N400 sensitivity to inhibitory load during ambiguous word processing.

EXPRESS: Measuring Individual Differences in Word-Meaning Disambiguation.

Theories of the mental lexicon must explain how people use context to interpret ambiguous words (e.g., "internal organ" vs. "musical organ") and why people vary on this core aspect of comprehension. Theoretical development has been hampered by the lack of reliable tests of disambiguation skill. We introduce a task in w...

Verbal recoding underlies visual ambiguity resolution, even in a nonlinguistic context

In language, word order can be used to help disambiguate the grammatical category (noun, verb, etc.) to which an unfamiliar or ambiguous word belongs. We have recently demonstrated that the order of stimuli impacts how ambiguous stimuli are subsequently categorized, even in a nonlinguistic context. However, it remains...

Double Negation Without Double Effort: ERP Evidence From Mandarin Chinese.

The role of the number of meanings in solving problems of recalling ambiguous information

Most modern studies devoted to the processing of ambiguous information contain in the experiment procedure stimulus material with two possible semantic meanings, leaving out cases where there may be more than two possible meanings. In addition, quite a lot of attention in such studies is devoted to the phenomenon of ne...

On the Nature of the Inhibitory Neighborhood Effect: A Masked Priming Study With European Portuguese–English Bilinguals

Most researchers assume language non-selective lexical access: when a target is presented, words sharing form and/or meaning are activated regardless of language and may compete for identification. Lexical decision studies have explored the lateral inhibition (LI) mechanism using orthographic substitution neighbors...

Reading Minds: Priming Implicit Prosody and Individual Differences in Silent Sentence Processing

Our inner experience of silent reading affects reading enjoyment, comprehension, and broader measures of literacy. Therefore, how this inner experience differs between individuals is an important question. Yet this phenomenon is remarkably difficult to investigate. This thesis examines how implicit prosody affects sent...