Using the Visual World Paradigm, the current study aimed to explore whether the mass/count distinction is determined by syntax in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on classified nouns in nominal phrases. By using dual-role classifiers, ontological count and mass nouns, and phrase structures with and without biased syntactic cues we found that the…

The influence of sublexical and lexico-syntactic factors during the grammatical gender assignment process in Spanish was studied in two experiments using the gender decision task. In Experiment 1, the regularity of the ending of gender-marked nouns (masculine nouns ended in "-o" and feminine nouns ended in "-a" and of nouns…

Extensive evidence has shown that presentation of a word (target) following a related word (prime) results in faster reaction times compared to unrelated words. Two primes preceding a target have been used to examine the effects of multiple influences on a target. Several studies have observed greater, or additive, priming effects of multiple…

We present two eye-tracking experiments that investigate lexical frequency and semantic context constraints in spoken-word recognition in German. In both experiments, the pivotal words were pairs of nouns overlapping at onset but varying in lexical frequency. In Experiment 1, German listeners showed an expected frequency bias towards…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether and when individuals with aphasia and healthy controls use lexical and prosodic information during on-line sentence comprehension. Individuals with aphasia and controls (n = 12 per group) participated in a self-paced listening experiment. The stimuli were early closure sentences, such as "While…

This study investigated children's understanding of unfamiliar noun and verb definitions in tasks that were manipulated for syntactic and semantic properties of definitions. The study was also designed to examine the relation between understanding word definitions and the skills of syntactic awareness and making inferences. A total of 117 children…

Two self paced listening experiments examined the role of prosodic phrasing in syntactic ambiguity resolution. In Experiment 1, the stimuli consisted of early closure sentences (e.g., "While the parents watched, the child sang a song.") containing transitive-biased subordinate verbs paired with plausible direct objects or intransitive-biased…

The verb has traditionally been characterized as the central element in a sentence. Nevertheless, the exact role of the verb during the actual ongoing comprehension of a sentence as it unfolds in time remains largely unknown. This paper reports the results of two Cross-Modal Lexical Priming (CMLP) experiments detailing the pattern of verb priming…

The present study examined the general hypothesis that, as for nouns, stable representations of semantic knowledge relative to situations expressed by verbs are available and accessible in long term memory in normal people. Regular associations between verbs and past tenses in French adults allowed to abstract two superordinate semantic features…

Two eye-tracking studies assessed effects of grammatical and conceptual gender cues in generic role name processing in German. Participants read passages about a social or occupational group introduced by way of a generic role name(e.g., "Soldaten"/soldiers, "Kunstler"/artists). Later in the passage the gender of this group was specified by the…

Four experiments were performed which had the goal of determining how and when young children acquire the ability to understand long distance dependencies. These studies examined the operations underlying the auditory processing of non-canonically ordered constituents in object-relative sentences. Children 4-6 years of age and an adult population…

The present study was designed to examine the processes by which grammatical gender is assigned during word production. French words varied in strength of sublexical cues, based on whether the word ending was typical for one gender rather than neutral about gender, and lexical cues, derived from the associated definite article being uninformative…

This paper addresses the problem of learning the class of raising verbs (e.g. seem). These verbs are potentially problematic for learners in that unlike typical main verbs, these verbs do not stand in a semantic relation with any Noun Phrase (NP) arguments. Moreover, a second class of verbs, known as control verbs, shares certain distributional…

We report the results of an experiment investigating the ramifications of using space to express coreference in American Sign Language (ASL). Nominals in ASL can be associated with locations in signing space, and pronouns are directed toward those locations to convey coreference. A probe recognition technique was used to investigate the case of…

Two experiments showed that French native speakers rely on sublexical and lexical cues to allocate gender during word recognition. Sublexical cues were based on whether the word ending was typical for a particular gender rather than neutral with regard to gender. Lexical cues were based on whether the associated definite article was informative…