Previous evidence suggests that when speakers produce sentences from memory or as picture descriptions, their choices of sentence structure are influenced by how easy it is to retrieve sentence material (accessibility). Three experiments assessed whether this pattern holds in naturalistic, interactive dialogue. Pairs of speakers took turns asking…

Following two individually mentioned characters in a text it is possible to successfully refer to either the individuals, or the set of two. Various factors, syntactic and pragmatic, have been found to affect the ease with which these types of reference can be made, however. This is therefore an interesting puzzle for those attempting to work out…

Are comprehenders affected by an alternative analysis that they do not adopt (a nonadopted analysis) in case of syntactic ambiguity? If the processor only considers and maintains the preferred analysis at a given time, an alternative analysis is then not considered and will hence not affect processing. In two experiments, we examined the…

In three experiments, we investigate whether speakers tend to perseverate in the assignment of emphasis to concepts with particular thematic roles across utterances. Participants matched prime sentences involving clefts (e.g., "Het is de cowboy die hij slaat," "It is the cowboy that he is hitting") to pictures and then…

We report three experiments on reference resolution in Dutch. The results of two off-line experiments and an eye-tracking study suggest that the interpretation of different referential forms--in particular, "emphatic" strong pronouns, weak pronouns, and demonstrative pronouns--cannot be satisfactorily explained in terms of a single…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

Classifier languages are spoken by a large portion of the world's population, but psychologists have only recently begun to investigate the psychological reality of classifier categories and their potential for influencing non-linguistic thought. The current work evaluates both the mental representation of classifiers and potential cognitive…

The current study examines whether young and older adults have similar preferences for animate-subject and active sentences, and for using the order of activation of a verb's arguments to determine sentence structure. Ninety-six participants produced sentences in response to three-word stimuli that included a verb and two nouns differing in…

In order to study the role of working memory in sentence formulation, we elicited errors of subject-verb agreement in spoken sentence completion, while speakers did or did not maintain an extrinsic memory load (a word list). We compared participants with low and high speaking spans (a measure of verbal working memory for sentence production). As…