Complex Inferential Processes Are Needed for Implicature Comprehension, but Not for Implicature Production.

Upon hearing "Some of Michelangelo's sculptures are in Rome," adults can easily generate a scalar implicature and infer that the intended meaning of the utterance corresponds to "Some but not all Michelangelo's sculptures are in Rome." Comprehension experiments show that preschoolers struggle with this kind of inference until at least 5 years of age. Surprisingly, the few studies having investigated children's production of scalar expressions like and suggest that production is adult-like already in their third year of life.

Event-related potentials reveal increased dependency on linguistic context due to cognitive aging.

Whereas executive functions are known to be closely tied to successful language processing in children and younger adults, less is known about how age-related decline in these functions affects language processing in elderly adults. Because the abilities to use linguistic context and resolve potential ambiguities such as between an idiom's figurative and literal meaning depend on executive functions, we investigated this issue by examining elderly adults' processing of idioms in context. We recorded event-related potentials of 25 younger (age 18-28) and 25 elderly adults (age 61-74) while they read literal sentences and sentences containing an idiom (e.

Age Effects in L2 Grammar Processing as Revealed by ERPs and How (Not) to Study Them.

In this study we investigate the effect of age of acquisition (AoA) on grammatical processing in second language learners as measured by event-related brain potentials (ERPs). We compare a traditional analysis involving the calculation of averages across a certain time window of the ERP waveform, analyzed with categorical groups (early vs. late), with a generalized additive modeling analysis, which allows us to take into account the full range of variability in both AoA and time.

Prolonged L2 immersion engenders little change in morphosyntactic processing of bilingual natives.

Bilingual and monolingual language processing differ, presumably because of constant parallel activation of both languages in bilinguals. We attempt to isolate the effects of parallel activation in a group of German first-language (L1) attriters, who have grown up as monolingual natives before emigrating to an L2 environment. We hypothesized that prolonged immersion will lead to changes in the processing of morphosyntactic violations.

The impact of language co-activation on L1 and L2 speech fluency.

Fluent speech depends on the availability of well-established linguistic knowledge and routines for speech planning and articulation. A lack of speech fluency in late second-language (L2) learners may point to a deficiency of these representations, due to incomplete acquisition. Experiments on bilingual language processing have shown, however, that there are strong reasons to believe that multilingual speakers experience co-activation of the languages they speak.

An ERP study on L2 syntax processing: When do learners fail?

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) can reveal online processing differences between native speakers and second language (L2) learners during language comprehension. Using the P600 as a measure of native-likeness, we investigated processing of grammatical gender agreement in highly proficient immersed Romance L2 learners of Dutch. We demonstrate that these late learners consistently fail to show native-like sensitivity to gender violations.

Pupil dilation co-varies with memory strength of individual traces in a delayed response paired-associate task.

Studies on cognitive effort have shown that pupil dilation is a reliable indicator of memory load. However, it is conceivable that there are other sources of effort involved in memory that also affect pupil dilation. One of these is the ease with which an item can be retrieved from memory.