This report describes part of a longer study on sentence comprehension. The long range goal is to identify distinct levels of processing in terms of the types of linguistic and extralinguistic information each level uses. The focus of this part of the study is sentences with filler-gap relations, such as, "This is the girl the teacher wanted to…

A polemic is made for frame semantics and the linguistic phenomenon of anaphoric reference without noun phrase (NP) antecedent is examined within this frame. Non-syntactic anaphora is that which does not point out into the real world but rather points back into the discourse in a frame which has been built up between the speaker and hearer in a…

This research examines how semantic information influences syntactic parsing decisions during sentence processing. In the first experiment, subjects were presented lexical strings having syntactically identical surface structures but with two possible underlying structures: "The children taught by the Berlitz method," and "The…

A study of the process of listeners' and readers' generation and verification of expectations about spoken and written discourse presented to them examined the possible interactions between surface form and cognitive constraints, to establish baseline measures of the effectiveness of different sentence structures in constraining the production of…

Spanish verbs pose contextual problems for the non-native speaker in his use of the subjunctive, reflexives, and pronouns. The semantic range and syntactic contexts of many common verbs are usually treated and learned very unsystematically. One ordinarily seeks answers to contextual questions from a dictionary, but dictionaries do not provide…

It has long been said that there are an infinite number of English sentences. "This is the cat that caught the rat" is an Enqlish sentence. So is "This is the cat that caught the rat that stole the cheese.""This is the cat with white paws that caught the rat that stole the cheese" is unobjectionable as well. Since a…

In Mandarin Chinese the two lexical items "de" and "bu," when inserted into a verb-verb construction, function as positive and negative potential markers, respectively, Their insertion, however, is not very regular or uniform, because some V-V constructions require their presence, while some others take them optionally, and…

Ways in which negation varies in two dialects of French, called "standard" and "colloquial" are investigated. The two dialects under consideration are representative of an extensive scale of styles, often overlapping and varying according to social status, education, contextual situation, age, and geographical area. Although the great majority of…

Two crucial factors in teaching spelling are the teacher's understanding of the material to be learned and the teacher's understanding of the nature of the learner. Psycholinguistics is relevant to both the material and the learner. In teaching spelling, it is possible to draw insights from behavioral and cognitive psychology as well as from Noam…

This paper reports on a study conducted to determine the abilities of children to make optional transformations in sentences conjoined with "and." The subjects were 35 middle-class children between the ages of five and eight, who demonstrated average school achievement, spoke standard American English, and had normal speech and hearing. A…

The paper proposes, on the basis of a study of relative clauses and WH-interrogative constructions, to reflect the time-oriented character of the sentence by replacing neutral expressions like "#" with explicit time references like "beginning" and "end." These boundaries are to be universally associated with all…

This paper discusses one way of exploring how we perceive and understand the connections between some parts of texts, or between one sentence and the whole discourse. Understanding ellipsis involves non-syntactic understanding; the semantic structure is responsible for our understanding of elliptical sentences and encoding the knowledge contained…

To determine whether poor readers employ less efficient strategies in processing logical connectives than do good readers, 34 ninth grade students participated in a study. Half of the students were good readers and half were poor readers. An acquisition list consisting of 18 target sentences and 6 fillers was constructed. A list of 42 recognition…

Grammatical theories that rely exclusively on the categorical nature of constituents to determine their syntactic behavior encounter problems when dealing with cleft construction. The ungrammaticality of such constructions is indeed syntactic in nature and can be shown to derive from a general principle of universal grammar (UG), restricting the…

This paper focuses on linguistic prosodic units related to boundaries between syntactic units. Specifically, rules for predicting the location of such boundaries, and factors affecting their location, are discussed. Examples are given on how prosodies can be used for syntactic analysis. Addressing the question of prosodic units and their…