Which repair strategy does the language system deploy when it gets garden-pathed, and what can regressive eye movements in reading tell us about reanalysis strategies? Several influential eye-tracking studies on syntactic reanalysis ([Frazier and Rayner, 1982], [Meseguer et al., 2002] and [Mitchell et al., 2008]) have addressed this question by…

Our study addresses the scope of phonological advance planning during sentence production using a novel experimental procedure. The production of German sentences in various syntactic formats (SVO, SOV, and VSO) was cued by presenting pictures of the agents of previously memorized agent-action-patient scenes. To tap the phonological activation of…

This paper investigates how readers process number ambiguous noun phrases in subject position. A speeded-grammaticality judgment experiment and two self-paced reading experiments were conducted involving number ambiguous subjects in German verb-end clauses. Number preferences for individual nouns were estimated by means of two questionnaire…

Two rating studies demonstrate that English speakers willingly produce reduced relatives with internal cause verbs (e.g., "Whisky fermented in oak barrels can have a woody taste"), and judge their acceptability based on factors known to influence ambiguity resolution, rather than on the internal/external cause distinction. Regression analyses…

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…

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…