Two experiments showed that functional completeness--the explicit propositional surface realization of deep-structure clause relations--isolated effective and integral comprehension units, which definitions of comprehension units couched in levels of syntactic structure failed to do. (Author/RL)

Suggests that cumulative dynamic analysis of the semantic structure of the incoming message is subconsciously performed by interpreters. (Author/RL)

Native users of American Sign Language manipulated sentences in four ways: sign them at slow rate, parse them, make relatedness judgments of pairs of signs taken from each sentence, and recall the sentences. Hierarchical performance structures for each of the sentences were highly similar across tasks. (Author/RD)

Investigates the availability of surface representations for the interpretation of verb-phrase ellipsis. Results show that an elliptical verb phrase is most easily interpreted if its antecedent is in the immediately preceding sentence and that this can not be explained in terms of the unnaturalness of the passages with distant antecedents. (MM)

Reports the results of an experiment which tested the ability of native English-speaking students of Spanish and native Spanish speakers to comprehend an oral passage, in Spanish, and remember the word order of certain sentences. The findings indicate that word order significantly affected the degree of the English speakers' comprehension.…

Discusses a preliminary and sketchy hypothesis of second language comprehension based on empirical investigations into strategies and processes specific to second language comprehension. (Author/CB)

Contrasts the syntactic view of forward and backward deletion of base structure elements with the idea that pragmatic factors of situational redundancy and perceptual grouping account for conjunction reduction in children. (EKN)

Studies analyzing children's response time to detect word targets revealed that six-year-olds and younger children generally did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show, providing support for the argument that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an…

Demonstrates that the comprehension of law report discourse in newspapers in England is particularly difficult for the non-expert reader. Comparative discourse analysis of the way a particular case is reported in various newspapers shows that the discourse structure of the newspaper law report is not adequately signalled by the linguistic…

Investigates the role of morphological structure in the representation and processing of Mandarin Chinese compounds. Results provide evidence against single-layer, morpheme-based models of the Chinese mental lexicon, pointing instead to a two-layer, whole-word and morphemic model (the Multi-Level Cluster Representation Model). (67 references)…