Human language is a unique faculty of the mind. It has been the ultimate mystery throughout the history of neuroscience. Despite many aphasia and functional imaging studies, the exact correlation between cortical language areas and subcomponents of the linguistic system has not been established. One notable drawback is that most functional imaging studies have tested language tasks at the word ...

The development of models of human sentence processing has traditionally followed one of two paths. Either the model posited a sequence of processing modules, each with its own task-speciic knowledge (e.g., syntax and semantics), or it posited a single processor utilizing diierent types of knowledge inextricably integrated into a monolithic knowledge base. Our previous work in modeling the sent...

The Problem: It has become clear that a robust full-text natural language question-answering system cannot realistically be expected any time soon. Numerous problems such as intersentential reference and paraphrasing, summarization, common sense implication, and many more, will take a long time to solve to everybody’s satisfaction. At the same time, however, it turns out that given a sophistica...

Four groups of second language (L2) learners of English from different language backgrounds (Chinese, Japanese, German & Greek) and a group of native speaker controls participated in an on-line reading-time experiment with sentences involving long-distance wh-dependencies. While the native speakers showed evidence of making use of intermediate syntactic gaps during processing, the L2 learners a...

The degree to which native and non-native readers interpret English sentences incrementally was investigated by examining plausibility effects on reanalysis processes. Experiment 1 required participants to read sentences word by word and to make on-line plausibility judgements. The results showed that natives and non-natives immediately computed the plausibility of the preferred structural anal...

Typically, the production of speech involves the conversion of ideas into sounds. The ideas seem to precede the sounds. These truisms form the rudiments of two less self-evident claims to be examined in this chapter. The first is that different types of linguistic information, or different representational vocabularies, are called on at different points in the creation of a sentence's syntactic...

Our model of sentence comprehension includes at least grammatical processes important for structure-building, and executive resources such as working memory that support these grammatical processes. We hypothesized that a core network of brain regions supports grammatical processes, and that additional brain regions are activated depending on the working memory demands associated with processin...

Models of interference in sentence processing claim that object relative clauses are harder to process than subject relatives due to interference between the subject and object noun phrase. The interference effect for object relatives at the verb should be more pronounced when the two noun phrases retrieved from memory are similar. To test this, two eye tracking experiments manipulated whether ...

Human language processing relies on many kinds of linguistic knowledge, and is sensitive to their frequency, including lexical frequencies (Tyler, 1984; Salasoo & Pisoni, 1985; MarslenWilson, 1990; Zwitserlood, 1989; Simpson & Burgess, 1985), idiom frequencies (d’Arcais, 1993), phonological neighborhood frequencies (Luce, Pisoni, & Goldfinger, 1990), subcategorization frequencies (Trueswell, Ta...

Does knowledge of sociolinguistic variation influence how we perceive and understand speech coming from different kinds of people? A series of experiments investigated whether listeners have knowledge about t/d deletion, a sociolinguistic variable, and, if so, whether this knowledge influences their language comprehension. Experiment 1 investigated listeners’ knowledge of the social correlates ...