During language comprehension, people often predict what they are likely to encounter, but such predictions are affected by processing difficulty. In this study, we explored how speech rate influences listeners' prediction speed using three different methods. Participants read sentence contexts that either were or were not highly predictive of a final word, and we measured how quickly participants judged whether a given letter was contained in that final word (Experiment 1), named a picture corresponding to that final word (Experiment 2), and named that final word (Experiment 3). We manipulated the speech rates and contextual predictability of the sentences. Across the experiments, participants responded more slowly at a faster speech rate, and this slowing was greater in more predictable than less predictable contexts. These results suggest that a faster speech rate slows down prediction speed, reinforcing the idea that prediction demands cognitive resources.

IntroductionThis study investigated the influence of grammatical information-specifically, the use of masculine forms as generic—on sentence comprehension in Italian.MethodsA sentence evaluation paradigm was used. In each trial, a first sentence introduced a professional role name (e.g., Gli architetti uscivano...), followed by a second sentence providing gender information (e.g., una delle donne...). Participants were asked to judge whether the second sentence was a sensible continuation of the first.ResultsResults indicated that participants' judgements were biased by the masculine plural form used as generic. The analysis of reaction time data showed that female continuations led to longer reaction times than male continuations, consistent with the judgement data.DiscussionThese findings align with align with previous research showing that in gender-marked languages, such as German and French, masculine generics bias mental representations in an androcentric way.

Regressive eye movements are commonly observed in response to syntactic ambiguities, yet their characteristics and role in ambiguity resolution remain unclear. This study examined two key questions about rereading in Chinese garden-path sentences: (1) whether rereading is selective, meaning that readers allocate more or longer fixations to specific regions following garden-path disambiguation and (2) whether rereading facilitates comprehension by aiding the recovery of the globally correct interpretation. We therefore conducted an eye-tracking experiment on sentences featuring a naturally occurring syntactic ambiguity (NP1 + VP + NP2 + de + NP3). The results provide clear evidence of selective rereading, as readers refixated the ambiguous region after encountering processing difficulty. However, these refixations did not aid ambiguity resolution, suggesting that while regressions reflect sensitivity to processing disruptions, they do not always contribute to successful reinterpretation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

This study investigates the production, online processing, and offline comprehension of non-canonical structures in Mandarin-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). We tested three Mandarin non-canonical structures, which differed in word order, the presence or absence of morphosyntactic cues, and the distance between the displaced element and its trace. Syntactic priming was adopted to elicit production, and a self-paced listening task with picture verification was used to examine online processing and offline comprehension accuracy, among 22 DLD children aged 5 to 9 and 37 age-, SES-, and nonverbal IQ-matched typically developing (TD) children. Results showed a quantitative difference between DLD and TD children across non-canonical structures in production and offline comprehension. In online processing, TD children immediately used different cues when they were available, whereas DLD children relied on the most informative cue within a given structure and context and integrated redundant cues only at a later stage. These findings point toward a complex interaction of representational weakness and domain-general processing constraints whereby DLD children show difficulties in allocating processing resources to integrate multiple linguistic cues.

Previous research suggests that child HSs’ performance in offline linguistic tasks is typically worse than their age-matched monolingual peers and is modulated by linguistic and child-level factors. This study examined the comprehension and production of three Mandarin non-canonical structures in 5- to 9-year-old Mandarin–English heritage children and Mandarin-speaking monolingual children, including an online processing task. Results showed that heritage children had different performance in production and offline comprehension across structures compared to monolinguals. In online processing, they showed sensitivity to different cues similarly to monolinguals but took longer to revise initial misinterpretations. Within heritage children, we found that presence of morphosyntactic cues facilitated performance across tasks while cross-linguistic influence was only identified in production and offline comprehension but not in online processing. Additionally, input quantity predicted their production and offline comprehension accuracy of non-canonical structures, whereas age modulated their production. Lastly, online processing was not modulated by age nor input.

Korean grammar encodes relative social hierarchies among interlocutors in various ways. This study utilized honorific subject-verb agreement in Korean to investigate how social hierarchies are processed during sentence comprehension. The experimental results showed that honorific violations elicited processing difficulties. The use of an honorific verb with an unhonorifiable subject resulted in lower naturalness ratings, longer reading times, and elicited a P600, similar to effects observed with number, person, and gender agreement in Spanish or English. These findings suggest that social hierarchies have become integrated into grammar, constraining how native Korean speakers process sentences. However, the agreement between honorific subjects and verbs seems asymmetrical; the mismatch effect was smaller or absent when an honorifiable subject was not accompanied by an honorific verb, suggesting that while an honorific verb requires an honorifiable subject, the reverse is not necessarily true. The results indicate that the -si agreement in Korean is a form of morpho-syntactic agreement, despite its asymmetrical nature.

The present study investigated whether children's difficulty with non-canonical structures is due to their non-adult-like use of linguistic cues or their inability to revise misinterpretations using late-arriving cues. We adopted a priming production task and a self-paced listening task with picture verification, and included three Mandarin non-canonical structures with differing word orders and the presence or absence of morphosyntactic cues. Forty five-to-ten-year-old Mandarin-speaking children were tested and compared to adults. Results showed that children were indistinguishable from adults in how they used different cues in real-time, although their performance in offline comprehension and production was more prone to errors but improved given the increase of age. These results suggest that the current child sample has adult-like cue-use patterns and use late-arriving cues to revise misinterpretations. The observed worse offline accuracy and production difficulties relative to adults result from their less developed domain-general abilities in performing tasks.

Across four eye-tracking studies and one self-paced reading study, we test whether attraction in subject-verb agreement is affected by (a) the relative linear positions of target and distractor, and (b) the active dependency status of the distractor. We find an effect of relative position, with greater attraction in retro-active interference configurations, where the distractor is linearly closer to the critical verb (Subject…Distractor…V) than in pro-active interference where it is more distant (Distractor…Subject…V). However, within pro-active interference configurations, attraction was not affected by the active dependency status of the distractor: attraction effects were similarly small whether or not the distractor was waiting to complete an upcoming dependency at the critical verb, with Bayes Factor analyses showing evidence in favour of a null effect of active dependency status. We discuss these findings in terms of the decay of activation, and whether such decay is affected by maintenance of features in memory.

Corpus evidence suggests that in contexts in which the presence of multiple antecedents might favor plural reference, the disadvantage observed for singular reference may disappear if the potential antecedents are combined in a group-like plural entity. We examined the relative salience of antecedents in conditions where the context either made a group interpretation available (i.e., mereological entity) (e.g., The engineer hooked up the engine to the boxcar horizontal ellipsis , where group = train), or not (e.g., The engineer detached the engine from the boxcar horizontal ellipsis ). Results from three experiments in which participants were asked to identify referents for singular versus plural pronouns (Experiment 1), to confirm the referents of pronouns in a sentence completion task (Experiment 2), and to provide paraphrases for given texts (Experiment 3), collectively provided evidence that the creation of a group makes that entity (i) a possible referent for singular anaphoric reference and (ii) more salient than its constituents.

Illusions of grammaticality, where ungrammatical sentences are misperceived as grammatical (e.g. The key to the cabinets were rusty), have been widely studied during language comprehension. Such grammatical illusions have been influential in debate surrounding so-called representational and retrieval-based accounts of linguistic dependency resolution. Whether analogous illusions of plausibility occur at the level of semantic interpretation has only recently begun to be examined, and thus far, these illusions have been restricted to a narrow range of linguistic phenomena. In two eye-tracking during reading experiments (n = 48 in each) and two self-paced reading experiments (n = 192 in each) we examined the possibility of semantic illusions during the processing of adjuncts and co-ordination. Across experiments, our results suggest illusions of plausibility during dependency resolution, though interference effects were clearer in adjuncts than co-ordination. We argue that our findings are more compatible with retrieval-based rather than representational accounts of linguistic dependency resolution.

Research has shown that comprehenders represent alternative meanings to single focused words online, consistent with Rooth’s (1992) formal semantic account. However, focus can also take a broader scope over whole phrases (read the manuscript). We examined whether in these cases, alternatives are represented by testing for an interference effect of the particle only, which necessarily evokes alternatives. Using the probe recognition task, we first tested unmentioned alternatives to the constituent parts of VPs, to object nouns (Experiment 1, letter for manuscript) and verbs (Experiment 2, wrote for read). In Experiment 3, we tested alternatives to whole phrases (wrote the letter). In all experiments, alternative probes were processed slower than unrelated ones. We found varying evidence of the interference effects of only with noun, verb and whole-phrase alternatives. Overall, this study does not provide support for the generalisation of the effects of only to broad focus. Since our study was the first to use the probe recognition task with phrase-sized constituents, we additionally discuss the methodological implications of our work—we found a relatedness effect for whole phrases and this shows that the probe recognition task can be used to test the representation of larger constituents.

This study investigates the influence of stereotypical information on the representation of gender in Chinese, applying a sentence evaluation paradigm. Participants were required to decide whether the second sentence about the gender of the characters (e.g., women) was a sensible continuation of the first sentence containing plural phrase denoting a group of people with a role name (e.g., “the surgeons”). Participants' decisions were biased by the stereotypes of the role names, and were male-biased when reading neutral role names. Additionally, decision time was relatively longer when there was a conflict between the stereotype and the gender, showing the greatest difference between a feminine-biased role name and a male referential expression. The results support previous research showing that speakers use gender stereotype information in task, in languages that lack grammatical gender.

In English, it is possible for a morphologically singular collective noun like government to control both singular (syntactic) agreement and plural (semantic) agreement in the same sentence (e.g. The government has praised themselves). It has been claimed that sentences with the opposite pattern of agreeing elements are ungrammatical (e.g. *The government have praised itself), and there is a corresponding asymmetry in corpus frequencies of these two configurations. Across two acceptability judgement experiments, we show that the acceptability contrast is affected by the relative order of the two agreeing elements, with degraded acceptability in the case where the first agreeing element shows plural agreement and the second shows singular agreement, relative to the opposite configuration. This pattern is found both when the agreeing verb precedes the reflexive, and when the reflexive precedes the verb. Overall, the results suggest that the initial formation of a semantic agreement dependency between an agreement target and a collective controller makes subsequent morpho-syntactic agreement with the same controller less accessible. We argue that any theoretical account of these results would require an important role for incremental processing.

In two eye-tracking reading experiments, we used a variant of the filled gap technique to investigate how strong and weak islands are processed on a moment-to-moment basis during comprehension. Experiment 1 provided a conceptual replication of previous studies showing that real time processing is sensitive to strong islands. In the absence of an island, readers experienced processing difficulty when a pronoun appeared in a position of a predicted gap, but this difficulty was absent when the pronoun appeared inside a strong island. Experiment 2 showed an analogous effect for weak islands: a processing cost was seen for a pronoun in the position of a predicted gap in a that-complement clause, but this cost was absent in a matched whether clause, which constitutes a weak island configuration. Overall, our results are compatible with the claim that active dependency formation is suspended, or reduced, in both weak and strong island structures.

This study examines the cognitive information processes that Turkish advanced non-native speakers of English employ in assigning the referents of this and that in reading and production. We predicted that these speakers would assign referents in relation to the linear distance between discourse-linked anaphors and their referents in the discourse (i.e., based on spatial-temporal features of this and that), which means they would prefer this for a referent mentioned in the proximal chunk of text and that for a referent mentioned in the distal chunk. We also predicted that readers would not assign referents based on the focusing features of this and that. We tested our predictions in two eye- tracking reading experiments and one sentence-completion experiment. Turkish L2 learners’ on- line reference resolution in reading experiments was different from that of English native speakers that were tested in a previous study. In the eye-tracking experiments, Turkish L2 learners did not show evidence of using a recency strategy to resolve referential ambiguity and did not use spatial- temporal or focusing features of this and that to assign referents. On the other hand, in the sentence- completion experiment, the effect of prominence of discourse structure in the use of this and that was qualitatively similar to that of English native speakers, but their indexing of the degree of focus of this and that was different. Our results suggest that the difference between Turkish L2 learners and English native speakers is due to L1 interference.

We present an eye-tracking study testing a hypothesis emerging from several theories of prediction during language processing, whereby predictable words should be skipped more than unpredictable words even in syntactically illegal positions. Participants read sentences in which a target word became predictable by a certain point (e.g., “bone” is 92% predictable given, “The dog buried his. . .”), with the next word actually being an intensifier (e.g., “really”), which a noun cannot follow. The target noun remained predictable to appear later in the sentence. We used the boundary paradigm to present the predictable noun or an alternative unpredictable noun (e.g., “food”) directly after the intensifier, until participants moved beyond the intensifier, at which point the noun changed to a syntactically legal word. Participants also read sentences in which predictable or unpredictable nouns appeared in syntactically legal positions. A Bayesian linear-mixed model suggested a 5.7% predictability effect on skipping of nouns in syntactically legal positions, and a 3.1% predictability effect on skipping of nouns in illegal positions. We discuss our findings in relation to theories of lexical prediction during reading.

This study attempts to reveal the mechanisms behind the online formation of Wh-Filler-Gap Dependencies (WhFGD). Specifically, we aim to uncover the way in which maintenance and retrieval work in WhFGD processing, by paying special attention to the information that is retrieved when the gap is recognized. We use the agreement attraction phenomenon (Wagers, M. W., Lau, E. F., & Phillips, C. (2009). Agreement attraction in comprehension: Representations and processes. Journal of Memory and Language, 61(2), 206-237) as a probe. The first and second experiments examined the type of information that is maintained and how maintenance is motivated, investigating the retrieved information at the gap for reactivated fillers and definite NPs. The third experiment examined the role of the retrieval, comparing reactivated and active fillers. We contend that the information being accessed reflects the extent to which the filler is maintained, where the reader is able to access fine-grained information including category information as well as a representation of both the head and the modifier at the verb.

In two eye-tracking studies we investigated whether readers can detect a violation of the phonological-grammatical convention for the indefinite article an to be followed by a word beginning with a vowel when these two words appear in the parafovea. Across two experiments participants read sentences in which the word an was followed by a parafoveal preview that was either correct (e.g. Icelandic), incorrect and represented a phonological violation (e.g. Mongolian), or incorrect without representing a phonological violation (e.g. Ethiopian), with this parafoveal preview changing to the target word as participants made a saccade into the space preceding an. Our data suggests that participants detected the phonological violation while the target word was still two words to the right of fixation, with participants making more regressions from the previewed word and having longer go-past times on this word when they received a violation preview as opposed to a non-violation preview. We argue that participants were attempting to perform aspects of sentence integration on the basis of low-level orthographic information from the previewed word.