An experiment is reported that uses cross-modal priming to look at the resolution of anaphoric reference. Subjects given a visual lexical decision test simultaneously with an auditorily presented sentence showed selective semantic activation of the pronoun's referent on the basis of the pronoun's lexical properties. This finding is discussed in…

The relationship between lower level code availability and top-down contextual processing in word recognition was investigated in two experiments. The major finding was that the increment in performance resulting from coherent organization relative to the random passage was equivalent in both normal and reversed orthographic forms. (Author/GK)

In English, the word 'to' functions as a preposition (e.g., 'to the store') and also as part of an infinitive (e.g., 'to go'). Two experiments investigated how the word 'to' is resolved by fluent undergraduate student readers. Readers comprehended sentences that contained the word 'to' preceded by sentence context that either did or did not…

An experiment replicating earlier research on the pronoun bias effect in reading comprehension, in which the pronoun "they" in an auditory fragment influences the syntactic analysis of an ambiguous expression, used a new technique in which words in a fragment are cumulated on an electronic monitor rather than being presented one by one.…

Describes three experiments that investigated the influence of a context sentence on the processing of a subsequent sentence. Concludes that context can affect within-sentence processes in comprehension. Test materials used in the experiments are appended. (FL)

Argues that WH-Movement in American Sign Language (ASL) is a leftward specifier of CP. Also argues that the occurrence of rightward WH-elements derives from independently motivated syntactic and discourse factors leading to the appearance of WH-elements in a sentence- or discourse-final positions--not by rightward WH-movement. This analysis…

In order to test hypotheses derived from the concept that grammatical, syntactic, semantic, and contextual cues affect the degree of reading comprehension in a visual display, the present investigation was undertaken using the French language. The subjects were approximately 30 college students in a second-semester elementary French course. Five…

Two experiments indicated that sentence verification times were significantly longer when a discrepancy between target sentence and context was in the syntactic presupposition, rather than in the assertion. Findings are best explained by a structural hypothesis, not by strategies designed to locate given and new information. (Author/CP)

Attempts to show that exophora falls within the category of anaphora proper and not deixis; it is in terms of a conceptual representation of the situation evoked that the anaphor is interpreted; and exphora is a more central manifestation of anaphora than the "endophoric" type. Naturally occurring data from English and French are the…

Several examples of genre analysis are examined to identify criteria employed for the identification of textual boundaries. The conclusion is that there are nonlinguistic reasons for generic staging in texts and that the search for structural divisions is a search for cognitive boundaries in terms of convention, appropriacy, and content. (42…

Cross-linguistic investigation of the importance of syntactic cues and cue processing cost in French and Spanish four through six-year-olds' sentence comprehension revealed that topological cues helped French subjects most, while local cues helped Spanish subjects most. (Author/CB)

A study investigated Japanese 3-to-5-year-olds' comprehension of sentences using the temporal terms "before" and "after" and examined whether contextual information helped the children respond correctly. The children were asked to perform a task with a toy either before or after performing another task with a different toy.…

Two experiments were conducted on the use and combination of three cues that differentiate active from passive verbs: a form of the auxiliary "be," the morphology of the passive participle of the verb, and the case-making preposition "by." In the first experiment, 59 children aged 2.9 to 5.10 years were asked to interpret…

Experiments using memory paradigms have shown that general terms receive context-dependent encodings. This experiment investigates the encoding of category and instance nouns. The results indicate that representations set up during reading are the product of both the linguistic input and of general knowledge. (Author/KC)

Describes the longitudinal emergence of verb inflections as observed in the speech of four American English-speaking children emphasizing occurrence of inflections, their linguistic/non-linguistic contexts, and their conditional use. Discusses results in terms of sentence relations between verbs and other constituents and the semantics of verb…