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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 14, 2026

Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks

Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks

Published on: September 5, 2019

"Just-Right" Is (Not) Always Right: Joint Effects of Typicality and Informativity During Real-Time Sentence

Muxuan He¹, Elsi Kaiser¹

¹Department of Linguistics, University of Southern California.

Cognitive Science

|May 13, 2026

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Language comprehension balances world knowledge typicality and communication informativeness. Context influences how people process sentence meaning, affecting understanding of both affirmative and negative statements.

Keywords:

Informativity Negation Pragmatics Self‐paced reading Sentence processing Trade‐off Typicality World knowledge

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Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Published on: May 9, 2019

Area of Science:

Cognitive Science
Psycholinguistics
Computational Linguistics

Background:

Empirical research indicates language processing is influenced by integrating linguistic input with world knowledge.
Communicative expectations, specifically informativeness, also shape real-time sentence comprehension.
The interplay between world-knowledge typicality and informativeness during language processing remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how comprehenders coordinate world-knowledge typicality and communication informativeness during sentence processing.
To propose and test a model where language comprehension is a dynamic balance between typicality and informativeness, modulated by context.

Main Methods:

Two self-paced reading studies were conducted.
Participants read affirmative and negative sentences describing part-whole relations.
Sentences varied in typicality and informativity within unmarked and unexpectedness-signaling contexts.

Main Results:

Evidence supports joint effects of typicality and informativeness on language processing.
Distinct patterns of these effects were observed for affirmative versus negative sentences.
Contextual modulation significantly influenced the balance between typicality and informativeness.

Conclusions:

Language comprehension dynamically balances world-knowledge typicality and communication informativeness.
Context plays a crucial role in modulating this balance.
Understanding sentence polarity (affirmative/negative) is key to interpreting these processing dynamics.