Examines the importance of context in the processing of negative statements and its influence on the latency components of negative sentences. In particular, tries to determine whether the longer reaction times to such sentences in experiments could be accounted for by their inappropriateness in the experimental settings. (Author/MES)

Describes three experiments designed to determine whether grapheme-to-phoneme rules are automatically applied when a word pattern is encoded. Concludes that grapheme-to-phoneme translation is a natural response to written words, at least when naming is required, and that mediation by visual mechanisms can be ruled out. (Author/MES)

Two experiments examined the role of presupposed (or old) and focal (or new) information in integrating sentences, by measuring comprehension time for various combinations of presupposed and focal information. (Author/AM)

Two experiments examined the nature of access, storage, and comprehension of idiomatic phrases, using a phrase classification task. Results support a lexical representation hypothesis for the processing of idioms. (Author/AM)

Reports two experiments which support the hypothesis that reaction time is faster to phonemes when the phonetic context matches the listener's expectation than when the vowel context is different. Reaction time to syllable targets is equal to phoneme, matched context targets. (PMJ)

A cross-section method was used to study the developmental changes in elementary decoding and encoding processes of 163 Swedish-German bilingual students, whose length of residence in Sweden varied. It was demonstrated that decoding in two languages, expressed in terms of reaction time, develops faster than encoding. (SW)