risks and health effects of harmful products and behaviors to larger and hard-to-reach segments of the population. Nearly 70% of US adults use some social media. However, rigorous research across different social media is vital to establish successful evidence-based health communication strategies that meet the requirements of the evolving digital landscape and the needs of diverse populations.

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Syntactic satiation is the phenomenon where some sentences that initially seem ungrammatical appear more acceptable after repeated exposures (Snyder, 2000). We investigated satiation by manipulating two factors known to affect syntactic priming, a phenomenon where recent exposure to a grammatical structure facilitates subsequent processing of that structure (Bock, 1986). Specifically, we manipulated (i) (number of sentences between primes and targets) and (ii) (type of phrase repeated across primes and targets).

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We used Chinese prenominal relative clauses (RCs) to test the predictions of two competing accounts of sentence comprehension difficulty: the experience-based account of Levy () and the Dependency Locality Theory (DLT; Gibson, ). Given that in Chinese RCs, a classifier and/or a passive marker BEI can be added to the sentence-initial position, we manipulated the presence/absence of classifiers and the presence/absence of BEI, such that BEI sentences were passivized subject-extracted RCs, and no-BEI sentences were standard object-extracted RCs. We conducted two self-paced reading experiments, using the same critical stimuli but somewhat different filler items.

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We present three self-paced reading experiments that investigate the reflexive ziji "self" in Chinese-in particular, we tested whether and how person-feature-based blocking guides comprehenders' real-time processing and final interpretation of ziji. Prior work claims that in Chinese sentences like "John thought that {I/you/Bill} did not like ZIJI," (i) the reflexive ziji can refer to the matrix subject John if the intervening subject is also a third person entity (e.g.

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One of the central questions in speech production is how speakers decide which entity to assign to which grammatical function. According to the lexical hypothesis (e.g.

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Language form varies as a result of the information being communicated. Some of the ways in which it varies include word order, referential form, morphological marking, and prosody. The relevant categories of information include the way a word or its referent have been used in context, for example, whether a particular referent has been previously mentioned, and whether it plays a topical role in the current utterance or discourse.

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Current models of idiom representation and processing differ with respect to the role of literal processing during the interpretation of idiomatic expressions. Word-like models (Bobrow & Bell, 1973; Swinney & Cutler, 1979) propose that idiomatic meaning can be accessed directly, whereas structural models (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988; Cutting & Bock, 1997; Sprenger, Levelt, & Kempen, 2006) propose that literal processing is crucial in the access of idiomatic meaning. We used a self-paced reading task to examine how contextual expectations influence real-time processing of phrasal verbs that are ambiguous between a literal and idiomatic sense (e.

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Segmenting stimuli into events and understanding the relations between those events is crucial for understanding the world. For example, on the linguistic level, successful language use requires the ability to recognize semantic coherence relations between events (e.g.

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We present four experiments on the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives in picture noun phrases with and without possessors (e.g. Andrew's picture of him/himself, the picture of him/himself).

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On-line comprehension studies of flexible word-order languages find that noncanonical ('scrambled') structures induce more difficulty than canonical structures [e.g., Hyona & Hujanen, Q.

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