What do we learn when we adapt to reading regional constructions?

We present four experiments investigating adaptation to a regional grammatical structure through reading exposure, using both the needs + past participle construction (e.g., The car needs washed) and the double modal construction (e.

Zoom disrupts the rhythm of conversation.

Small, variable transmission delays over Zoom disrupt the typical rhythm of conversation, leading to delays in turn initiation. This study compared local and remote (Zoom) turn transition times using both a tightly controlled yes/no Question and Answer (Q&A) paradigm (Corps et al., 2018) and unscripted conversation.

Grammatical predictions in Spanish-English bilinguals and Spanish-language learners.

Although bilingual individuals know 2 languages, research suggests that the languages are not separate in the mind. This is especially evident when a bilingual individual switches languages midsentence, indicating that mental representations are, to some degree, overlapping or integrated across the 2 languages. In 2 eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the nature of this integration during reading to examine whether incremental grammatical predictions generated by Spanish-English bilinguals (Experiment 1, N = 50) and Spanish-as-a-second-language learners (Experiment 2, N = 50) are language-specific or language-independent.

Persistent structural priming during online second-language comprehension.

We report 2 self-paced reading experiments investigating the longevity of structural priming effects in comprehending reduced relative clauses among adult Chinese-speaking learners of English. Experiment 1 showed that structural priming occurred both when prime and target sentences were immediately adjacent and when they were separated by 1 or 2 filler sentences of unrelated structures. Moreover, the magnitude of the priming effect held constant across different lag conditions.

If You're House Is Still Available, Send Me an Email: Personality Influences Reactions to Written Errors in Email Messages.

The increasing prevalence of social media means that we often encounter written language characterized by both stylistic variation and outright errors. How does the personality of the reader modulate reactions to non-standard text? Experimental participants read 'email responses' to an ad for a housemate that either contained no errors or had been altered to include either typos (e.g.

Structural Priming and Frequency Effects Interact in Chinese Sentence Comprehension.

Previous research in several European languages has shown that the language processing system is sensitive to both structural frequency and structural priming effects. However, it is currently not clear whether these two types of effects interact during online sentence comprehension, especially for languages that do not have morphological markings. To explore this issue, the present study investigated the possible interplay between structural priming and frequency effects for sentences containing the Chinese ambiguous construction V NP1 de NP2 in a self-paced reading experiment.

The interplay between referential processing and local syntactic/semantic processing: ERPs to written Chinese discourse.

Two event-related brain potential experiments were conducted to investigate the functional interplay between discourse-level referential processing and local syntactic/semantic processing of phrases. We manipulated both the syntactic/semantic coherence of a noun phrase (NP) and the referential ambiguity of the same NP. Incoherence of the NP elicited a P600 effect in both experiments.

Semantic support and parallel parsing in Chinese.

Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted using written Chinese sentences that contained a multi-word ambiguous region. The goal was to determine whether readers maintained multiple interpretations throughout the ambiguous region or selected a single interpretation at the point of ambiguity. Within the ambiguous region, we manipulated the strength of support for the complement clause (CC) analysis and the relative clause (RC) analysis of the ambiguous construction Verb NP1 de NP2.

The time course of perception of coarticulation.

The perception of coarticulated speech as it unfolds over time was investigated by monitoring eye movements of participants as they listened to words with oral vowels or with late or early onset of anticipatory vowel nasalization. When listeners heard [CṼNC] and had visual choices of images of CVNC (e.g.

Semantics does not need a processing license from syntax in reading Chinese.

Two event-related brain potential experiments were conducted to investigate whether there is a functional primacy of syntactic structure building over semantic processes during Chinese sentence reading. In both experiments, we found that semantic interpretation proceeded despite the impossibility of a well-formed syntactic analysis. In Experiment 1, we found an N400 difference between combined syntactic category and semantic violations and single syntactic violations.

Children's use of language context in lexical ambiguity resolution.

Lexical ambiguity resolution was examined in children aged 7 to 10 years and adults. In Experiment 1, participants heard sentences supporting one (or neither) meaning of a balanced ambiguous word in a cross-modal naming paradigm. Naming latencies for context-congruent versus context-incongruent targets and judgements of the relatedness of targets to the sentence served as indices of appropriate context use.

Dominance and context effects on activation of alternative homophone meanings.

Two eyetracking-during-listening experiments showed frequency and context effects on fixation probability for pictures representing multiple meanings of homophones. Participants heard either an imperative sentence instructing them to look at a homophone referent (Experiment 1) or a declarative sentence that was either neutral or biased toward the homophone's subordinate meaning (Experiment 2). At homophone onset in both experiments, the participants viewed four pictures: (1) a referent of one homophone meaning, (2) a shape competitor for a nonpictured homophone meaning, and (3) two unrelated filler objects.

Argument status and PP-attachment.

Prepositional phrase attachment was investigated in temporarily ambiguous sentences. Both attachment site (noun phrase or verb phrase) and argument status (argument or adjunct) were manipulated to test the hypothesis that arguments are processed differently than adjuncts. Contrary to this hypothesis, some previous research suggested that arguments and adjuncts are initially processed in the same manner, following a general bias to attach prepositional phrases to the verb phrase whenever possible [Clifton, Speer, & Abney (1991) Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 251-271].

Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception.

In the past decade, cultural differences in perceptual judgment and memory have been observed: Westerners attend more to focal objects, whereas East Asians attend more to contextual information. However, the underlying mechanisms for the apparent differences in cognitive processing styles have not been known. In the present study, we examined the possibility that the cultural differences arise from culturally different viewing patterns when confronted with a naturalistic scene.

Visual arguments.

Three experiments investigated the use of verb argument structure by tracking participants' eye movements across a set of related pictures as they listened to sentences. The assumption was that listeners would naturally look at relevant pictures as they were mentioned or implied. The primary hypothesis was that a verb would implicitly introduce relevant entities (linguistic arguments) that had not yet been mentioned, and thus a picture corresponding to such an entity would draw anticipatory looks.

Differences in the timing of implausibility detection for recipient and instrument prepositional phrases.

We conducted two word-by-word reading experiments to investigate the timing of implausibility detection for recipient and instrument prepositional phrases (PPs). These PPs differ in thematic role, relative frequency, and possibly in argument status. The results showed a difference in the timing of garden path effects such that the detection of implausible dative recipients (which are clearly arguments) was delayed relative to the detection of implausible instruments (which may not be arguments).