A word-by-word human sentence processing complexity metric is presented. This metric formalizes the intuition that comprehenders have more trouble on words contributing larger amounts of information about the syntactic structure of the sentence as a whole. The formalization is in terms of the conditional entropy of grammatical continuations, given…

Italian speakers were asked to name pictures of actions (e.g. "bere", to drink). Pictures were presented at the same time as distracter words that were semantically related or unrelated to the picture names, and were of the same or different grammatical class (verbs or nouns). Half of the participants named the actions as verbs in citation form,…

Argues that social language should be delayed in a second language course until a core of factual language has been built up. The article presents an account of verb-form clustering and of some of the problems caused by discrete treatment of verb forms. It also suggests how to implement verb clustering within the context of syllabus design. (11…