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The gender congruency effect, and so the facilitated retrieval of grammatical gender for translation equivalents of the same gender, has been documented in the recognition of isolated words in L2. Our study investigates whether this effect extends to word recognition in sentence context and whether it is modulated by gender transparency and L2 proficiency.Sixty late unbalanced Polish–German bilinguals completed a self-paced reading task with noun phrases manipulated for lexical gender congruency with L1 (congruent, incongruent) and noun-internal gender transparency in L2 (transparent, non-transparent). L2 proficiency was assessed through the Dialang test.Reading times on the noun were analysed by means of linear mixed-effects modelling.Results showed a gender congruency effect that was limited to transparent nouns and which was greater at lower L2 proficiency levels.The study is the first to investigate the gender congruency effect in the recognition of nouns embedded in grammatical sentences.The study shows that the presence of a contextualising sentence does not eliminate the cross-language effects of grammatical gender. Furthermore, it provides first evidence that individual noun-internal gender cues modulate the gender congruency effect. The findings are discussed in terms of the relationship between gender transparency at the micro-level and the degree of activation of gender values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce Mouse Tracking for Reading (MoTR) a new incremental processing measurement tool that can be used to collect word-by-word reading times. In a MoTR trial, participants are presented with text, which is blurred, except for a small region around the tip of the mouse. Participants must move the mouse to reveal and read the text. Mouse movement is recorded, and, using a postprocessing pipeline we present, can be analyzed to produce scanpaths as well as word-by-word reading times. We validate MoTR in two suites of experiments. In the first experiment, we collect data for the English-language Provo Corpus (Luke and Christianson, 2018). We analyze scanpaths and show that participants interpolate between two types of strategies for reading during a MoTR trial – sometimes they fixate on individual words, somewhat akin to eye-tracking, while other times they produce a more constant pass over the text, slowing down in response to processing difficulties. Taking these strategies into account, we show that the word-by-word reading times produced by our data analysis pipeline correlate well with previously collected eye-tracking data for this corpus, and that these correlations are higher than those produced by SPR data, which we also collect for the corpus. Furthermore, we demonstrate that there is a linear relationship between by-word MoTR values and word-level surprisal values, as has been previously shown for eye-tracking data (Smith and Levy, 2013). In the second experiment, we assess whether MoTR can be used to study sentence processing phenomena in targeted psycholinguistics experiments. Using materials from Witzel et al. (2012), we show that MoTR can reveal English speakers' preferences for low attachment during online sentence comprehension. We argue that MoTR presents a compelling tradeoff between multiple experimental considerations: It is cheap to run and can be presented in a browser enabling the collection of data over the internet. It is more naturalistic than some alternative processing measures, allowing participants to skip words and regress to previous sentence regions. Finally, it has good sensitivity, detecting signatures of psycholinguistic processing behaviors from a relatively small number of participants. • Mouse tracking with a blur and spotlight (MoTR) can be used to record reading patterns. • Word-by-word reading times from MoTR and eye-tracking are well-correlated. • A word's information content is linearly related to its reading time in MoTR. • MoTR reading times reveal previously-studied psycholinguistic processing preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although extensive research has been carried out on opaque formulaic language where the meaning is not the sum of the individual words (i.e., idioms and many collocations), it is still not clear how cross-language congruency and frequency of exposure influence the learning of transparent formulaic language in an L2. In the current study, self-paced reading along with offline word order recognition tasks were used to investigate the role of cross-language congruency and the frequency of exposure on the learning and processing of fully transparent binomials. In the self-paced reading, Arabic second language learners of English and native English speakers encountered three types of binomial phrases either two or five times in English texts: English-only binomials, Arabic-only binomials that were translated into English, and congruent binomials (acceptable in English and Arabic). A subsequent offline task revealed that both native and non-native speakers developed knowledge of the ‘correct’ order of binomials (i.e., fish and chips, not chips and fish) after only two exposures in the self-paced reading. Native speakers were more accurate on congruent and English-only items than Arabic-only items, while non-natives speakers exhibited no differences in accuracy across the binomial types. The offline task showed that native speakers responded faster to congruent and English-only items than Arabic-only, and non-native speakers responded faster to congruent items than English-only and Arabic-only. The frequency of exposure had no effect, with no difference in response times and accuracy between two and five exposures.

This study investigated the possible effects of motivational factors on the positive effects generated by structured input on the acquisition of English causative passive forms. This investigation builds upon the work carried out within the structured input research framework with the intention to measure online effects utilising a self-paced reading test. The self-paced reading test is a reliable measurement of language processing. Fifty Chinese (L1) subjects participated in the current study. They were all learning English in a university in the United Kingdom. After receiving two motivation questionnaires three groups were formed: structured input low-motivated (n = 15); structured input high-motivated (n = 20); and a control group (n = 15). Pre-tests and post-tests (immediate and delayed) were administered before and after the instructional treatment period which lasted for 3 h over a two-day period. The main findings from this experimental study confirmed the positive effects of structured input in facilitating the correct processing of English causative passive forms (accuracy and response time). The structured input activities groups improved equally from pre-to post-tests and they both retained the positive instructional effects over a 3-week period. Motivation was not a factor influencing the positive results generated by structured input. The present study contributes to the current call in the field for more empirical research to investigate the role of instruction and individual differences and the use of online tests to measure in-depth language processing.

The disambiguation of syntactically ambiguous sentences canlead to reading difficulty, often referred to as a garden path ef-fect. The surprisal hypothesis suggests that this difficulty canbe accounted for using word predictability. We tested this hy-pothesis using predictability estimates derived from two fam-ilies of language models: grammar-based models, which ex-plicitly encode the syntax of the language; and recurrent neuralnetwork (RNN) models, which do not. Both classes of mod-els correctly predicted increased difficulty in ambiguous sen-tences compared to controls, suggesting that the syntactic rep-resentations induced by RNNs are sufficient for this purpose.At the same time, surprisal estimates derived from all mod-els systematically underestimated the magnitude of the effect,and failed to predict the difference between easier (NP/S) andharder (NP/Z) ambiguities. This suggests that it may not bepossible to reduce garden path effects to predictability

The present study seeks to substantiate a cognitively-groundedmodel of synchronic meaning variation and diachronic mean-ing change. We propose that inter-comprehender vari-ability in CONTEXT-SENSITIVITY drives variation in word-meanings along conceptual structure pathways; we test thismodel through English have and its underlying LOCATION-POSSESSION conceptual structure. Through acceptability rat-ings, self-paced reading times, and ERPs, we show thatrelevant context can facilitate the dispreferred but plausibleLOC interpretation of a have-sentence–the degree of facil-itation is predicted by individual differences in CONTEXT-SENSITIVITY, indexed here by gender and Autism Quotient.Altogether, our results suggest that the variation of have-sentences’ meanings is principled due to its unified concep-tual structure, and that conceptual structure together with con-text cooperate in guiding comprehension by modulating thesalience of competing variants in real-time. Ultimately, di-achronic change is naturally emergent from this model of nor-mal language processing.

Introduction: While phi-agreement and concord are suggested to differ in nature during the first language (L1) acquisition, the acquisition of adverb-verb TC and SV person/number agreement by Chinese Spanish second language (L2) learners has only received limited attention. The current study examined morphosyntactic processing by advanced Chinese Spanish L2 learners (L2ers), whose L1 lacks the explicit morphological marking of tense and phi-agreement. Method: Chinese Spanish L2ers and native Spanish speakers were asked to complete a self-paced grammaticality judgment task, where the grammaticality of adverb-verb TC and SV person/number agreement as well as the adverb/subject-verb distance were manipulated. Results: For both native Spanish speakers and L2ers, SV agreement violations are detected earlier and judged more accurately than adverb-verb TC violations. Furthermore, L2ers process SV number agreement less efficiently than SV person agreement (but as efficiently as adverb-verb TC). And there is no influence of the adverb/subject-verb distance on the processing of verbal inflection. Conclusions: This study suggests that advanced Chinese Spanish L2ers tend to use native-like cognitive mechanisms for phi-agreement and concord computations, though their sensitivity to agreement violations may be further influenced by the morphosyntactic feature involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human language processing mechanism assigns a structure to the incoming materials as they unfold. There is evidence that the parser prefers some attachment types over others; however, theories of sentence processing are still in dispute over the stage at which each source of information contributes to the parsing system. The present study aims to identify the nature of initial parsing decisions during sentence processing through manipulating attachment type and verbs' argument structure. To this end, we designed a self-paced reading task using globally ambiguous constructions in Dutch. The structures included double locative prepositional phrases (PPs) where the first PP could attach both to the verb (high attachment) and the noun preceding it (low attachment). To disambiguate the structures, we presented a visual context in the form of short animation clips prior to each reading task. Furthermore, we manipulated the argument structure of the sentences using 2- and 3-argument verbs. The results showed that parsing decisions were influenced by contextual cues depending on the argument structure of the verb. That is, the visual context overcame the preference for high attachment only in the case of 2-argument verbs, while this preference persisted in structures including 3-argument verbs as represented by longer reading times for the low attachment interpretations. These findings can be taken as evidence that our language processing system actively integrates information from linguistic and non-linguistic sources from the initial stages of analysis to build up meaning. We discuss our findings in light of serial and parallel models of sentence processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Recent research on the effects of processing instruction (PI) have incorporated online research methods in order to demonstrate that PI has effects on cognitive processing behaviors as well as on accuracy (e.g. Lee & Doherty, 2019a). The present study uses self-paced reading and a moving windows technique to examine the effects of PI on second language (L2) learners' processing of Spanish active and passive sentences to explore the effects of PI on instructed second language acquisition. One group received PI but the Control group did not. Between group comparisons on passive sentences showed changes in performance for the PI group but not the Control group with the PI group gaining in accuracy and processing speed, specifically faster response times to select the correct picture and faster reading time on passive verb forms. Within group analyses showed changes in the PI group's performance on all dependent variables at the immediate posttest and a subsequent decline in performance at the delayed posttest (8 weeks later). We discuss the implications of our results and treatment format for classroom and hybridized instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While parafoveal word processing plays an important role in natural reading, the underlying neural mechanism remains unclear. The present study investigated the neural basis of parafoveal processing during Chinese word reading with the co-registration of eye-tracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) using fixation-related fMRI analysis. In the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm, preview conditions (words that are identical, orthographically similar, and unrelated to target words), pre-target word frequency and target word frequency were manipulated. When fixating the pre-target word, the identical preview condition elicited lower brain activation in the left fusiform gyrus relative to unrelated and orthographically similar preview conditions and there were significant interactions of preview condition and pre-target word frequency on brain activation of the left middle frontal gyrus, left fusiform gyrus and supplementary motor area. When fixating the target word, there was a significant main effect of preview condition on brain activation of the right fusiform gyrus and a significant interaction of preview condition and pre-target word frequency on brain activation of the left middle frontal gyrus. These results suggest that fixation-related brain activation provides immediate measures and new perspectives to understand the mechanism of parafoveal processing in self-paced reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human language processing mechanism assigns a structure to the incoming materials as they unfold. There is evidence that the parser prefers some attachment types over others; however, theories of sentence processing are still in dispute over the stage at which each source of information contributes to the parsing system. The present study aims to identify the nature of initial parsing decisions during sentence processing through manipulating attachment type and verbs’ argument structure. To this end, we designed a self-paced reading task using globally ambiguous constructions in Dutch. The structures included double locative prepositional phrases (PPs) where the first PP could attach both to the verb (high attachment) and the noun preceding it (low attachment). To disambiguate the structures, we presented a visual context in the form of short animation clips prior to each reading task. Furthermore, we manipulated the argument structure of the sentences using 2- and 3-argument verbs. The results showed that parsing decisions were influenced by contextual cues depending on the argument structure of the verb. That is, the visual context overcame the preference for high attachment only in the case of 2-argument verbs, while this preference persisted in structures including 3-argument verbs as represented by longer reading times for the low attachment interpretations. These findings can be taken as evidence that our language processing system actively integrates information from linguistic and non-linguistic sources from the initial stages of analysis to build up meaning. We discuss our findings in light of serial and parallel models of sentence processing.

This study used online and offline tasks to examine whether proficient Korean learners of Chinese can analyze the syntactic structure of separable verbs in a native-like manner during real-time processing. Separable verbs are considered a unique grammar in Chinese, involving an interface of lexicon and syntax. Despite their lexical status, separable verbs occur in the form of syntactic phrases, with constituents modified by phrase-level rules in syntax. The present study demonstrates that despite native-like offline judgments on the syntactic analysis of separable verbs, the same grammatical information was not utilized in the L2 real-time processing. The results of the experiments indicate that the structural information of separable verbs was employed less in the L2 online processing due to overreliance on the lexical representations of these compounds. In contrast, it was shown that L1 speakers could access both syntactic and lexical information associated with separable verbs during real-time processing. It is suggested that when processing a construction involving an interface of syntax and lexicon, L2 speakers rely heavily on lexicon storage and underutilize structural information.

This study investigated the effects of cross-linguistic influence in Japanese speakers' integration of morphological and syntactic information during the processing of Korean transitive causative constructions. We examined whether Japanese speakers would process two types of Korean causative constructions as efficiently as native speakers: (a) when one target structure was instantiated differently from learners' L1 correspondents and (b) when the other type was unique to the L2. Although the learners showed native-like performance during an acceptability judgment task, they had difficulties with the integration of morphological and syntactic information during a self-paced reading task when the target construction gave rise to cross-linguistic competitions with the L1 correspondent, but not when the target construction was unique to the L1. Our findings support the claim that cross-linguistic cue competitions are a major source of difficulties in L2 sentence processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comprehending conditional statements is fundamental for hypothetical reasoning about situations. However, the online comprehension of conditional statements containing different conditional connectives is still debated. We report two self-paced reading experiments on German conditionals presenting the conditional connectives wenn ('if') and nur wenn ('only if') in identical discourse contexts. In Experiment 1, participants read a conditional sentence followed by the confirmed antecedent p and the confirmed or negated consequent q. The final, critical sentence was presented word by word and contained a positive or negative quantifier (ein/kein 'one/no'). Reading times of the two quantifiers did not differ between the two conditional connectives. In Experiment 2, presenting a negated antecedent, reading times for the critical positive quantifier (ein) did not differ between conditional connectives, while reading times for the negative quantifier (kein) were shorter for nur wenn than for wenn. The results show that comprehenders form distinct predictions about discourse continuations due to differences in the lexical semantics of the tested conditional connectives, shedding light on the role of conditional connectives in the online interpretation of conditionals in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study employed a self-paced reading task in conjunction with concurrent acceptability judgements to examine how similar or different English natives and Chinese learners of English are when processing non-local agreement. We also tested how determiner-number specification modulates number agreement computation in both native and non-native processing by manipulating number marking with demonstrative determiners (the versus that/these). Results suggest both groups were sensitive to non-local agreement violations, indexed by longer reading times for sentences containing number violations. Furthermore, we found determiner-number specification facilitated processing of number violations in both native and non-native groups in an acceptability judgement task only, with stronger sensitivity to violations with demonstrative determiners than those with bare determiners. Contrary to some theories that predict qualitative differences between native and non-native processing, we did not find any significant differences between native and non-native speakers, despite the fact that the Chinese speakers of English had to process a novel linguistic feature absent in their native language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated the effects of processing instruction (PI) on the acquisition of accusative case markers in German, focusing on whether PI influences learners' online processing behaviors. Third and fourth semester L1 English-L2 German learners were divided into two groups: a traditional instruction (TI) group and a PI group. Participants completed offline sentence interpretation and production tasks, as well as a self-paced reading (SPR) task, which provides a detailed investigation of how PI alters processing strategies. Results showed that the PI group outperformed the TI group on the sentence interpretation task and matched their performance on the production task. The SPR task revealed that, in some conditions, the PI group showed increased attention to and processing of accusative case markers after training, while the TI group did not. The results provide some support for the claim that PI is effective because it alters learners' processing strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-paced reading has been a widely used experimental method for study of the processing of sentences and texts. In this paper, we introduce the method to the Czech audience. We summarize its advantages and limitations and provide practical suggestions on stimuli construction and data processing. We also present different variants of the method, we discuss its ecological validity, and we summarize the experimental evidence showing that reaction times collected in self-paced reading can be linked to processing demands people might experience during reading. Finally, we present three examples of the application of the method: an experiment on agreement attraction in Czech, an experiment on garden-path sentences in Czech and an experiment studying the processing of short discourses in English. We also briefly discuss new trends that connect corpus linguistics with psycholinguistic discourse processing research and lead to the development of reading-time corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A visually enhanced self-paced reading task helps understand syntactic processing. • A disambiguation clip prior to reading task affects the initial stages of analysis. • Sentences with two and three argument verbs were processed similarly up to the verb. • Visual depiction of intended sentence meanings modulates per-word RTs. • Visual context guides parser to intended attachment type in global ambiguity. Understanding how language users navigate through syntactic ambiguities is crucial for unravelling the intricacies of sentence processing. This study explored ambiguity resolution within verb-final double prepositional phrase structures in Dutch. While previous research has largely focused on SVO structures such as those found in English, there is a scarcity of evidence regarding initial syntactic decisions in verb-final structures. The study pursued two aims: firstly, to investigate whether visual cues can direct the parser towards an intended interpretation; and secondly, to examine the potential of visual cues in priming verb subcategorization information within ambiguous sentences in the absence of linguistic input. A reading task was administered to address these objectives by assessing per-word reading times. Furthermore, ambiguity within the structures was resolved by presenting an animation clip that displayed the intended interpretation of each sentence before reading it. The results indicated that the animations provided before the reading task modulated the processing of NP- and VP-attachment interpretations of the ambiguous structures under study. However, these contextual cues did not prime subcategorized information of verbs earlier than their appearance within the sentence, as evidenced by unchanged reading profiles for the regions preceding the verb. This study demonstrates that visual contexts modulate the word-by-word processing of Dutch verb-final structures, and that verb argument structure appears to influence this process. The results are examined through various sentence processing theories, lending support to constraint-based models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lexical frequency of an upcoming word affects read-ing times even when the upcoming word is masked fromreaders (Angele et al., 2015). One explanation for thisobservation is that readers may slow down if there is highuncertainty about upcoming material. In line with thishypothesis, this study finds a positive correlation be-tween predictive entropy and self-paced reading times.This study also demonstrates that such predictive en-tropy can be effectively approximated by the surprisalof upcoming observations and that this future surprisalestimate is more predictive of reading times when thegrammar is more granular, which would be prohibitivelyexpensive for predictive entropy. These results suggestreaders engage in fine-grained predictive estimations ofcertainty about upcoming lexical and syntactic material,that such predictions influence reading times, and thatestimating that uncertainty can be done less expensivelyand more robustly with information-theoretic surprisal.

This data paper presents the experimental design and stimuli from an online self-paced reading study on the processing of emojis substituting lexically ambiguous nouns. We recorded reading times for the target ambiguous nouns and for emojis depicting either the intended target referent or a contextually inappropriate homophonous noun. Furthermore, we recorded comprehension accuracy, demographics and a self-assessment of the participants’ emoji usage frequency. The data includes all stimuli used, the raw data, the full JavaScript code for the online experiment, as well as Python and R code for the data analysis. We believe that our dataset may give important insights related to the comprehension mechanisms involved in the cognitive processing of emojis. For interpretation and discussion of the experiment, please see the original article entitled “The processing of emoji-word substitutions: A self-paced-reading study”.

The results of a self-paced reading experiment show that reading times in Dutch increase when there is a gender mismatch between the subject and a subsequent possessive pronoun, signaling an increase in processing difficulty. We hypothesized that Dutch learners of French incorrectly apply the rules of their L1 in their L2 and should therefore also show an increase in reading times in French upon encountering a possessive pronoun for which grammatical gender differs from the biological gender of the subject (the possessor). At the same time, we expected that they would have no or less difficulties in processing ungrammatical French sentences in which the biological gender of the subject/possessor matches the gender of the possessive pronoun. We did not find either of these effects in a second self-paced reading experiment. We assume that the Dutch learners of French parse the foreign language sentences in a shallow fashion.

This study examines L1-Korean speakers' online processing and offline judgments of L2-English articles using a self-paced task (SPRT) targeting implicit knowledge and an untimed acceptability judgment task (AJT) assessing explicit knowledge. SPRT results indicate that L1-Korean speakers exhibited targetlike online sensitivity to (in)appropriate use of articles, which provides evidence against the claim that L2-specific morphosyntactic structures cannot be utilized during online comprehension (Jiang, 2007). However, the same L2 speakers showed non-targetlike judgment patterns in the AJT. The discrepancy between online and offline performance is discussed in terms of the role of task effects on L2 performance and the development of implicit and explicit knowledge for L2 articles in the acquisition process. Methodological considerations for evaluating L2 knowledge are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The let alone construction (John can't run a mile, let alone a marathon) differs from standard coordination structures (with and or but) by requiring ellipsis of the second conjunct--for example, a marathon is the remnant of an elided clause [[see text] a marathon]. In support of an ellipsis account, a corpus study of British and American English finds that let alone exhibits a Locality bias, as the second conjunct preferentially contrasts with the nearest lexical item of the same syntactic type. Two self-paced reading studies show that the Locality bias is active during online processing, but must be reconciled with indicators of semantic contrast and discourse information. Further, a sentence-rating study shows that the Locality bias interacts with a Finality bias that favours placing the let alone phrase at the end of a clause, which sometimes necessitates a nonlocal contrast. Together, the results show how a general bias in ellipsis for local contrasts is affected by discourse demands, such as the need for scalar contrast imposed by let alone, thereby offering a window into how possibly divergent syntactic and discourse constraints impact sentence processing.

The current study examined the effects of workingmemory training on working memory capacity andsecond language ability in adult learners ofSpanish. In order to maximize the effect of the trainingfor language learners, the stimuli for the training taskswere Spanish words and sentences. While the traininggroup did not show greater improvements on workingmemory assessments relative to controls, they did showmore native-like patterns in a Spanish self-paced readingtask. The combination of second language materials withworking memory training may be helping users learn tocope with the increased processing demands associatedwith learning a new language, even if they are notnecessarily improving their working memory.

Language comprehension requires access to stored knowledge and the ability to combine knowledge in new, meaningful ways. Previous work has shown that processing linguistically more complex expressions ('Texas cattle rancher' vs. 'rancher') leads to slow-downs in reading during initial processing, possibly reflecting effort in combining information. Conversely, when this information must subsequently be retrieved (as in filler-gap constructions), processing is facilitated for more complex expressions, possibly because more semantic cues are available during retrieval. To follow up on this hypothesis, we tested whether information distributed across a short discourse can similarly provide effective cues for retrieval. Participants read texts introducing two referents (e.g., two senators), one of whom was described in greater detail than the other (e.g., 'The Democrat had voted for one of the senators, and the Republican had voted for the other, a man from Ohio who was running for president'). The final sentence (e.g., 'The senator who the {Republican/Democrat}had voted for…') contained a relative clause picking out either the Many-Cue referent (with 'Republican') or the One-Cue referent (with 'Democrat'). We predicted facilitated retrieval (faster reading times) for the Many-Cue condition at the verb region ('had voted for'), where readers could understand that 'The senator' is the object of the verb. As predicted, this pattern was observed at the retrieval region and continued throughout the rest of the sentence. Participants also completed the Author/Magazine Recognition Tests (ART/MRT; Stanovich and West, 1989), providing a proxy for world knowledge. Since higher ART/MRT scores may index (a) greater experience accessing relevant knowledge and/or (b) richer/more highly structured representations in semantic memory, we predicted it would be positively associated with effects of elaboration on retrieval. We did not observe the predicted interaction between ART/MRT scores and Cue condition at the retrieval region, though ART/MRT interacted with Cue condition in other locations in the sentence. In sum, we found that providing more elaborative information over the course of a text can facilitate retrieval for referents, consistent with a framework in which referential elaboration over a discourse and not just local linguistic information directly impacts information retrieval during sentence processing.

The present study (N = 109) set out to examine the role of cross-linguistic differences as a source of potential difficulty in the acceptance and online interpretation of the English singular they by Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners across two levels of second-language proficiency. Experiment 1 operationalized performance through an untimed acceptability judgment test and Experiment 2 through a self-paced reading task. Statistical analyses yielded an asymmetric pattern of results. Experiment 1 indicated that unlike native English speakers who generally accepted the singular they with all antecedent types, two Chinese EFL groups consisting of English majors (higher level) and non-English majors (lower level) both rated it as the least acceptable pronoun regardless of their proficiency level. In contrast, Experiment 2 demonstrated that like native English speakers, both Chinese EFL groups were not disrupted in their reading by the use of the singular they most of the time, although its online interpretation was modulated by L2 proficiency levels of the participants. While the English majors were not affected by the use of the singular they , the non-English majors spent a significantly longer time reading the latter region of the sentences where the singular they was used. In short, the results of the two experiments seem to indicate that under no time constraint, L2 speakers showed a heightened degree of grammar sensitivity, whereas when there was a time constraint, their grammatical sensitivity was reduced by a greater need to focus on meaning. The difficulty for Chinese EFL learners to acquire the singular they may be located at the restructuring of their existing knowledge of the plural feature of they [−PLURAL] in their mental lexicon and the adaptation to the sociocultural norms of the target language. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has demonstrated that filler-gap dependency formation is an active process in which gap filling occurs at the earliest possible gap site, in advance of identifying the location of the actual gap (Crain and Fodor 1985; Frazier 1987; Frazier and Clifton 1989; Frazier and Flores d’Arcais 1989; Omaki et al. 2015; Stowe 1986). In this study, we investigated whether this active gap filling is at work in the processing of tough-constructions. In tough-constructions, the matrix subject has to be associated with a gap in the embedded clause (Chomsky 1977; Keine and Poole 2017; Lasnik and Fiengo 1974; Rezac 2006). However, unlike a wh-phrase in wh-questions or relative clause constructions, the matrix subject in tough-constructions does not guarantee the presence of a gap. The results of a self-paced reading experiment indicated that active gap filling is nonetheless operative in the processing of tough-constructions, providing further evidence for the active nature of dependency formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the following self-paced reading study, we assess the cognitive realism of six widely used corpus-derived measures of association strength between words (collocated modifier–noun combinations like vast majority): MI, MI3, Dice coefficient, T-score, Z-score, and log-likelihood. The ability of these collocation metrics to predict reading times is tested against predictors of lexical processing cost that are widely established in the psycholinguistic and usage-based literature, respectively: forward/backward transition probability and bigram frequency. In addition, the experiment includes the treatment variable of task: it is split into two blocks which only differ in the format of interleaved comprehension questions (multiple choice vs. typed free response). Results show that the traditional corpus-linguistic metrics are outperformed by both backward transition probability and bigram frequency. Moreover, the multiple-choice condition elicits faster overall reading times than the typed condition, and the two winning metrics show stronger facilitation on the critical word (i.e. the noun in the bigrams) in the multiple-choice condition. In the typed condition, we find an effect that is weaker and, in the case of bigram frequency, longer lasting, continuing into the first spillover word. We argue that insufficient attention to task effects might have obscured the cognitive correlates of association scores in earlier research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various studies within the Good-Enough Approach observe that people often make errors in answering comprehension questions after reading garden-path sentences such as While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib. Recently, it has been claimed that readers form a full syntactic analysis of these sentences, but they do not completely prune the original misanalysis. This article presents evidence that these findings do not hold for all garden-path sentences. The main finding of the Good-Enough Approach—that the comprehension questions targeting the initial misanalysis yield significantly higher rates of incorrect answers after garden-path sentences, in comparison with after control sentences—was replicated here in three self-paced reading experiments on Czech. However, these experiments show a similar pattern of results for other comprehension questions, such as questions targeting an analysis that is not syntactically licensed at any point of processing. These results point out that certain garden-path structures may be very hard to process and that the process of garden-path repair might not be successful at all. Based on these results and the results of previous studies, the idea of a range of difficulty levels for garden-path structures is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proponents of good-enough processing suggest that readers often (mis)interpret certain sentences using fast-and-frugal heuristics, such that for non-canonical sentences (e.g., The dog was bitten by the man) people confuse the thematic roles of the nouns. We tested this theory by examining the effect of sentence canonicality on the reading of a follow-up sentence. In a self-paced reading study, 60 young and 60 older adults read an implausible sentence in either canonical (e.g., It was the peasant that executed the king) or non-canonical form (e.g., It was the king that was executed by the peasant), followed by a sentence that was implausible given a good-enough misinterpretation of the first sentence (e.g., Afterwards, the peasant rode back to the countryside) or a sentence that was implausible given a correct interpretation of the first sentence (e.g., Afterwards, the king rode back to his castle). We hypothesised that if non-canonical sentences are systematically misinterpreted, then sentence canonicality would differentially affect the reading of the two different follow-up types. Our data suggested that participants derived the same interpretations for canonical and non-canonical sentences, with no modulating effect of age group. Our findings suggest that readers do not derive an incorrect interpretation of non-canonical sentences during initial parsing, consistent with theories of misinterpretation effects that instead attribute these effects to post-interpretative processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So far, processing studies on grammatical norm violations (GNVs) in Dutch (i.e. als 'as' in comparatives) have mainly focused on general differences between GNVs and their grammatical and ungrammatical counterparts. The present study is the first to also systematically investigate between-participant and between-construction variation in the processing of GNVs, using a self-paced reading task. Age and educational level were investigated as potential sources of between-participant variation, and between-construction variation was assessed by including three GNVs that vary in the amount of prescriptive attention they receive in society. Results indeed showed that the processing of GNVs was influenced by the age and educational level of participants. Moreover, different results were obtained for different norm violations. Based on these results, we conclude that it is very important to take into account differences between participants and constructions when studying the processing of GNVs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The results of a self-paced reading experiment show that reading times in Dutch increase when there is a gender mismatch between the subject and a subsequent possessive pronoun, signaling an increase in processing difficulty. We hypothesized that Dutch learners of French incorrectly apply the rules of their L1 in their L2 and should therefore also show an increase in reading times in French upon encountering a possessive pronoun for which grammatical gender differs from the biological gender of the subject (the possessor). At the same time, we expected that they would have no or less difficulties in processing ungrammatical French sentences in which the biological gender of the subject/possessor matches the gender of the possessive pronoun. We did not find either of these effects in a second self-paced reading experiment. We assume that the Dutch learners of French parse the foreign language sentences in a shallow fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to see whether any difference between native language speakers (L1) and second language speakers (L2) exists in terms of the processing of expressions containing different levels of figurative meaning (literal, conventional metaphors, novel metaphors and semantically anomalous) and metaphor types that reflect different cognitive functions (orientational metaphors, ontological metaphors and structural metaphors). To this end, self-paced reading was used in the study. It was observed that the processing of novel metaphors and anomalous expressions, as they contain figurative meaning, took longer than literal expressions and conventional metaphors. It was found that the processing pattern was the same in both L1 and L2 groups. These findings support the view suggesting that the figurative expressions and literal expressions are interpreted in parallel / in equal time (Glucksberg, 2003; McElree and Nordlie, 1999), and oppose the one that metaphors which are perceived as conventional by L1 speakers, can be perceived as novel metaphors by the L2 group (Mashal et al. 2015; Türker, 2016). In terms of metaphor types, while there was no difference in the processing of metaphors of different types in the L1 group, it was observed that the orientational metaphors in the L2 group took longer to process than ontological metaphors and structural metaphors. It is thought that orientational metaphors will cause an additional cognitive load in L2 group because of the possible reasons such as a) orientational metaphors’ providing less conceptual structure for target concept, b) L2 group’s differences in their L1 and L2 in terms of manner features c) the differences in the use of visual imagery in L1 and L2 to process the orientational metaphors.

Sentence comprehension in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) contexts is influenced by many factors. One of the most important ones is the processing mechanism of relative clauses which can be analyzed in different frameworks by researchers. So far, a wide range of research has been conducted on the processing mechanism of relative clauses in a number of languages. The results have shown a tendency toward two major categories which have been proven to be of significance, namely subject preference and object preference. Studies conducted on native speakers of English, for instance, have demonstrated subject preference by the participants. Consequently, in this study, the researchers conducted a self-paced reading experiment employing Linger software, and the data were analyzed by using the SPSS Statistics version 25. It aims to investigate the processing mechanism of English relative clauses by Iranian EFL learners. The participants were nine males and 21 females of advanced English learners majoring in the English literature, all being native speakers of Farsi. The results indicate that that the correctness percentage of subject relative clauses, and also subject modifying ones, are significantly higher than that of object ones. The results also indicated that subject relatives were processed swifter than object relatives. Finally, the researchers discussed the reasons behind such a tendency among the participants of the experiment in terms of a number of theories and principles. The findings of this study are expected to be employed in language syllabus designing as well as in grading or sequencing of materials by educators and teaching material developers.

The present study (N = 109) set out to examine the role of cross-linguistic differences as a source of potential difficulty in the acceptance and online interpretation of the English singular they by Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners across two levels of second-language proficiency. Experiment 1 operationalized performance through an untimed acceptability judgment test and Experiment 2 through a self-paced reading task. Statistical analyses yielded an asymmetric pattern of results. Experiment 1 indicated that unlike native English speakers who generally accepted the singular they with all antecedent types, two Chinese EFL groups consisting of English majors (higher level) and non-English majors (lower level) both rated it as the least acceptable pronoun regardless of their proficiency level. In contrast, Experiment 2 demonstrated that like native English speakers, both Chinese EFL groups were not disrupted in their reading by the use of the singular they most of the time, although its online interpretation was modulated by L2 proficiency levels of the participants. While the English majors were not affected by the use of the singular they, the non-English majors spent a significantly longer time reading the latter region of the sentences where the singular they was used. In short, the results of the two experiments seem to indicate that under no time constraint, L2 speakers showed a heightened degree of grammar sensitivity, whereas when there was a time constraint, their grammatical sensitivity was reduced by a greater need to focus on meaning. The difficulty for Chinese EFL learners to acquire the singular they may be located at the restructuring of their existing knowledge of the plural feature of they [−PLURAL] in their mental lexicon and the adaptation to the sociocultural norms of the target language. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.

Expectation-based theories of sentence processing posit that processing difficulty is determined by predictability in context. While predictability quantified via surprisal has gained empirical support, this representation-agnostic measure leaves open the question of how to best approximate the human comprehender's latent probability model. This article first describes an incremental left-corner parser that incorporates information about common linguistic abstractions such as syntactic categories, predicate-argument structure, and morphological rules as a computational-level model of sentence processing. The article then evaluates a variety of structural parsers and deep neural language models as cognitive models of sentence processing by comparing the predictive power of their surprisal estimates on self-paced reading, eye-tracking, and fMRI data collected during real-time language processing. The results show that surprisal estimates from the proposed left-corner processing model deliver comparable and often superior fits to self-paced reading and eye-tracking data when compared to those from neural language models trained on much more data. This may suggest that the strong linguistic generalizations made by the proposed processing model may help predict humanlike processing costs that manifest in latency-based measures, even when the amount of training data is limited. Additionally, experiments using Transformer-based language models sharing the same primary architecture and training data show a surprising negative correlation between parameter count and fit to self-paced reading and eye-tracking data. These findings suggest that large-scale neural language models are making weaker generalizations based on patterns of lexical items rather than stronger, more humanlike generalizations based on linguistic structure.

Seminal studies on negation revealed that negative sentences are difficult to process, as they require an extra mental step. Similarly, at the discourse level, concession has been repeatedly shown to be more complex than other relations such as result because it implies the denial of an inference. The affinity between negation and concession prompted the present study to test whether overt verb polarity would affect the processing of upcoming discourse relations. In particular, it investigated whether negation can act as a cue to help process concessive relations. Results from four self-paced reading experiments indeed show a robust facilitation effect of negation on concession that cancels the baseline difference between concessive and result relations, thus nuancing existing context-blind categorizations of concession as a highly complex relation. This study furthers our understanding of how various types of cues interact in discourse processing and switches the focus from "what makes negation easier to process" to "what is made easier thanks to negation". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central component of sentence understanding is verb-argument interpretation, determining how the referents in the sentence are related to the events or states expressed by the verb. Previous work has found that comprehenders change their argument interpretations incrementally as the sentence unfolds, based on morphosyntactic (e.g., case, agreement), lexico-semantic (e.g., animacy, verb-argument fit), and discourse cues (e.g., givenness). However, it is still unknown whether these cues have a privileged role in language processing, or whether their effects on argument interpretation originate in implicit expectations based on the joint distribution of these cues with argument assignments experienced in previous language input. We compare the former, linguistic account against the latter, expectation-based account, using data from production and comprehension of transitive clauses in Swedish. Based on a large corpus of Swedish, we develop a rational (Bayesian) model of incremental argument interpretation. This model predicts the processing difficulty experienced at different points in the sentence as a function of the Bayesian surprise associated with changes in expectations over possible argument interpretations. We then test the model against reading times from a self-paced reading experiment on Swedish. We find Bayesian surprise to be a significant predictor of reading times, complementing effects of word surprisal. Bayesian surprise also captures the qualitative effects of morpho-syntactic and lexico-semantic cues. Additional model comparisons find that it—with a single degree of freedom—captures much, if not all, of the effects associated with these cues. This suggests that the effects of form- and meaning-based cues to argument interpretation are mediated through expectation-based processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cataphors precede their antecedents, so they cannot be fully interpreted until those antecedents are encountered. Some researchers propose that cataphors trigger an active search during incremental processing in which the parser predictively posits potential antecedents in upcoming syntactic positions (Kazanina et al., Journal of Memory and Language, 56[3], 384–409, 2007). One characteristic of active search is that it is persistent: If a prediction is disconfirmed in an earlier position, the parser should iteratively search later positions until the predicted element is found. Previous research has assumed, but not established, that antecedent search is persistent. In four experiments in English and Norwegian, we test this hypothesis. Two sentence completion experiments show a strong off-line preference for coreference between a fronted cataphor and the first available argument position (the main subject). When the main subject cannot be the antecedent, participants posit the antecedent in the next closest position: object position. Two self-paced reading studies demonstrate that comprehenders actively expect the antecedent of a fronted cataphor to appear in the main clause subject position, and then successively in object position if the subject does not match the cataphor in gender. Our results therefore support the claim that antecedent search is active and persistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The results of a self-paced reading study with advanced German, Dutch and French second language (L2) learners of English showed that their online comprehension of early closure (EC) sentences which are initially misanalysed by native English speakers (e.g. While John hunted the frightened rabbit escaped) was affected by whether or not, like English, their first language (L1) encodes aspect grammatically (French) or only via lexical means (German, Dutch). The English and the higher proficiency French participants showed a processing asymmetry in their online reading of the temporarily ambiguous sentences, assumed to be caused by the difference in the aspectual perspective a comprehender takes when initial verbs appear in the past simple vs. the past progressive. In contrast, the German and Dutch learners, irrespective of proficiency, treated both progressive and simple sentences in the same way, despite the fact that all the L2 learners were matched according to their metalinguistic knowledge of English aspectual distinctions. Furthermore, despite patterning with the German learners online, the Dutch L2 learners' offline judgments were more akin to those of the English native speakers and the French L2 learners, showing an effect of aspect, which could be argued to lend support to the idea that progressive aspect may be becoming grammaticalized in Dutch. Taken together, the results of this study add to our growing understanding of cross-linguistic influences during online L2 sentence processing, and differences between L2 parsing and learners' metalinguistic L2 performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined how L1 Mandarin L2 English learners with different L2 proficiency levels processed the syntactic structure of English sentences. Using a self-paced reading paradigm, this study investigated three issues: first, whether Mandarin learners of English were able to predict the syntactic structure, subject filled-gap, in online English sentence reading; second, whether the parser would commit more strongly to the subject gap analysis when there is a longer distance between the filler and the potential gap; third, how L2 proficiency levels would influence this process. The results showed that regardless of their English proficiency levels, Mandarin learners of English were capable to predict a subject filled-gap when processing English sentences. Besides, the subject filled-gap effect was not found in the sentences with adjuncts between the filler and the potential gap. This indicated that L2 learners' predictive ability in syntactic processing did not need to be activated by the increase of processing time or difficulty. Due to the efficiency of sentence processing, there is no need to increase the processing burden for L2 learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is widely acknowledged that both predictive expectations and retrodictive integration influence language processing, the individual differences that affect these two processes and the best metrics for observing them have yet to be fully described. The present study aims to contribute to the debate by investigating the extent to which experienced-based variables modulate the processing of word pairs (bigrams). Specifically, we investigate how age and reading experience correlate with lexical anticipation and integration, and how this effect can be captured by the metrics of forward and backward transition probability (TP). Participants read more and less strongly associated bigrams, paired to control for known lexical covariates such as bigram frequency and meaning (i.e., absolute control, total control, absolute silence, total silence) in a self-paced reading (SPR) task. They additionally completed assessments of exposure to print text (Author Recognition Test, Shipley vocabulary assessment, Words that Go Together task) and provided their age. Results show that both older age and lesser reading experience individually correlate with stronger TP effects. Moreover, TP effects differ across the spillover region (the two words following the noun in the bigram).

A central component of sentence understanding is verb-argument interpretation, determining how the referents in the sentence are related to the events or states expressed by the verb. Previous work has found that comprehenders change their argument interpretations incrementally as the sentence unfolds, based on morphosyntactic (e.g., case, agreement), lexico-semantic (e.g., animacy, verb-argument fit), and discourse cues (e.g., givenness). However, it is still unknown whether these cues have a privileged role in language processing, or whether their effects on argument interpretation originate in implicit expectations based on the joint distribution of these cues with argument assignments experienced in previous language input. We compare the former, linguistic account against the latter, expectation-based account, using data from production and comprehension of transitive clauses in Swedish. Based on a large corpus of Swedish, we develop a rational (Bayesian) model of incremental argument interpretation. This model predicts the processing difficulty experienced at different points in the sentence as a function of the Bayesian surprise associated with changes in expectations over possible argument interpretations. We then test the model against reading times from a self-paced reading experiment on Swedish. We find Bayesian surprise to be a significant predictor of reading times, complementing effects of word surprisal. Bayesian surprise also captures the qualitative effects of morpho-syntactic and lexico-semantic cues. Additional model comparisons find that it—with a single degree of freedom—captures much, if not all, of the effects associated with these cues. This suggests that the effects of form- and meaning-based cues to argument interpretation are mediated through expectation-based processing.