The gender information in written Chinese third person pronouns is not symmetrically encoded: the character for "he" (, with semantic radical , meaning human) is used as a default referring to every individual, while the character for "she" (, with semantic radical , meaning woman) indicates females only. This critical feature could result in different patterns of processing of gender informati...

Phonetic markedness regarding linguistically relevant tonal patterns (Accent 2, boundary tones) in Central Swedish is discussed. Both tonal markedness and F0 turning points are assumed to be important cues for anticipatory attention to grammatical structure during speech processing. Empirical evidence from neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic experiments for the assumed relation between anticip...

There are two main domains of research in psycholinguistics: sentence processing, concerned with how the syntactic structures of sentences are computed, and text processing, concerned with how the meanings of larger units of text are understood. In recent sentence processing research, a new and controversial theme is that syntactic computations may rely heavily on statistical information about ...

Speakers who engage in the joint activity of a conversation tend to align their utterances with those of their interlocutors by reusing, reinterpreting, hence playing with co-present linguistic material. One dimension of alignment is the activation of resonance, as recently developed within the model of ‘dialogic syntax’ (Du Bois, 2001). When speakers establish cross-turn parallelisms in the fo...

The acquisition of Belief verbs lags behind the acquisition of Desire verbs in children. Some psycholinguistic theories attribute this lag to conceptual differences between the two classes, while others suggest that syntactic differences are responsible. Through computational experiments, we show that a probabilistic verb learning model exhibits the pattern of acquisition, even though there is ...

The key developments of two decades of connectionist parsing are reviewed. Connectionist parsers are assessed according to their ability to learn to represent syntactic structures from examples automatically, without being presented with symbolic grammar rules. This review also considers the extent to which connectionist parsers offer computational models of human sentence processing and provid...

Children raised in the home as English or Welsh monolinguals or English–Welsh bilinguals were tested on untrained word form recognition using both behavioral and neurophysiological procedures. Behavioral measures confirmed the onset of a familiarity effect at 11 months in English but failed to identify it in monolingual Welsh infants between 9 and 12 months. In the neurophysiological procedure ...

BACKGROUND Text analysis of personal documents provides insight into the cognition of those who complete suicide. Many personal documents are digitalized and easily found on the Internet, which can be used to advance suicide research. AIMS (1) To examine the temporal relationships between posting intensity and language use to sketch the suicidal process of a young man on the basis of his blog...

An important problem with several modeling enterprises in psycholinguistics is that they are not cumulative, unlike successful experimental research. For example, in the field of language production, quite a few models focus on a few findings only instead of trying to account simultaneously for a wide range of data. Even worse, some investigators treat their models like their toothbrushes by us...

Despite an impressive psycholinguistic effort to explore the way in which two or more languages are represented and controlled, controversy surrounds both issues. During my talk, I will show that problems of language representation and language control are intimately connected and I will propose that data from functional neuroimaging may advance a resolution. Neuroimaging data support the notio...