Chinese is a logographic writing system that drastically differs from alphabetic scripts in many important aspects. Thus, the nature of parafoveal processing in reading Chinese may be different from that in reading alphabetic languages. Here, four eye-tracking experiments using the boundary display change paradigm (Rayner, 1975) were conducted to explore the role of high level information, like semantic and plausibility information, in the parafovea for Chinese readers. Experiments 1 and 2 used two-character words that can have the order of their component characters reversed, and still be lexical units as target words. Readers received a parafoveal preview of a target word that was either (1) identical to the target word, (2) a reversed word that was the target word with the order of its characters reversed, or (3) a control word. The results indicated that fixation durations on the target words were comparable in the identical and the reverse preview condition when the reversed preview word was plausible; however, fixation durations were longer in the reverse than the identical preview condition when the reverse preview word was implausible. This plausibility preview effect was independent of whether the reverse preview word shared the meaning with the target word or not. Moreover, a plausible reverse preview word provided more facilitation to the processing of the target word than a plausible control preview word, since the former one had orthographic overlap with the target word. Experiment 3 tested whether plausible preview words would yield a semantic preview benefit. That is, the question was whether a semantically related & plausible preview word would provide more benefit than a semantically unrelated & plausible preview word to the processing of the target word. However, such semantic preview effect was only marginally significant by participants. In addition, a plausibility preview effect was revealed in Experiment 3. Furthermore, Experiment 4 found that contextual information could affect word recognition in the parafovea: Chinese readers were more likely to encode a plausible preview word than an implausible preview word. Collectively, these experiments indicated that the plausibility of a preview word has an important role in reading Chinese.

Speakers frequently make subject-verb number agreement errors in the presence of a number-mismatching local noun (e.g., *The key to the rusty old cabinets are on the table). A series of two-choice response time (RT) experiments was used to test an account of these errors according to which a number attractor generally makes the speaker's representation of subject number less definitive, with errors arising probabilistically from a competitive decision process. As predicted by this account, the presence of a number attractor reliably slowed responding when the correct response was issued. Analysis of RT distributions showed that this slowing was not due to pronounced difficulty on a minority of trials, but instead was manifested on most trials. Error responses were not slowed compared to correct responses, suggesting that errors and correct responses emerged from a single decision process. The data patterns were modeled using the Ratcliff diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978), which explicitly assumes that variability in response output is due to random trial-to-trial variability in a range of decision parameters. Exceptions to these data patterns were observed in the case of non-intervening attraction, suggesting that this phenomenon may have a distinct cause. The results are taken to argue against standard accounts of number attraction, according to which errors occur in specific instances in which the speaker's representation of subject number is defective.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Janet Astington.

It is argued in Chapters 1 to 4 that in cognitive psychology in general, and in the disciplines of language acquisition and cognitive development in particular, there is substantial benefit to be derived from distinguishing between two representational systems, one system being deployed in long-established or highly-practiced functions, and the second deployed in novel tasks, or where difficulties interrupt the first system. It is also argued that the proper subject of cognitive development is the second of these systems. Chapters 5 and 6 are concerned in different ways with the origins of language in the individual, in particular with the question of what innate knowledge of language might be justified. It is concluded that many questions regarding innate knowledge remain open, and that a source in human evolution for knowledge of language is no more likely than sources in individual or social development. In Chapter 7 it is argued that representational drawing emerges late in the 4th year of life, and some new techniques are described for studying early representational drawing. Following these treatments of external systems of representation, Chapter 8 offers a general developmental theory of forms of representation, extending Piaget's insight that mental representation is co-extensive with thought, and that the main axis of cognitive development is the content of thought and representation. Chapters 9 to 12 apply this theory to the representation of belief and desire, and of extrinsic and intrinsic qualities of objects, by 11/2 to 4 year-old children. Chapter 13 introduces a new method for analyzing the free classification task, a task sometimes used to assess children's ability to think about intrinsic qualities, and applies this method to various data sets. Chapter 14 applies these insights and results to the problem of characterizing concepts and concept development and favourably discusses the idea that more precise knowledge of this aspect of development may help to explain certain features of early language acquisition.