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ABSTRACT Clear communication between government administrations and citizens is a challenge in democratic societies. Public administration texts often contain technical legal terms, essential to convey specialized knowledge with precision but often impenetrable to non‐experts. The plain language movement provides guidelines for simplifying legal‐administrative texts, recommending avoiding, explaining, or replacing technical terms with more transparent synonyms. This study assesses the effect of plain terminology on the processing and comprehension of administrative texts in Spanish. We conducted a self‐paced reading experiment in which participants (N = 117) read texts with legal‐administrative terms and their plain synonyms and answered comprehension questions. Results showed that plain terms significantly improved comprehension but did not reduce reading times. Mixed linear regression analysis revealed that other term properties—length, frequency, and comprehensibility—also influenced reading speed and comprehension. These findings suggest that these factors should be considered when proposing clear alternatives to legal terminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do learners who have mastered two gender systems prior to learning a third have an advantage in gender processing over those who have mastered only one gender system? To address this question, we recruited two groups of adult Polish learners of L3/Ln Swedish with and without prior knowledge of German. They completed a self-paced reading task in Swedish that involved two types of gender marking: the indefinite article, which is realised similarly in Swedish and German, and the definite suffix, which is uniquely present in Swedish. We found that while both groups were sensitive to gender agreement violations involving the indefinite article, only learners with knowledge of German showed sensitivity to gender agreement violations involving the definite suffix. Therefore, knowledge of non-native German conferred an advantage for the processing of dissimilar rather than similar gender marking. We interpret these findings in light of morphological transfer from German that consists in the employment of the existing morphemes and assigning them new grammatical functions. More broadly, the study indicates that the gender system in a non-native language rather than the native language, might be more helpful for the acquisition of a new type of gender marking in L3/Ln. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguities, focussing on the availability of Pseudo-Relative Small Clauses (PRs) in Italian. The PR-first hypothesis posits that, when controlling for other factors, PRs are preferred over relative clauses due to their structural simplicity, leading to an apparent preference for "high attachment" in PR-licensing languages. Through a self-paced reading experiment, this study examines how PR availability affects ambiguity resolution in Italian, and how it interacts with locality principles during online sentence processing. We find a significant slowdown in the LA condition with PR-licensing verbs, also tied to lower comprehension accuracy, and unclear evidence for an advantage of LA in non-PR contexts. Overall, our results add support to the PR-first hypothesis for Italian, while opening new questions about the interplay of structural ambiguity, locality, and language-specific properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a psycholinguistic approach to the complex phenomenon of word order variation in Dutch where speakers can freely choose the position of the past participle and the auxiliary verb in bipartite final verb clusters. (1) Jeroen beweert dat Bregje de hele middag heeft geslapen. (2) Jeroen beweert dat Bregje de hele middag geslapen heeft. 'Jeroen claims that Bregje has slept all afternoon.' Previous corpus studies have shown that a range of factors associated with the variability can be related to processing complexity of the cluster's context. More specifically, it is claimed that one of the orders is the default word order that is easier to process, used in circumstances of heavy processing demands (De Sutter 2007; Bloem et al. 2017). Evidence diverges about which of the two orders is the default. In a self-paced reading experiment and a 'puzzle' production experiment conducted with 60 native speakers of Dutch, we (i) test a variety of morphosyntactic factors indicating a higher or lower processing complexity to (ii) clarify the issue of default word order. From the self-paced reading experiment it emerges that both length of the middle field before the cluster and placement of the prepositional object in extraposition have an effect on processing of the two orders. Since this effect is apparent for factors that change the structure and length of the sentence and is absent when it comes to definiteness and inheritance of preverbal constituents, it is argued that not all proposed factors are equally related to processing complexity and that there is not necessarily a default order. Furthermore, we find evidence that processing of the orders is influenced in a very different way than production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in research on language processing have originally come from group-level comparisons, but there is now a growing interest in individual differences. To investigate individual differences, tasks that have shown robust group-level differences are often used with the implicit assumption that they will also be reliable when used as an individual differences measure. Here, we examined whether one of the primary tasks used in psycholinguistic research on language processing, the self-paced reading task, can reliably measure individual differences in relative clause processing. We replicated the well-established effects of relative clauses at the group level, with object relative clauses being more difficult to process than subject relative clauses. However, when using difference scores, the reliability of the size of the relative clause effect was close to zero because the self-paced reading times for the different relative clause types were highly correlated within individuals. Nonetheless, we found that the self-paced reading task can be used to reliably capture individual differences in overall reading speed as well as key sentence regions when the two types of relative clause sentences are considered separately. Our results indicate that both the reliability and validity of different sentence regions need to be assessed to determine whether and when self-paced reading can be used to examine individual differences in language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assesses the usability of machine-translated texts in scholarly communication, using self-paced reading experiments with texts from three scientific disciplines, translated from French into English and vice versa. Thirty-two participants, proficient in the target language, participated. This study uses three machine translation engines (DeepL, ModernMT, OpenNMT), which vary in translation quality. The experiments aim to determine the relationship between translation quality and readers' reception effort, measured by reading times. The results show that for two disciplines, manual and automatic translation quality measures are significant predictors of reading time. For the most technical discipline, this study could not build models that outperformed the baseline models, which only included participant and text ID as random factors. This study acknowledges the need to include reader-specific features, such as prior knowledge, in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigated whether different morphosyntactic features, i.e. number and gender, play a role during the adult online comprehension of subject relative clauses (SRC) and object relative clauses (ORC), in Italian. This study was inspired by developmental studies showing that children struggle with ORC compared to SRC; yet, ORC comprehension improves if the head and the subject of the RC mismatch in relevant morphosyntactic features (e.g. number but not gender in Italian, based on the featural Relativized Minimality principle, fRM). We found that Italian adults read ORC more slowly than SRC verbs; moreover, ORC verbs were read faster in the head-subject number mismatch condition, while there was no facilitation in the head-subject gender mismatch condition, in line with developmental studies and fRM. We conclude that online parsing is feature-sensitive, that features are not all equally “relevant”, and that current models should be refined to account for these differences.

This study examined structural priming during online second language (L2) comprehension. In two self-paced reading experiments, 64 intermediate to advanced Chinese learners of English as a foreign language read coordinated noun phrases where the conjuncts had either the same structure or different structures. Experiment 1 showed that the second conjunct was read faster when it had the same structure as the first. This effect occurred for the structurally marked adjective phrases (e.g., a simple to grasp problem) but only showed a numerical trend for the less marked relative clauses (e.g., a problem that was simple to grasp). Experiment 2 compared unmarked adjective phrases and relative clauses (e.g., a simple problem vs. a problem that was simple) and found significant priming for both. Together, the two experiments showed that L2 comprehension priming could occur without repetition of the lexical head. Moreover, this priming was susceptible to inverse frequency effects, with the less frequent structure exhibiting greater priming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on sentence processing in inflectional languages support that syntactic structure building functionally precedes semantic processing. Conversely, most EEG studies of Chinese sentence processing do not support the priority of syntax. One possible explanation is that the Chinese language lacks morphological inflections. Another explanation may be that the presentation of separate sentence components on individual screens in EEG studies disrupts syntactic framework construction during sentence reading. The present study investigated this explanation using a self-paced reading experiment mimicking rapid serial visual presentation in EEG studies and an eye-tracking experiment reflecting natural reading. In both experiments, Chinese 'ba' sentences were presented to Chinese young adults in four conditions that differed across the dimensions of syntactic and semantic congruency. Evidence supporting the functional priority of syntax over semantics was limited to only the natural reading context, in which syntactic violations blocked the processing of semantics. Additionally, we observed a later stage of integrating plausible semantics with a failed syntax. Together, our findings extend the functional priority of syntax to the Chinese language and highlight the importance of adopting more ecologically valid methods when investigating sentence reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It remains an open question whether second language (L2) learners can process linguistic properties at the syntax–discourse interface. This study examines this issue in the context of the L2 processing of Korean dative sentences under different information structure requirements. Given that discourse constraints associated with information structure tend to manifest more strongly in noncanonical than in canonical structures, we tested whether L2 learners of Korean show sensitivity to such constraints during online processing. In a story-continuation task, both native and nonnative speaker groups showed a strong preference for producing canonical dative patterns, indicating their comparable knowledge of the canonical status of Korean dative sentences. In a self-paced reading task, both groups spent longer reading times when the word order of dative sentences did not follow given–new information structure, but only for the noncanonical and not the canonical structure. These results suggest that L2 processing of dative structures at the syntax–discourse interface relies on the same parsing architecture that guides native-speaker processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using self-paced reading, the present study compared native English and adult L1-Korean–L2-English speakers' processing behaviors during online comprehension of underinformative scalar sentences and non-scalar sentences like Some/All elephants have trunks and ears. Results indicate that native speakers showed online sensitivity (i.e. slower reading) to underinformative scalar sentences relative to non-scalar sentences, but second language (L2) speakers did not. These results are interpreted in support of the Relevance Theory claim that scalar implicature generation is modulated by contextual and individual factors, in particular by the language condition, that is, whether sentences are presented in L1-English versus L2-English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to better understand the role of syntactic similarity in a code-switched sentence, the current study explored the effect of similar and different syntactic structures on Chinese-English bilinguals’ intra-sentential switching costs. L2 proficiency and switching directions as factors that potentially intervene in bilingual performance were together explored to see if there was any interaction. We manipulated the degree of syntactic similarity by utilizing clauses in active voice (greater similarity) and passive voice (lesser similarity). The study conducted a self-paced reading paradigm as a more natural language reading processing. Results showed overall longer reading times for active sentences than passive counterparts, which supported a syntactic similarity impediment rather than facilitation. The impediment seemed to be predominant irrespective of L2 proficiency. Furthermore, syntactic similarity modulated the asymmetry of switching costs between forward (L1-L2) and backward (L2-L1) direction: word RTs for the 1st and the 2nd switched word yielded greater costs in L2-L1 condition, while greater costs in L1-L2 condition was observed in 3rd switched word RTs and average RTs. The present study observed syntactic similarity impediment rather than facilitation for Chinese-English bilinguals. Notably, syntactic similarity plays a predominant role compared to L2 proficiency, and modulates the asymmetry between switching directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research has shown that various types of conventional multiword chunks are processed faster than matched novel strings, but it is unclear whether this processing advantage extends to variant multiword chunks that are less formulaic. To determine whether the processing advantage of multiword chunks accommodates variations in the canonical phrasal template, we examined the robustness of the processing advantage (i.e., Predictability) of binomial phrases with non-canonical conjunctions (e.g., salt and also pepper; salt as well as pepper). Results from the cloze study (Experiment 1) showed that there was a high tendency of producing the canonical conjunct (pepper), even in the binomials that contained non-formulaic conjunctions. Consistent with these findings, results from two eye tracking studies (Experiments 2a and 2b) showed that canonical conjuncts were read faster than novel conjuncts that were matched on word length (e.g., paprika), even in the binomials with variant conjunctions. This robust online processing advantage was replicated in a self-paced reading study that compared all three Conjunction Types (Experiment 3). Taken together, these findings show that binomials with variant function words also receive facilitated processing relative to matched novel strings, even though both types of strings are neither conventional nor relatively frequent. Exploratory analyses revealed that this processing speed advantage was driven by the lexical-semantic association between the canonical conjuncts (salt-pepper), rather than lexical and phrasal frequency. Overall, these results highlight flexibility in the processing of multiword chunks that current models of multiword storage and processing must take into account.

The current study explores the effects of processing demands and proficiency on second language (L2) learners’ acceptability judgment of wh-island sentences. A total of 65 adult Korean learners of English and ten native speakers (NSs) of English participated in an experiment that combined self-paced reading and acceptability judgment. They were presented with wh-island and non-island sentences that varied by whether the intervening nominal constituents inside the dependency were lexical noun phrases (NPs) or pronouns. The results showed that high-proficiency learners gave a higher rating to non-island sentences than to wh-island sentences, which is comparable to the NSs’ rating pattern, whereas lowproficiency learners showed a chance-level performance. The learners preferred the lexical condition to the pronoun condition, whereas the NSs exhibited the opposite preference. In the reading time (RT) analyses, both NSs and L2 learners slowed down in the lexical condition at regions where intervening NPs occurred, indicating that lexical nouns incur higher processing costs compared with pronouns. The NSs slowed down at the embedded verb region in the pronoun condition, whereas L2 learners showed no RT difference between conditions. The findings suggest that L2 learners’ acceptability judgment is affected by their proficiency, but not as much by processing costs in terms of RT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A subset of German control verbs allows for the discontinuous linearization of their infinitival complements, a word-order pattern known as the "third construction" pattern. Compared to alternative word-order options (notably, extraposition), third constructions are very rare in present-day German. Here we ask whether the third construction pattern's low occurrence frequency can be accounted for by processing factors. We report the results from a self-paced reading task and a production priming task investigating whether third constructions are difficult to comprehend, difficult to produce, or both. Our results show that the third construction pattern's local structural ambiguity impedes comprehension, and that the pattern is also resistant to priming. We conclude that this word-order pattern is an example of a "latent" construction that is grammatically licensed but strongly dispreferred in language use because easier-to-process word-order variants are available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syntactic adaptation has been shown to occur for various temporarily ambiguous structures, wherein an initially unexpected resolution becomes easier to process after repeated exposure. More controversial and less replicated is the claim that this adaptation towards a locally frequent structure occurs due to a strategic shifting of expectations to match short-term statistical regularities such that readers adapt away from the a priori more frequent structure. Experiment 1 replicates the initial adaptation towards a coordination garden path structure using self-paced reading; however, this paradigm has been criticised for its low reliability for detecting such small effects. To this end, Experiments 2 and 3 use a combination of self-paced reading and sentence completion tasks to replicate initial adaptation towards both coordination and reduced relative garden path structures and show evidence for a preference for these structures over their a priori more frequent alternatives. Together, these data reveal that participants may be tracking local structural statistics in real time; however, they may not be able to rapidly use that information to update processing behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study tested how the Recency Preference and Predicate Proximity model (Gibson et al. in Cognition 59(1):23–59, 1996, ) plays out by examining the attachment preferences of native Russian speakers when processing locally ambiguous participial relative clause sentences with three potential NP attachment sites in Russian. Using a self-paced reading task, reading times and noun phrase selection responses were collected. Results showed significantly shorter reading times at the disambiguating region and higher accuracy rate of selection in the high-attaching condition than in the middle- and low-attaching conditions. No significant differences were found between the middle- and low-attaching conditions. We argue that Predicate Proximity is a much stronger factor than Recency Preference in Russian. [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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IntroductionWhile 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.MethodChinese 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.ResultsFor 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.ConclusionsThis 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.

This study assesses the usability of machine-translated texts in scholarly communication, using self-paced reading experiments with texts from three scientific disciplines, translated from French into English and vice versa. Thirty-two participants, proficient in the target language, participated. This study uses three machine translation engines (DeepL, ModernMT, OpenNMT), which vary in translation quality. The experiments aim to determine the relationship between translation quality and readers’ reception effort, measured by reading times. The results show that for two disciplines, manual and automatic translation quality measures are significant predictors of reading time. For the most technical discipline, this study could not build models that outperformed the baseline models, which only included participant and text ID as random factors. This study acknowledges the need to include reader-specific features, such as prior knowledge, in future research.

The self-paced reading paradigm has been popular and widely used in psycholinguistic research for several decades. The tool described in this paper, FAB (Forward and Backward reading), is a tool created to hopefully and maximally reduce the coding demands and simplify the operation costs for experimental researchers and clinical researchers who are doing experimental work, in their designing, coding, implementing, and analyzing self-paced reading tasks. Its basis in web languages (HTML, JavaScript) also promotes experimental implementation and material sharing in our era of open science. In addition, FAB has a unique forward-and-backward mode that can track regressive-like behaviors that are usually only recordable using eye-tracking or mouse-tracking equipment. In this paper, the specific application and usage of FAB is demonstrated in one laboratory and two online validation experiments. We hope this free and open-sourced tool can benefit research in a diverse range of contexts where self-paced reading is desirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates whether child second language (L2) learners can use syntactic information during the processing of sentences involving unbounded dependencies and how their processing patterns compare to those of child monolinguals and adult L2 learners. Through a self-paced reading experiment involving the numeral quantifier (NQ) construction in Korean, we tested participants' sensitivity to agreement violations between a noun phrase (NP) and an NQ in local and nonlocal conditions. The results showed that a subset of child L2 learners who demonstrated target-like knowledge of NP-NQ agreement in an offline task spent a longer processing time in the NP-NQ mismatch than in the NP-NQ match condition, in both local and nonlocal contexts. These child L2 learners' processing patterns were comparable to those observed in child monolinguals and adult L2 learners. These findings suggest that child and adult L2 learners rely on the same system of syntactic representations and processing mechanisms that guide first language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated whether native Chinese speakers' comprehension of ironic criticism is constrained by relationship closeness in two experiments. In Experiment One, participants read conversations in which speakers were close or distant in relationships and made ironic or literal remarks, and then rated the degree of sarcasm, humor, and the appropriateness of each conversation. In Experiment Two, another group of participants read those conversations and answered questions by pressing the keyboard at their own pace. Ironic criticism made by close acquaintances was less sarcastic as well as more humorous and appropriate than that made by distant ones. Besides, close relationships facilitated the processing of the target sentences of ironies, and ironic target sentences were processed at a slower pace than literal ones only in the distant-relationship condition. To conclude, relationship closeness influences the comprehension of Chinese ironic criticism both in terms of its pragmatic dimensions and the costs in reading. • Relationship closeness is an effective cue in the comprehension of Chinese ironic criticism. • Rating tasks and self-paced reading tasks were used to examine the comprehension of Chinese ironic criticism. • Close relationship increases the degree of appropriateness and humor and decreases the degree of sarcasm. • Close relationship facilitates the processing of Chinese ironic criticism by reducing its reading time duration. • Insights are provided for the current theoretical accounts of figurative language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do domain-general executive functions play in human language comprehension? To address this question, we examine the relationship between behavioral measures of comprehension and neural activity in the domain-general "multiple demand" (MD) network, which has been linked to constructs like attention, working memory, inhibitory control, and selection, and implicated in diverse goal-directed behaviors. Specifically, functional magnetic resonance imaging data collected during naturalistic story listening are compared with theory-neutral measures of online comprehension difficulty and incremental processing load (reading times and eye-fixation durations). Critically, to ensure that variance in these measures is driven by features of the linguistic stimulus rather than reflecting participant- or trial-level variability, the neuroimaging and behavioral datasets were collected in nonoverlapping samples. We find no behavioral-neural link in functionally localized MD regions; instead, this link is found in the domain-specific, fronto-temporal "core language network," in both left-hemispheric areas and their right hemispheric homotopic areas. These results argue against strong involvement of domain-general executive circuits in language comprehension.

The present study examined the effects of guided induction (GI) and deductive instruction (DI) on the acquisition of verbal negation structure in spoken Palestinian Arabic (PA) using an interpretation task in a self-paced reading paradigm. The experimental design featured a 30- item pre-test, posttest and a delayed test used to assess the short- and long- term accuracy gains and reaction times. Twenty-seven learners of Arabic as a foreign language participated in the experiment. Results indicated that both groups benefited from their respective intervention at the immediate level as indicated by accuracy gains. However, only the guided induction group improved significantly from pretest to posttest, administered 4 weeks later. It also showed that while both groups performed comparably at the immediate level, GI group outperformed DI on the delayed test. Additionally, while reading times data was not informative, GI took significantly longer response time than DI. These results are in line with Cerezo et al. (2016) and Zhuang (2019)who found an edge for GI. In addition to finding a main effect for GI, results are original in terms of experimenting with the complex Arabic negation structure, thus extending evidence to a novel structure with multi-layered complexity.

Heritage speakers—bilinguals who acquire minority languages naturalistically in infancy but are typically majority-language-dominant in adulthood—generally acquire grammars that differ systematically from the baseline input received in childhood. Yet not all areas diverge equally; understanding what characterizes divergence or resilience of a given feature is crucial to understanding heritage language acquisition. In this realm, we investigate the discourse-conditioned non-canonical word orders that mark information focus in Spanish. Focus bears the hallmarks of structures that diverge from the baseline, yet the evidence is mixed. We use an offline forced-choice task and an online self-paced reading task to compare heritage speakers' judgments and processing to the baseline's, and we find, echoing recent work, that the heritage speakers largely resemble baseline speakers. We interpret this convergence with reference to seven factors potentially affecting heritage language acquisition and identify one hypothesis—that focus facilitates processing due to its structural and pragmatic salience—as a promising explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Referential processing relies on similar cognitive functions across languages – in particular, working memory. However, this has only been investigated in spoken languages with highly similar referential systems. In contrast to spoken languages, American Sign Language (ASL) uses a spatial referential system. It is unknown whether the referential system of ASL (L1) impacts referential processing in English (L2). This cross-language impact may be of particular importance for deaf, bimodal bilinguals who sign in ASL and read in English. Self-paced reading times of pronouns in English texts were compared between ASL–English bimodal bilinguals and Chinese–English unimodal bilinguals. The results showed that L1 referential characteristics influenced pronoun reading time in L2. Furthermore, in contrast to Chinese–English bilinguals, ASL–English bilinguals' referential processing during reading of English texts relied on vocabulary knowledge – not working memory. These findings emphasize the need to expand current theories of referential processing to include more diverse types of language transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scalar implicatures involve inferring the use of a less informative term (e.g. some) to mean the negation of a more informative term (e.g. not all). A growing body of recent research on the derivation of scalar implicatures by adult second language (L2) learners shows that while they are successful in acquiring the knowledge of scalar implicatures, a property at the semantics–pragmatics interface, it remains controversial as to which mechanism, default or non-default, could account for L2 learners' derivation of scalar implicatures. The present study used an online self-paced reading task to address this issue by examining the role of the speaker's knowledge state in the interpretation of the existential quantifier some by Chinese-speaking learners of English in incremental sentence processing. Results showed that both L2 and native participants demonstrated comparable online sensitivity to the speaker's knowledge state. Critically, when the scalar implicature was computed in situations where the speaker was more likely to know whether the statement with the stronger alternative was true, it gave rise to measurable reading latency, indicative of increased processing costs. We conclude by arguing that our findings are compatible with the context-driven models within the Gricean tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human reading behavior is tuned to the statistics of natural lan-guage: the time it takes human subjects to read a word can bepredicted from estimates of the word’s probability in context.However, it remains an open question what computational ar-chitecture best characterizes the expectations deployed in realtime by humans that determine the behavioral signatures ofreading. Here we test over two dozen models, independentlymanipulating computational architecture and training datasetsize, on how well their next-word expectations predict humanreading time behavior on naturalistic text corpora. Consistentwith previous work, we find that across model architecturesand training dataset sizes the relationship between word log-probability and reading time is (near-)linear. We next evalu-ate how features of these models determine their psychometricpredictive power, or ability to predict human reading behav-ior. In general, the better a model’s next-word expectations(as measured by the traditional language modeling perplexityobjective), the better its psychometric predictive power. How-ever, we find nontrivial differences in psychometric predictivepower across model architectures. For any given perplexity,deep Transformer models and n-gram models generally showsuperior psychometric predictive power over LSTM or struc-turally supervised neural models, especially for eye movementdata. Finally, we compare models’ psychometric predictivepower to the depth of their syntactic knowledge, as measuredby a battery of syntactic generalization tests developed usingmethods from controlled psycholinguistic experiments. Onceperplexity is controlled for, we find no significant relationshipbetween syntactic knowledge and predictive power. These re-sults suggest that, at least for the present state of natural lan-guage technology, different approaches may be required to bestmodel human real-time language comprehension behavior innaturalistic reading versus behavior for controlled linguisticmaterials designed for targeted probing of syntactic knowl-edge.

Does it take more or less time to read ironic sentences than toread literal equivalents? Though this question has beenextensively discussed in the literature, the results are mixed(seeeg. Filik & Moxey, 2010). The present work attempt to accountfor the differences in the literature by considering the variableeffect of anticipating the intentions of a speaker duringcomprehension of ironic utterances used to answer yes/noquestions, as well as the role of explicit cues regarding theattitude of a speaker. The results show that both of these factorsinteract and together modulate the interpretation of a sentenceas ironic or literal as well as the utterance’s reading times. Weinterpret the results are broadly in line with the predictionsmade by the echoic mention account.

There is little consensus as to whether the use of implicit causal biases is driven exclusively by verb semantics or mediated by an interaction of verb semantics and other information sources. We tested whether the topic status of a subject modulates Korean speakers’ referential choices and processing in the interpretation of implicit consequentiality information. Results from two sentence-completion tasks (Experiment 1) showed more subject reference in participants’ continuations when the preceding subject was marked by the topic rather than the nominative marker, regardless of the directionality of the implicit consequentiality bias. In a self-paced reading task (Experiment 2), Korean speakers spent shorter reading times when the referent in the consequence clause was resolved as referring to the previous subject than when it referred to the previous object, although only in the topic-marked condition and not in the nominative-marked condition. Our results suggest that the implicit consequentiality effect remains consistent regardless of the subject’s topic status in the offline tasks, but the effect interacts with the topicality effect in real-time sentence processing. We discuss the implications of our findings for assumptions concerning the underlying mechanisms of referential resolution in discourse including causal bias verbs.

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]

This study provides a synthesis of corpus-based and experimental investigations of word-order preferences in German infinitival complementation. We carried out a systematic analysis of present-day German corpora to establish frequency distributions of different word-order options: extraposition, intraposition, and 'third construction'. We then examined, firstly, whether and to what extent corpus frequencies and processing economy constraints can predict the acceptability of these three word-order variants, and whether subject raising and subject control verbs form clearly distinguishable subclasses of infinitive-embedding verbs in terms of their word-order behaviour. Secondly, our study looks into the issue of coherence by comparing acceptability ratings for monoclausal coherent and biclausal incoherent construals of intraposed infinitives, and by examining whether a biclausal incoherent analysis gives rise to local and/or global processing difficulty. Taken together, our results revealed that (i) whilst the extraposition pattern consistently wins out over all other word-order variants for control verbs, neither frequency nor processing-based approaches to word-order variation can account for the acceptability of low-frequency variants, (ii) there is considerable verb-specific variation regarding word-order preferences both between and within the two sets of raising and control verbs under investigation, and (iii) although monoclausal coherent intraposition is rated above biclausal incoherent intraposition, the latter is not any more difficult to process than the former. Our findings indicate that frequency of occurrence and processing-related constraints interact with idiosyncratic lexical properties of individual verbs in determining German speakers' structural preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Simple Recurrent Network (SRN) has a long tradition incognitive models of language processing. More recently, gatedrecurrent networks have been proposed that often outperformthe SRN on natural language processing tasks. Here, we in-vestigate whether two types of gated networks perform betteras cognitive models of sentence reading than SRNs, beyondtheir advantage as language models. This will reveal whetherthe filtering mechanism implemented in gated networks corre-sponds to an aspect of human sentence processing. We traina series of language models differing only in the cell types oftheir recurrent layers. We then compute word surprisal valuesfor stimuli used in self-paced reading, eye-tracking, and elec-troencephalography experiments, and quantify the surprisalvalues’ fit to experimental measures that indicate human sen-tence reading effort. While the gated networks provide betterlanguage models, they do not outperform their SRN counter-part as cognitive models when language model quality is equalacross network types. Our results suggest that the differentarchitectures are equally valid as models of human sentenceprocessing.

Recurrent neural network (RNN) models of sentence process-ing have recently displayed a remarkable ability to learn as-pects of structure comprehension, as evidenced by their abilityto account for reading times on sentences with local syntac-tic ambiguities (i.e., garden-path effects). Here, we investi-gate if these models can also simulate the effect of semanticappropriateness of the ambiguity’s readings. RNN-based esti-mates of surprisal of the disambiguating verb of sentences withan NP/S-coordination ambiguity (as in ‘The wizard guards theking and the princess protects ...’) show identical patters to hu-man reading times on the same sentences: Surprisal is higheron ambiguous structures than on their disambiguated counter-parts and this effect is weaker, but not absent, in cases of poorthematic fit between the verb and its potential object (‘Theteacher baked the cake and the baker made ...’). These resultsshow that an RNN is able to simultaneously learn about struc-tural and semantic relations between words and suggest thatgarden-path phenomena may be more closely related to wordpredictability than traditionally assumed.

Relative construction is one of the complex syntactic constructions involving various structures depending on the different language typologies. Studies in several languages have shown that subject relative clauses (SRCs) are easier and faster to process than object relative clauses (ORCs). Some studies have proposed the topichood hypothsis to account for the ease and faster processing of the subject relative clause. However, based on this hypothesis, when the embedded noun phrase in a relative clause is a pronoun, the difficulty in the processing of object relative clauses is reduced. In the present study, the speed of the processing Persian subject and object relative clauses with full NP and pronoun were investigated on fourtu 20–30-year-old monolingual normal subjects using self-paced reading (SPR) experiment, one of the online experiments in psycholinguistic studies. The experiment was presented in a linear, noncumulative (i.e., moving window) SPR procedure with region-by-region segmentation. Each of the 16 sentential stimuli had 4 syntactic forms and collectively, 640 reading time data from the subjects were recorded. The findings indicated that the processing speed of the regions within relative clauses, i.e., the regions containing relative clause noun phrase and relative clause verb, were faster in pronominal ORCs, pronominal SRCs, full NP SRCs and full NP ORCs, respectively. However, the processing speed of the main clause verb region was a bit different in the various sentences containing relative clauses. The conclusions, in line with the results of a number of research in other languages, confirmed the topichood hypothesis with respect to the processing of Persian relative clauses.

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.

Two lines of theoretical research have dominated the question of the locus of gender resolution in the context of Slavic conjunct agreement. Goal Resolution accounts comprise of the assumption made by mainstream research that resolved value (masculine plural) on ConjP goal is readily available to be copied onto probe (Bošković 2009; Franks and Willer-Gold 2014; Marušič et al. 2015; Murphy and Puškar 2018). The Probe Resolution account instead argues that gender resolution takes place on probe once gender values have been copied from the two conjuncts, as proposed by Citko (2018). The current study aims to experimentally test the validity of these two theoretical accounts of gender resolution. In this objective, we first discuss the results of an elicited production study on conjunct agreement in South Slavic (Willer-Gold et al. 2018), which found production times for nine gender combinations to strongly correlate with uniformity of agreement exponents. This finding indicates that simultaneous activation of multiple conjunct agreement strategies is resolved by competition at the level of morphological exponents on probe, offering support for the Probe Resolution account. We then report a novel study comprised of three self-paced reading experiments in Croatian (n: 99) designed to validate the resolved masculine gender on ConjP goal with (in)congruent gender conjuncts. Results of this study suggest is an early predictor of the gender on the upcoming verbal target but its violation is detected late in the presence of an alternative agreement strategy in the experimental paradigm, and as expected when this alternative is eliminated from the experimental paradigm favouring Goal Resolution theories. Conflicting data from comprehension (self-paced reading) and production (elicited production) studies supporting Goal and Probe approaches are finally considered in the context of the production-comprehension asymmetry often observed in gender attraction studies.

This study applies the paradigm of self-paced reading to examine the Context Predictability Effect in the processing of Chinese and detect whether there is a prediction error cost. Context constraint strength (constraining and neutral) and word predictability (predictable and unpredictable) were strictly manipulated. The statistical results suggest that: (1) There is a Context Predictability Effect for Chinese native speakers in reading processing, which is consistent with most previous studies; (2) There is also a Context Predictability Effect for advanced Chinese L2 learners; (3) Both Chinese native speakers and Chinese L2 learners have a prediction error cost in reading processing, a finding different from those of much previous research. (4) Chinese L2 learners are significantly slower than Chinese native speakers when they conduct predictive reading processing. This paper is very enlightening in that it identifies the existence of a prediction error cost in Chinese L2 processing by means of behavioral experiments, providing evidence for the hypothesis of Lexical Prediction. In a strongly predictive setting, when encountering a plausible but unpredictable word, the brain must expend extra effort to suppress, revise, or reanalyze the material, and this may account for the prediction error cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reports on a self‐paced reading experiment exploring whether the figurativeness of collocations affects L2 processing of collocations. The participants were 40 English native speakers and 44 Chinese‐speaking English foreign language learners (including doctoral, postgraduate, and undergraduate students). To ensure that the effect emerged from the figurativeness of collocations rather than other item‐related confounds, this study added a literal–literal comparison (e.g., choose a career vs. choose a house) as a control to the experimental figurative–literal comparison (e.g., build a career vs. build a house). Results showed that L2 speakers processed figurative collocations more slowly than literal collocation controls but native speakers did not. Importantly, this processing cost for figurative collocations in L2 speakers varied by L2 proficiency but not phrase familiarity. We discuss the results in terms of the dual‐route model of formulaic and novel language processing and also incorporate them into the literal salience model of bilingual figurative processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controversy exists as to whether, compared to young adults, older adults are more, equally or less likely to make linguistic predictions while reading. While previous studies have examined age effects on the prediction of upcoming words, the prediction of upcoming syntactic structures has been largely unexplored. We compared the benefit that young and older readers gain when the syntactic structure is made predictable, as well as potential age differences in the costs involved in making predictions. In a self‐paced reading study, 60 young and 60 older adults read sentences in which noun‐phrase coordination (e.g. large pizza or tasty calzone) is made predictable through the inclusion of the word either earlier in the sentence. Results showed a benefit of the presence of either in the second half of the coordination phrase, and a cost of the presence of either in the first half. We observed no age differences in the benefit or costs of making these predictions; Bayes factor analyses offered strong evidence that these effects are age invariant. Together, these findings suggest that both older and younger adults make similar strength syntactic predictions with a similar level of difficulty. We relate this age invariance in syntactic prediction to specific aspects of the ageing process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Idioms entail a competition between bottom-up and top-down activations of literal and figurative meanings. The present study explored the involvement of cognitive control in processing Hebrew ambiguous idioms. Fifty subjects have completed a self-paced reading task and a response inhibition, stop-signal task (SST). Subjects read 26 matched pairs of almost-identical sentences, which included ambiguous idioms (e.g., "break the ice"). The ambiguity was resolved only in the third part of the sentence, which was either literal ("on the parking lot") or figurative ("with funny stories"). Figurative disambiguation parts were read significantly faster than literal ones. The means of the absolute RT difference between the literal and figurative sentences significantly correlated with the SST cognitive control measure. A comparison between three groups of cognitive control levels validated that "Good inhibitors" in the SST were also faster in processing ambiguities. The paper discusses the generality of cognitive control in linguistic processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This study investigated implicit knowledge of inflectional morphemes by Brazilian English learners as a second language (L2). Specifically, we examined whether they could detect the omission of third-person singular (-s) and simple past (-ed) morphemes; using a self-paced reading task that required automated knowledge of the L2. Additionally, we administered an English proficiency test to classify participants into higher and lower proficiency groups. The results indicate that both higher and lower proficiency participants were not sensitive to the lack of -s and -ed morphemes, as their reaction times were similar in grammatical and ungrammatical sentences involving both morphemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the findings of a self-paced reading experiment with object relative clauses and resumptive pronouns (RPs) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). There are mixed reports on processing and acceptability of RPs compared to gapped relative clauses (MELTZER-ASSCHER, 2021), even in languages in which RPs are grammatically required in some relative clauses, such as Hebrew. In BP RPs are a less frequent and somewhat stigmatized variant (MOLLICA, 1977). Our results indicate that the presence of a RP seems to impose a filled-gap effect, which is distinct from the effect caused by an ungrammatical DP, and from which the processor recovers immediately in the following segments, for which reading times equated those for the grammatical gap. The comparison with a strong pronoun in completive clauses suggests that the processing cost of RPs is not due to the presence of the pronoun per se, but due to the high predictability of an unfilled gap in low complexity relative clauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated whether first language (L1) English and second language (L2) Russian bilinguals are sensitive to structural information during L2 processing by testing their attachment preference when reading participial relative clauses with three preceding noun phrases in Russian.The participants read sentences containing a participial relative clause preceded by three noun phrases connected by genitive marking and responded to comprehension questions by indicating which noun phrase the participial relative clause modified or that the sentence was ungrammatical. Their reading times and post-reading responses were recorded.The reading times were log-transformed and fitted to a generalized linear mixed-effects model. Ungrammaticality judgment rates and noun phrase selection accuracy rates were fitted to generalized linear mixed-effects models using a binary logistic distribution.Reading times and ungrammaticality judgment rates showed that the participants preferred to attach the participial relative clause to the first and the third noun phrases. The second noun phrase was least preferred. These results contrast findings in previous studies, which have shown no attachment preference for L2 learners. We argue that the participants were sensitive to structural information, in that they were constrained by the recency preference and the predicate proximity effects, similar to native speakers.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that tested L2 learners with relative clauses preceded by three noun phrases and showed that L2 learners are also constrained by the recency preference and predicate proximity effects.We argue that our findings deviate from the null attachment preference found in previous studies, which has been used as evidence that L2 processing is fundamentally different from L1 processing. Our findings suggest that L2 learners were influenced by predicate proximity, similar to native Russian speakers, and were also mildly influenced by recency preference, which could be from this L1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]