Nicoletta Biondo

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Psychology

Existing psycholinguistic models typically describe agreement relations as monolithic phenomena amounting to mechanisms that check mere feature consistency. This eye-tracking study aimed at widening this perspective by investigating the time spent reading subject-verb (number, person) and adverb-verb (tense) violations on an inflected verb during s...

The present study examined the processing of temporal adverbial phrases such as “last week”, which must agree in temporal features with the verb they modify. We investigated readers’ sensitivity to this feature match or mismatch in two eye-tracking studies. The main aim of this study was to expand the range of concord phenomena which have been inve...

------------------------------- UPDATE: The final version of this work is available at https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-7054-2 ------------------------------ The processing of temporal concord anomalies (e.g., Last week/*Tomorrow I bought a car) has been rather understudied compared to the processing of other agreement relations...

The ability to think about non-present time is a crucial aspect of human cognition. Both the past and future imply a temporal displacement of an event outside the "now". They also intrinsically differ: the past refers to inalterable events; the future to alterable events, to possible worlds. Are the past and future processed similarly or differentl...

In this study, we investigated whether different morphosyntactic features, i.e., number and gender, play a role during the adult online comprehension of subject relative clauses (SRC) and object relative clauses (ORC), in Italian. This study was inspired by developmental studies showing that children struggle with ORC compared to SRC; yet, ORC comp...

Introduction While phi-agreement and concord are suggested to differ in nature during the first language (L1) acquisition, the acquisition of adverb-verb TC and SV person/number agreement by Chinese Spanish second language (L2) learners has only received limited attention. The current study examined morphosyntactic processing by advanced Chinese Sp...

The main aim of this work is to investigate the processing of past and future time reference during language comprehension. Mentally locating events in the past or future plays a key role in many fundamental aspects of human cognition and behavior, such as planning, decision-making, and self-regulation. From the psycholinguistic perspective, previo...

This ERP study aims at investigating the effect of linear distance during the processing of the temporal concord between a deictic temporal adverb and the verb (e.g. Yesterday I went/*will go to the concert). Data show that distance affects the processing of adverb-verb tense violations during later stages of the verb processing. Distal tense misma...

The aim of this thesis deals with the investigation of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the online processing of adverb-verb temporal agreement, namely the coherence in temporal features between the verb and a deictic temporal adverb (e.g. Yesterday I went/*will go to the jazz concert), during sentence comprehension. There are at least two reas...

A matter of Time (and Features): comparing Temporal Concord and Subject-Verb Agreement

How the movement of temporal adverbs can affect Tense processing