Three structural priming experiments investigated how monotransitive and intransitive structures are represented. Experiment 1 showed that priming from intransitives was stronger when the verb was the same in prime and target than when it was different, but monotransitive priming was unaffected by verb repetition. We argue that the activation of…

Listeners expect that a definite noun phrase with a pre-nominal scalar adjective (e.g., "the big"...) will refer to an entity that is part of a set of objects contrasting on the scalar dimension, e.g., size (Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers, & Carlson, 1999). Two visual world experiments demonstrate that uttering a referring expression with a…

The modifier effect is the reduction in perceived likelihood of a generic property sentence, when the head noun is modified. We investigated the prediction that the modifier effect would be stronger for mutable than for central properties, without finding evidence for this predicted interaction over the course of five experiments. However…

We tested a cue-based retrieval model that predicts how similarity between discourse entities influences the speaker's choice of referring expressions. In Experiment 1, speakers produced fewer pronouns (relative to repeated noun phrases) when the competitor was in the same situation as the referent (both on a horse) rather than in a different…

This research tests whether comprehenders use their knowledge of typical events in real time to process verbal arguments. In self-paced reading and event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments, we used materials in which the likelihood of a specific patient noun ("brakes" or "spelling") depended on the combination of an agent and verb…

The study examines whether speakers exaggerate prosodic cues to syntactic structure when addressing young children. In four experiments, 72 mothers and 48 non-mothers addressed either real 2-4-year old or imaginary children as well as adult confederates using syntactically ambiguous sentences like "Touch the cat with the spoon" intending to convey…

Three eye-tracking experiments investigated the role of pitch accents during online discourse comprehension. Participants faced a grid with ornaments, and followed prerecorded instructions such as "Next, hang the blue ball" to decorate holiday trees. Experiment 1 demonstrated a processing advantage for felicitous as compared to infelicitous uses…

Prior studies of ambiguity resolution in young children have found that children rely heavily on lexical information but persistently fail to use referential constraints in online parsing [Trueswell, J.C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N.M., & Logrip, M.L, (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children.…

This paper examines the use of singular and plural pronominal references to split antecedents such as "John and Mary." Current opinion suggests that under the right circumstances, singular reference should be difficult, and plural reference facilitated, but currently only the first of the these predictions has been demonstrated. We report four…

This paper reports three experiments that test the Presupposition-Denial account of complement set reference. According to the theory, complement set focus arises when focus is on the difference between the amount conveyed by a natural language quantifier and a large presupposed amount. We call this difference the shortfall. In this paper, what is…

If people believe that some property is true of all members of a class such as sofas, then they should also believe that the same property is true of all members of a conjunctively defined subset of that class such as uncomfortable handmade sofas. A series of experiments demonstrated a failure to observe this constraint, leading to what is termed…

Conjunction errors occur when participants incorrectly identify as "old" novel test stimuli created by recombining parts of two study stimuli (parent items). Prior studies have reported that the conjunction error rate is higher when parent items are studied together than when they are studied apart (a parent proximity effect). In several…