Non-sentential responses to requests for information.

When faced with requests for information ("Where did you go last night?"), why do speakers make non-sentential replies ("The movies") rather than full sentence replies ("I went to the movies")? We examine the role that pragmatic factors (politeness and formality) and memory factors (the speaker's ability to retrieve the answer to the question) play in determining whether speakers generate a non-sentential reply. Participants answered a series of questions about their lives. Pragmatic factors affected the participants' responses.

Elliptical Responses to Direct and Indirect Requests for Information.

We present two studies examining the factors that lead speakers to produce elliptical responses to requests for information. Following Clark and Levelt and Kelter, experimenters called businesses and asked about their closing time (e.g.

A pre-registered, multi-lab non-replication of the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE).

The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor activity in the comprehension of language. Participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences by producing movements toward the body or away from the body. The ACE is the finding that movements are faster when the direction of the movement (e.

Pointing to the Future of Language Research.

Murgiano et al. (2021) argue that indexicality and iconicity play a larger role in language than is typically acknowledged. They further call for a more situated view of language.

Structural priming in question-answer dialogues.

We explored whether speakers self-prime during question-answer dialogues. Experimenters called restaurants and asked two questions. The first was about the timing of different menu options ((At)What time do you stop serving breakfast?), and the second was about the closing time of the restaurant ((At)What time do you close?).

Gaming experience affects the interpretation of ambiguous words.

Rodd et al. (2016) report that recreational rowers' acquisition of sport-related terminology affected their interpretation of words that have both rowing-related and non-rowing-related meanings (e.g.

Examining the factors that affect structural repetition in question answering.

We present two experiments that examine structural priming in the single-trial phone-call paradigm introduced by Levelt and Kelter (Cognitive psychology, 14 (1), 78-106, 1982). Experimenters called businesses and asked either What time do you close? or At what time do you close? Participants were more likely to produce a prepositional response (At 7 o'clock vs. 7 o'clock) following a prepositional question than following a non-prepositional question.

Examining the impact of text style and epistemic beliefs on conceptual change.

Learning can be difficult for students due to incorrect prior knowledge, or misconceptions, interfering with the acquisition of new knowledge. Conceptual change refers to the process of replacing such misconceptions with new and accurate knowledge. The factors associated with conceptual change are currently under debate.

The effect of the menstrual cycle on dichotic listening.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of the menstrual cycle on responses to a dichotic listening task. It was hypothesized that participants would exhibit a stronger right ear advantage during the menstrual cycle days when estrogen levels are at their peak. It was also hypothesized that the women not taking oral contraceptives would exhibit greater variations in ear advantage over the course of their menstrual cycle than those taking oral contraceptives.

Developmental Timescale of Rapid Adaptation to Conflicting Cues in Real-Time Sentence Processing.

Children and adults use established global knowledge to generate real-time linguistic predictions, but less is known about how listeners generate predictions in circumstances that semantically conflict with long-standing event knowledge. We explore these issues in adults and 5- to 10-year-old children using an eye-tracked sentence comprehension task that tests real-time activation of unexpected events that had been previously encountered in brief stories. Adults generated predictions for these previously unexpected events based on these discourse cues alone, whereas children overall did not override their established global knowledge to generate expectations for semantically conflicting material; however, they do show an increased ability to integrate discourse cues to generate appropriate predictions for sentential endings.

Examining the Efficacy of Targeted Component Interventions on Language and Literacy for Third and Fourth Graders Who are at Risk of Comprehension Difficulties.

Testing a component model of reading comprehension in a randomized controlled trial, we evaluated the efficacy of four different interventions that were designed to target components of language and metacognition that predict children's reading comprehension: vocabulary, listening comprehension, comprehension of literate language, academic knowledge, and comprehension monitoring. Third- and fourth-graders with language skills falling below age expectations participated ( = 645). Overall, the component interventions were only somewhat effective in improving the targeted skills, compared to a business-as-usual control ( ranged from -.

Enacted Reading Comprehension: Using Bodily Movement to Aid the Comprehension of Abstract Text Content.

We report a design study that assessed the feasibility of Enacted Reading Comprehension (ERC), an intervention designed to teach 3rd and 4th grade students (n = 40 and 25, respectively) to use gestures to understand an increasingly abstract set of texts. Students were taught to use gestures to understand the idea of "opposing forces" in a concrete setting-the forces at play as tectonic plates move past each other-and then taught to use the gestures to understand opposing forces in more abstract situations. For example, students were taught to use gestures to understand the opposing sides of an argument, and to understand the internal conflicts that arise as individuals are faced with moral dilemmas.

Reciprocal Effects of Self-Regulation, Semantic Knowledge, and Reading Comprehension in Early Elementary School.

Many assume that cognitive and linguistic processes, such as semantic knowledge (SK) and self-regulation (SR), subserve learned skills like reading. However, complex models of interacting and bootstrapping effects of SK, SR, instruction, and reading hypothesize reciprocal effects. Testing this "lattice" model with children (n = 852) followed from first to second grade (5.

Statistical Learning is Related to Early Literacy-Related Skills.

It has been demonstrated that statistical learning, or the ability to use statistical information to learn the structure of one's environment, plays a role in young children's acquisition of linguistic knowledge. Although most research on statistical learning has focused on language acquisition processes, such as the segmentation of words from fluent speech and the learning of syntactic structure, some recent studies have explored the extent to which individual differences in statistical learning are related to literacy-relevant knowledge and skills. The present study extends on this literature by investigating the relations between two measures of statistical learning and multiple measures of skills that are critical to the development of literacy-oral language, vocabulary knowledge, and phonological processing-within a single model.

Long and Short Term Cumulative Structural Priming Effects.

We present six experiments that examine cumulative structural priming effects (i.e., structural priming effects that accumulate across many utterances).

Changes in task-extrinsic context do not affect the persistence of long-term cumulative structural priming.

We present two experiments exploring the role of extrinsic memory factors (i.e., factors that are extrinsic to the primary task that is being performed) and intrinsic memory factors (i.

The comprehension of sentences involving quantity information affects responses on the up-down axis.

We investigated the use of space in the comprehension of the concept of quantity in text. Previous work has suggested that the right-left axis is useful in spatial representations of number and quantity, while linguistic evidence points toward use of the up-down axis. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences containing quantity information and pressed buttons in either (1) an up and a down position or (2) a left and a right position.

Female fertility affects men's linguistic choices.

We examined the influence of female fertility on the likelihood of male participants aligning their choice of syntactic construction with those of female confederates. Men interacted with women throughout their menstrual cycle. On critical trials during the interaction, the confederate described a picture to the participant using particular syntactic constructions.

Global statistical learning in a visual search task.

Locating a target in a visual search task is facilitated when the target location is repeated on successive trials. Global statistical properties also influence visual search, but have often been confounded with local regularities (i.e.

Structural priming as implicit learning: cumulative priming effects and individual differences.

We explored the claim that structural priming is a case of implicit learning within the language production system. The experiment began with a baseline phase, in which we assessed participants' rates of production for double object and prepositional object constructions. Then participants were biased toward the production of either the double object or prepositional object construction.

Long-term cumulative structural priming persists for (at least) one week.

We present an experiment that explores the degree to which cumulative structural priming effects of the sort reported in Kaschak (Memory and Cognition 35:925-937, 2007) persist over the course of a week. In the first session of the experiment, participants completed written sentence stems that were designed to bias them toward producing the double object (Meghan gave Michael a toy) or prepositional object (Meghan gave a toy to Michael) construction. Participants returned for a second session of the experiment a week later.

Processing time shifts affects the execution of motor responses.

We explore whether time shifts in text comprehension are represented spatially. Participants read sentences involving past or future events and made sensibility judgment responses in one of two ways: (1) moving toward or away from their body and (2) pressing the toward or away buttons without moving. Previous work suggests that spatial compatibility effects should be observed, where the future is mapped onto responses away from the body, and the past is mapped onto responses toward the body.

Top-down and bottom-up contributions to understanding sentences describing objects in motion.

Theories of embodied language comprehension propose that the neural systems used for perception, action, and emotion are also engaged during language comprehension. Consistent with these theories, behavioral studies have shown that the comprehension of language that describes motion is affected by simultaneously perceiving a moving stimulus (Kaschak et al., 2005).

Does visual speech information affect word segmentation?

We present an experiment in which we explored the extent to which visual speech information affects learners' ability to segment words from a fluent speech stream. Learners were presented with a set of sentences consisting of novel words, in which the only cues to the location of word boundaries were the transitional probabilities between syllables. They were exposed to this language through the auditory modality only, through the visual modality only (where the learners saw the speaker producing the sentences but did not hear anything), or through both the auditory and visual modalities.