Abstract: . . .  employed implausibilities: although it is unlikely that foxes hunt poachers, it remains true that foxes can hunt (as can poachers). In a new experiment, the anomaly was a violation of the selection restriction of the verb (e.g., * ‘de vos die op de jager schoot, rende door het bos’; literal: ‘the fox that on the hunter shot, ran through the woods’; paraphrase: ‘the fox that shot the hunter, ran through the woods’). In this situation, selection restriction violations reliably elicit an N400 effect. In the present study, however, no N400 effect but a P600 effect was observed, thus replicating previous findings. 3.2. Semantic and pragmatic factors in the processing of relative clauses. Wietske Vonk, Pim Mak and Herbert Schriefers Vonk (MPI for Psycholinguistics and CLS, U. of Nijmegen), Mak (CLS, U. of Nijmegen), and Schriefers examined the role and interaction of semantic and pragmatic factors in the processing of sentences with relative clauses such as (1) and (2) below. With respect to such constructions, it has been established for several Germanic languages that readers prefer initially a subject relative (SR) reading over an object relative (OR) reading. In Dutch, the reading times of the syntactically disambiguating auxiliary and/or the words following the auxiliary were longer in the OR clause than in the SR clause. Page 12 12 ( 1) . . . the professor, that the students seen has, . . . (SR) “ the professor, who has seen the students, ” ( 2) . . . the professor, that the students . . .
. . .  semantic analysis of the word items, pseudohomophones were included as nonwords. The main results for lexical decision were as follows: The overall analysis did not yield effects of NOM, relatedness or an interaction. If, however, the group was divided based on their performance on Waters and Caplan’s (1996) reading span task, a different pattern was obtained. For high-span readers (N=26) an effect of relatedness arose as well as an interaction with NOM, thus replicating the results of Azuma and Van Orden. For the low-span readers no reliable effects were found (N=31). These results, therefore, suggest that only high span readers profit from the fact that the meanings of a word are highly related. More recent studies at NICI and at Penn State University indicate that proficient bilinguals can access semantic information in L2, and that full access to the subtle nuances of meaning in a second language may indeed be possible. Page 10 10 2.4. Bilingual word production Herbert Schriefers, Ton Dijkstra and Tau van Dijck Schriefers, Dijkstra, and Van Dijck investigated whether naming a picture in the first language (L1) leads to activation of the corresponding word in a second language (L2). Dutch-English bilinguals named pictures in L1 (Dutch) while hearing to-be-ignored distractor words. The distractors were either Dutch words that were phonologically related to the Dutch picture name, or English words that were phonologically related to the English picture name. The Dutch distractors . . .
--3000,2,750,3171,60463