We investigated factors that affect the comprehension of subject-verb agreement in English, using quantification as a window into the relationship between morphosyntactic processes in language production and comprehension. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read sentences with grammatical and ungrammatical verbs, in which the plurality of the subject noun phrase was either doubly marked (via overt plural quantification and morphological marking on the noun) or singly marked (via only plural morphology on the noun). Both acceptability judgments and the ERP data showed heightened sensitivity to agreement violations when quantification provided an additional cue to the grammatical number of the subject noun phrase, over and above plural morphology. This is consistent with models of grammatical comprehension that emphasize feature prediction in tandem with cue-based memory retrieval. Our results additionally contrast with those of prior studies that showed no effects of plural quantification on agreement in language production. These findings therefore highlight some nontrivial divergences in the cues and mechanisms supporting morphosyntactic processing in language production and comprehension.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that native Mandarin speakers have pervasive difficulties processing L2 English agreement morphology. However, less is known about the lexical and morphological cues that may modulate Mandarin speakers’ sensitivity to English number agreement. To investigate this, we examined subject-verb agreement processing in English by L1 Mandarin participants using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and focused on the use of quantificational cues to noun number and their interaction with agreement morphology on the verb. Previous work in English monolinguals has shown that agreement violations elicited larger P600s when preceded by a plurally quantified subject noun phrase (NP) compared to an unquantified NP. In the present study, Mandarin speakers were tested on the same quantified and unquantified sentences (e.g.,Most/The cookiestaste/*tastes…) as in the prior work. Like the L1 English speakers, ERPs time-locked to the verb showed a reliable P600 in response to agreement violations. However, the P600 in Mandarin speakers was larger for ungrammatical verbs withunquantified subjects, a contrast with English monolinguals. First, these results demonstrate that L2 agreement violations can elicit qualitatively similar neural responses in L1 Mandarin speakers as in English monolinguals (P600 effects), a finding that is to our knowledge novel. Second, quantification modulated the P600 in the L2 speakers in a qualitatively different way than in natives. Overall, these findings suggest stronger reliance on lexical versus morphological cues to number in Mandarin speakers, and that this impacts anticipation of subsequent grammatical features.

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An idiom is classically defined as a formulaic sequence whose meaning is comprised of more than the sum of its parts. For this reason, idioms pose a unique problem for models of sentence processing, as researchers must take into account how idioms vary and along what dimensions, as these factors can modulate the ease with which an idiomatic interpretation can be activated. In order to help ensure external validity and comparability across studies, idiom research benefits from the availability of publicly available resources reporting ratings from a large number of native speakers. Resources such as the one outlined in the current paper facilitate opportunities for consensus across studies on idiom processing and help to further our goals as a research community. To this end, descriptive norms were obtained for 870 American English idioms from 2,100 participants along five dimensions: familiarity, meaningfulness, literal plausibility, global decomposability, and predictability. Idiom familiarity and meaningfulness strongly correlated with one another, whereas familiarity and meaningfulness were positively correlated with both global decomposability and predictability. Correlations with previous norming studies are also discussed.

Despite evidence for the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), many individuals with OCD lack access to needed behavioral health treatment. Although some literature suggests that virtual modes of treatment for OCD are effective, it remains unclear whether intensive programs like partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient programs (PHP and IOPs) can be delivered effectively over telehealth (TH) and within the context of a global pandemic. Limited extant research suggests that clinicians perceive attenuated treatment response during the pandemic. The trajectory and outcomes of two matched samples were compared using linear mixed modeling: a pre-COVID in-person (IP) sample ( n = 239) and COVID TH sample ( n = 239). Findings suggested that both modalities are effective at treating OCD and depressive symptoms, although the pandemic TH group required an additional 2.6 treatment days. The current study provides evidence that PHP and IOP treatment delivered via TH during the COVID-19 pandemic is approximately as effective as pre-pandemic IP treatment and provides promising findings for the future that individuals with complicated OCD who do not have access to IP treatment can still experience significant improvement in symptoms through TH PHP and IOP treatment during and potentially after the pandemic.