Julie Boland

Over the last several years, my colleagues and I have been investigating syntactic processing in Chinese using self-paced reading, eye-tracking, and ERP paradigms. I review our recent results in three domains:

• (i) What cues guide incremental interpretation in the face is syntactic ambiguity?
• (ii) To what extent are syntactic alternatives maintained in parallel?
• (iii) Must semantic interpretations always be licensed by grammatical structure?  

I also compare our Chinese findings with results from similar experiments done in English and other Indo-European languages, with an interest in understanding what aspects of sentence comprehension are universal and what aspects might be tuned by language-specific properties.