Speakers often repeat syntactic structures that have recently been used by them or their interlocutors. Such syntactic persistence has variously been attributed to social causes (mimicking to be well-liked), to an effort to reduce processing costs, or as a side effect of either transient activation of previously processed structure or implicit learning. We present new evidence from syntactic pe...

The present study investigated the effect of different types of text simplification (i.e., reducing the lexical and syntactic complexity of texts) on reading comprehension of English as a Foreign Language learners (EFL). Sixty female intermediate EFL learners from three intact classes in Tabarestan Language Institute in Tehran participated in the study. The intact classes were assigned to three...

We investigated whether phonological relationships at the lexical level affect syntactic encoding during sentence production. Cleland and Pickering (2003) showed that syntactic priming effects are enhanced by semantic, but not phonological relations between lexical items, suggesting that there are no effects of phonology on syntactic encoding. Here we report four experiments investigating the i...

* I investigate a Breton paradigm where excorporation takes place from morphological amalgams such as inflected lexical verbs. I propose that Breton analytic structures with auxiliation in 'do' illustrate a case of excorporation outside of syntax, in realizational morphology. The distribution of Breton excorporation is directly dependent on the output of the syntactic module : word order. The t...

Syntax is the core computational component of language. A longstanding idea about syntactic processing is that it is generally not available to conscious access, operating autonomously and automatically. However, there is little direct neurocognitive evidence on this issue. By measuring event-related potentials while human observers performed a novel cross-modal distraction task, we demonstrate...

We tested whether comprehenders can use Binding Principle B (Chomsky, 1981) to guide antecedent search during the processing of cataphoric pronouns. ran two self-paced reading experiments using gender mismatch paradigm (van Gompel & Liversedge, 2003) as an index active prediction coreference between a cataphor and main clause subject. In both experiments, we find effects at subject when with is...