Willem van Boxtel

• PhD Psycholinguistics
• Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University

Background & Aims Studies using eye‐tracking methodology have made important contributions to the study of language disorders such as aphasia. Nevertheless, in clinical groups especially, eye‐tracking studies often include small sample sizes, limiting the generalizability of reported findings. Online, webcam‐based tracking offers a potential soluti...

Past research suggests that Working Memory plays a role in determining relative clause attachment bias. Disambiguation preferences may further depend on Processing Speed and explicit memory demands in linguistic tasks. Given that Working Memory and Processing Speed decline with age, older adults offer a way of investigating the factors underlying d...

Unlike the gender-based systems of noun categorization in many European languages, numerous semantic categories contribute to Bantu noun class systems. Kinyarwanda, the focus of our study, has a rich inventory of noun class prefixes, but it is unknown to what degree the semantic and morphological systems underlying these noun classes influence how...

Background: Recent studies suggest older adults’ implicit learning of syntactic patterns remains largely intact. Syntactic priming has proven to be a sensitive tool to examine this implicit sensitivity. However, most priming studies with older adults have focused on production, and none have included an electrophysiological component. This study ex...

Background Grammatical encoding is impaired in many persons with aphasia (PWA), resulting in deficits in sentence production accuracies and underlying planning processes. However, relatively little is known on how these grammatical encoding deficits can be mediated in PWA. This study aimed to facilitate off-line (accuracy) and real-time (eye fixati...

The extent to which syntactic priming in comprehension is affected by ageing has not yet been extensively explored. It is further unclear whether syntactic comprehension priming persists across fillers in older adults. This study used a self-paced reading task and controlled for syntactic and lexical overlap, to (1) discover whether syntactic compr...

The ability to correctly interpret complex syntax and long sentences is gradually impaired as people age. Typical ageing is characterised by working memory deficits, which are thought to play an important role in determining whether syntax can be comprehended correctly, and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) are thought t...

Abundant evidence suggests bilinguals show advantages in inhibitory control as opposed to monolinguals. Recently, this supposed bilingual advantage has come under severe scrutiny, with new neuroimaging data contributing to the controversy. The present study employed a cross-language mixed-design electroencephalography paradigm to investigate biling...

Bilingual speakers have been hypothesised to exhibit an inhibitory control advantage when making automatic cognitive decisions (e.g. Goldfarb & Tzelgov, 2007). Furthermore, cross-linguistic Stroop tests (in which the shown word is in one language, but the priming language is different), have shown the within-language Stroop effect is larger than th...