Listeners must integrate multiple sources of information to construct an interpretation of a sentence. We concentrate here on the alignment of prosodic and syntactic grouping during online sentence comprehension. We present the results from a …
This study tested whether listeners adapt to speaker-specific prosody in anticipatory processing, and, if so, whether adaptation is modulated by belief about the speaker’s intention. In three visual-world eye-tracking experiments, we compared how …
We show that the pupillometry method, which continuously captures minute changes in pupil size, provides a natural, real-time measure sensitive to mismatches between prosodic and syntactic group- ing. Pupillometry is increasingly used as a measure of …
This study investigated how L2 learners use prosodic boundary information in processing globally ambiguous sentences such as The boy will see the tiger with the binoculars. It was also examined whether structural analysis in L2 is affected when …
Classic reduced relative clause garden path sentences (e.g., The horse raced past the barn fell) are notoriously difficult to comprehend, even after repeated exposure (Bever, 1970; Frazier, 1979). We present a silent eye tracking experiment showing …
In a typical conversation, Speakers are assumed to be committed to the content of their utterances. Recent research has uncovered several linguistic expressions or prosodic contours that convey subtle interactions between the commitments of discourse …
Discourse particles and interjectives allow a speaker to signal how information presented in an utterance relates to her epistemic or emotive state. I present a semantics for one such interjective: the English particle what, providing evidence that …
This paper investigates the syntactic and semantic restrictions on modal adjectives that appear in prenominal and postnominal position in English, as in The stars visible include Capella. It is argued that, contrary to many current approaches, such …
Decades of psycholinguistic research have witnessed a sustained interest in whether syntactic island constraints are active during sentence comprehension. This paper examines extraction from the pseudo-coordination construction - a systematic …