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Thematic-role assignment is influenced by several classes of cues during sentence comprehension, ranging from morphological exponents of syntactic relation such as case and agreement to probabilistic cues such as prosody. The effect of these cues cross-linguistically varies, presumably reflecting their language-specific robustness in signaling thematic roles. However, language-specific frequencies are not mapped onto the cue strength in a one-to-one fashion. The present article reports two eye-tracking studies on Hungarian examining the interaction of case and prosody during the processing of case-unambiguous (Experiment 1) and case-ambiguous (Experiment 2) clauses. Eye fixations reveal that case is a strong cue for thematic role assignment, but stress only enhances the effect of case in case-unambiguous clauses. This result differs from findings reported for Italian and German in which case initial stress reduces the expectation for subject-first clauses. Furthermore, the sentence comprehension facts are not explained by corpus frequencies in Hungarian. After considering an array of hypotheses about the roots of cross-linguistic variation, we conclude that the crucial difference lies in the high reliability/availability of case cues in Hungarian in contrast to the further languages examined within this experimental paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of psycholinguistic research has revealed that during sentence interpretation adults coordinate multiple sources of information. Particularly, they draw both on linguistic properties of the message and on information from the context to constrain their interpretations. Relatively little however is known about how this integrative processor develops through language acquisition and about how children process language. In this study, two on-line picture verification tasks were used to examine how 1st, 2nd and 4th/5th grade monolingual Greek children resolve pronoun ambiguities during sentence interpretation and how their performance compares to that of adults on the same tasks. Specifically, we manipulated the type of subject pronoun, i.e. null or overt, and examined how this affected participants’ preferences for competing antecedents, i.e. in the subject or object position. The results revealed both similarities and differences in how adults and the various child groups comprehended ambiguous pronominal forms. Particularly, although adults and children alike showed sensitivity to the distribution of overt and null subject pronouns, this did not always lead to convergent interpretation preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined how noun and verb processing in bilingual visual word recognition are affected by within and between-language overlap. We investigated how word class ambiguous noun and verb cognates are processed by bilinguals, to see if co-activation of overlapping word forms between languages benefits from additional overlap within a language, and whether this effect is sensitive to the grammatical category of a word. Although effects of form overlap are ubiquitous in studies on nouns, little is known about such effects in verbs. In two experiments, Dutch–English bilinguals performed lexical decision tasks in L2 in which cognate status and word class ambiguity were manipulated in nouns and verbs. Responses to verb targets in both experiments showed facilitatory effects of both types of overlap. In contrast, noun targets in both experiments showed only a cognate effect, but no ambiguity effect. We argue that the difference between verbs and nouns arises because verb representations are more complex than those of nouns. As a consequence, verb processing benefits more from within-language form overlap than noun processing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We examined temporarily ambiguous coordination structures such as put the butter in the bowl and the pan on the towel. Minimal Attachment predicts that the ambiguous noun phrase the pan will be interpreted as a noun-phrase coordination structure because it is syntactically simpler than clausal coordination. Constraint-based theories assume that interpretations are the result of a constraint-satisfaction process, which predicts that frequency or context can bias the parser to initially pursue a more complex interpretation. The results showed an initial preference for noun-phrase coordination, despite the fact that sentential coordination is more frequent in imperative structures. These data suggest that the parser uses a syntactic simplicity heuristic for building initial structural analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Lexical ambiguity resolution was examined in children aged 7 to 10 years and adults. In Experiment 1, participants heard sentences supporting one (or neither) meaning of a balanced ambiguous word in a cross-modal naming paradigm. Naming latencies for context-congruent versus context-incongruent targets and judgements of the relatedness of targets to the sentence served as indices of appropriate context use. While younger children were faster to respond to related targets regardless of the sentence context, older children and adults showed priming only for context-appropriate targets. In Experiment 2, only a single-word context preceded the homophone, and in contrast to Experiment 1, all groups showed contextual sensitivity. Individual working-memory span and inhibition ability were also measured in Experiment 2, and more mature executive function abilities were associated with greater contextual sensitivity. These findings support a developmental model whereby sentential context use for lexical ambiguity resolution increases with age, cognitive processing capacity, and reading skill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Lingering misinterpretation and good enough processing have been widely examined. • Previous studies restricted to syntactic ambiguity (As Sue dressed the baby played). • We examined lingering misinterpretation of filler-gap dependencies. • We compared native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers in five experiments. • Results show good enough processing is a general property of L1 and L2 comprehension. Research on temporarily ambiguous "garden-path" sentences (e.g., After Mary dressed the baby laughed) has shown that initially assigned misinterpretations linger after reanalysis of the temporarily ambiguous phrase in both native (L1) and non-native (L2) readers. L2 speakers have particular difficulty with reanalysis, but the source of this L1/L2 difference is debated. Furthermore, how lingering misinterpretation may influence other aspects of language processing has not been systematically examined. We report three offline and two online experiments investigating reanalysis and misinterpretation of filler-gap dependences (e.g., Elisa noticed the truck which the policeman watched the car from). Our results showed that L1 and L2 speakers are prone to lingering misinterpretation during dependency resolution. L1/L2 differences were observed such that L2 speakers had increased difficulty reanalysing some filler-gap dependencies, however this was dependent on how the dependency was disambiguated. These results are compatible with the "good-enough" approach to language processing, and suggest that L1/L2 differences are more likely when reanalysis is particularly difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]