Research in the past few years has investigated the semantic complexity of expressions with aspectual verbs followed by entity-denoting complements such as finish the book that led to processing costs cross-linguistically. The Structured Individual Hypothesis (SIH) proposes that aspectual verbs lexically encode a function whose value (dimension) must be resolved. This ambiguity resolution is hypothesized to occur at the verb’s complement, where a specific dimension is selected based on context (Piñango & Deo, 2016). In light of the critical role of the context in SIH, recent research (Lai et al., 2023; Lai & Piñango, 2019) has investigated how the interpretations of sentences with aspectual verbs were affected by biased contexts in an offline sentence acceptability judgment study and an online eye-tracking study. However, results of the two studies showed that biased contexts disambiguated the interpretations of aspectual verb expressions offline while processing costs in biased contexts were not found to attenuate costs in real time. The reason why conflicting results were found offline versus online and the timecourse of context effects remain unclear, but in our view it may be due to pragmatic contexts, i.e., descriptions of the utterance context used to infer the salient reading of the utterance. We used grammatical contexts – two classes of adverbs – in a self-paced reading study to examine context effects for sentences with aspectual verbs in Mandarin. We found that biased grammatical contexts not only affected the interpretations in the offline task, but crucially facilitated processing in the online experiment as well. We conclude that biased grammatical contexts predetermine the interpretations of aspectual verb expressions immediately in real time.

The present study investigated whether 4- and 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children are able to process garden-path constructions in real time when the working memory burden associated with revision and reanalysis is kept to minimum. In total, 25 4-year-olds, 25 5-year-olds, and 30 adults were tested using the visual-world paradigm of eye tracking. The obtained eye gaze patterns reflect that the 4- and 5-year-olds, like the adults, committed to an initial misinterpretation and later successfully revised their initial interpretation. The findings show that preschool children are able to revise and reanalyze their initial commitment and then arrive at the correct interpretation using the later-encountered linguistic information when processing the garden-path constructions in the current study. The findings also suggest that although the 4-year-olds successfully processed the garden-path constructions in real time, they were not as effective as the 5-year-olds and the adults in revising and reanalyzing their initial mistaken interpretation when later encountering the critical linguistic cue. Taken together, our findings call for a fine-grained model of child sentence processing.

Sophisticated robotic applications require systems to be reconfigurable at the system level. Aiming at this requirement, this paper presents the design and implementation of a software architecture for a reconfigurable real-time multi-processing system for multi-robot control. The system is partitioned into loosely coupled function units and the data modules manipulated by the function units. Modularized and unified structures of the sub-controllers and controller processes are designed and constructed. All the controller processes run autonomously and intra-sub-controller information exchange is realized by shared data modules that serve as a data repository in the sub-controller. The dynamic data-management processes are responsible for data exchange among sub-controllers and across the computer network. Among sub-controllers there is no explicit temporal synchronization and the data dependencies are maintained by using datum-based synchronization. The hardware driver is constructed as a two-layered system to facilitate adaptation to various robotic hardware systems. A series of effective schemes for software fault detection, fault anticipation and fault termination are accomplished to improve run-time safety. The system is implemented cost-effectively on a QNX real-time operating system (RTOS) based system with a complete PC architecture, and experimentally validated successfully on an experimental dual-arm test-bed. The results indicate that the architectural design and implementation are well suited for advanced application tasks.