Presents a model of interpretation, parsing and error recovery in simultaneous translation using two experts and two amateur German-English bilingual translators orally translating from English to German. Argues that the translator first comprehends the text in English and divides it into meaningful units before translating. Study also…

Discusses research which suggests that language learning occurs by learning the regularities inherent in the semantic system and not by learning any regularities present in the syntax system. (EKN)

In open-ended and forced-choice situations, subjects were asked to interpret phrases containing superficially incompatible adjective pairs. The results demonstrate that English speakers implicitly understand proposed linguistic principles underlying prenominal adjective ordering. (SW)

Describes two experiments which demonstrated that readers use specific lexical information in comprehending sentences to anticipate and prepare for the appearance of lexical noun phrases and to postulate "gaps" that are associated with "fillers." Results also indicated that lexically based expectations involve the use of information about…

Describes an experiment where subjects were exposed to a sample of sentences from an artificial linguistic system and tested on their knowledge of the linear and hierarchical structures of the language. Suggests that learners succeed in inducing coherent grammatical systems only when input provides enough correlated cues to constituent…

A variable time delay naming latency paradigm was used to investigate the processing of noun-verb lexical ambiguities (e.g., "watch") in syntactic contexts that biased either the noun or the verb reading. Results support a two-stage model in which all reading of ambiguous words are initially accessed, followed by suppression of…

Presents evidence from artificial language experiments in support of the "marker hypothesis," i.e., that natural languages contain elements that signal the presence of syntactic constructions and that the absence of such markers would render a language virtually unusable. (Author/AM)

In a comparative study of American English speakers and British English speakers, it was examined whether segmental effects can be used in speech production as cues to syntactic structure. American speakers could use the segmental cues in syntax perception, while British speakers could not. Speakers of British English who were long-term residents…

Study examines possibility that certain story constituents are better recalled than others, suggesting a universal, underlying representation for a story by controlling for semantic content of settings, initiating events, internal responses, consequences, and reactions across versions of same story. Results show subjects transformed syntactic form…

This study was conducted to examine the acquisition of the meaning of the temporal conjunctions "before" and "after." The initial hypothesis was that in the acquisition of a word, the child learns its semantic components one at a time. The subjects were 40 school children attending the Bing Nursery School at Stanford…

The validity of using phoneme monitoring techniques to measure syntactic processing in French was validated by two experiments. Significant differences in the reaction times of 80 French-speaking academic professionals to phonemes immediately following reversible subject relative clauses and those following object relative clauses demonstrate the…

Three experiments were conducted to ascertain the effect of contextual restraints on pronoun assignment. Pronoun selection is based on integration of the context even where it is already syntactically constrained. Integration occurs during and not following the assignment of the pronoun. (PMJ)

Experiments were conducted to determine the effects of sentence contexts on word recognition and reading. The questions of whether context is predominantly facilitating or inhibiting and how automatic the influence of contexts is on word retrieval were investigated. (SW)

Two studies elicited native speaker and nonnative speaker judgments regarding preferred word order of the idioms known as "freezes." The results support the notion that rules of frozen word order are psychologically real and reflect universal language rules. (Author/AM)