An experiment replicating earlier research on the pronoun bias effect in reading comprehension, in which the pronoun "they" in an auditory fragment influences the syntactic analysis of an ambiguous expression, used a new technique in which words in a fragment are cumulated on an electronic monitor rather than being presented one by one.…

Two experiments investigated the effects of preceding sentence context on the naming times of sentence completion words in third-grade children and college students. In the first study subjects were shown incomplete sentences with four types of target words: best completions; semantically and syntactically appropriate, but less likely completions;…

Recent literature on individual differences in verbal ability indicates that people demonstrating high verbal comprehension are quicker and more accurate in identifying lexical items, as well as more rapid in parsing sentences. They are not, however, more sensitive to the general gist of a passage, and thus do not respond to priming from context…