Speakers reuse prior references to objects when choosing reference phrases, a phenomenon known as lexical entrainment. One explanation is that speakers want to maintain a set of previously established referential precedents. Speakers may also contrast any new referents against this previously established set, thereby avoiding applying the same…

Three experiments investigated whether speakers use constituent ordering as a mechanism for avoiding ambiguities. In utterances like ''Jane showed the letter to Mary to her mother,'' alternate orders would avoid the temporary PP-attachment ambiguity (''Jane showed her mother the letter to Mary,'' or ''Jane showed to her mother the letter to…

Theories of English phonology regard syllable onset patterns as irrelevant to the assignment of lexical stress. This paper describes three studies that challenge this position. Study 1 tested whether stress patterns on a large sample of disyllabic English words varied as a function of word onset. The incidence of trochaic stress increased…

Writing and speaking are clearly related activities, but the acts of production are different. To what extent are the underlying processes shared? This paper reports three experiments that use syntactic priming to investigate whether writing and speaking use the same mechanisms to construct syntactic form. People tended to repeat syntactic form…

Traditional syntactic accounts of verb phrase ellipsis (e.g., ''Jason laughed. Sam did [ ] too.'') categorize as ungrammatical many sentences that language users find acceptable (they ''undergenerate''); semantic accounts overgenerate. We propose that a processing theory, together with a syntactic account, does a better job of describing and…

Describes four experiments on the speech segmentation procedures of English listeners listening to English words and compares them to earlier work based on French speakers listening to French words. The results indicate that the segmentation process characteristically employed by French speakers and English speakers differs. (SED)