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Full-Text Articles in Cognitive Psychology
Investigating The Language Of Time: Evaluating The Use And Comprehension Of Before And After, Kimberley R. Henderson
Investigating The Language Of Time: Evaluating The Use And Comprehension Of Before And After, Kimberley R. Henderson
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Before-initial sentences are thought to be more difficult to comprehend than after-initial sentences because they structurally mismatch the temporal order of real-world events (Münte et al., 1998). Although event knowledge is known to affect how people understand before/after-initial sentences, little is known about the role of language knowledge in comprehending these sentences. A corpus analysis of before/after-initial sentences revealed that before typically is paired with a pronoun (Before he…) whereas after is paired with verb-ing (After leaving…). Participants' eyes were tracked while they read Before/After-pronoun/verbing sentences. Reading times did not match the …
Investigating The Influence Of Grammatical Aspect On Eye-Movements, Kelly A. Nisbet
Investigating The Influence Of Grammatical Aspect On Eye-Movements, Kelly A. Nisbet
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
People’s ability to understand language is influenced by numerous factors, one of which is grammatical aspect. The present study focused on whether hearing the imperfective aspect (“The man was slicing the vegetables”; ongoing action) versus the perfective aspect (“The man had sliced the vegetables”; completed action) affects the activation of the mental representation of an outcome (e.g., a sliced carrot) and of the instrument used for a specific action (e.g., a knife for slicing). We conducted a visual-world paradigm eye-tracking study to investigate moment-by-moment language understanding (Heuttig et al., 2011). Participants listened to sentences such as those above while viewing …
The Roles Of Thematic Knowledge In Sentence Comprehension, Kazunaga Matsuki
The Roles Of Thematic Knowledge In Sentence Comprehension, Kazunaga Matsuki
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
People possess a great deal of knowledge concerning what commonly happens in various types of events. This knowledge, specifically with respect to event participants and their relations within an event (thematic knowledge), is an important component of how people understand language. A number of studies have shown a rapid influence of thematic knowledge during moment-to-moment sentence processing, in both investigations of lexical processing in sentential contexts, and temporary syntactic ambiguity resolution. The main goal of this dissertation is to further our understanding about the roles of thematic knowledge during sentence processing and sentence understanding by examining two critical unresolved issues. …