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…

Several theoretical accounts have been proposed with respect to the issue how quickly the implicit causality verb bias affects the understanding of sentences such as "John beat Pete at the tennis match, because he had played very well". They can be considered as instances of two viewpoints: the focusing and the integration account. The focusing…

Time reference in Indo-European languages is marked on the verb. With tensed verb forms, the speaker can refer to the past (wrote, has written), present (writes, is writing) or future (will write). Reference to the past through verb morphology has been shown to be particularly vulnerable in agrammatic aphasia and both agrammatic and…

Research has shown that following a sentence fragment such as "John impressed Mary because...," people are most likely to refer to John, whereas following "John admired Mary because...," Mary is the preferred referent. Two written completion experiments investigated whether such semantic biases affect the choice of anaphor (pronouns vs. names).…

The major targets of number agreement in English are pronouns and verbs. To examine the factors that control pronoun number and to test pronouns against a psycholinguistic account of how verb number arises during language production, we varied the meaningful and grammatical number properties of agreement controllers and examined the impact of…

In two experiments, we examined the recent claim (Stewart, Pickering, & Sanford, 2000) that verb-based implicit causality information is used during sentence-final clausal integration only. We did so by looking for mid-sentence reading delays caused by pronouns that are inconsistent with the bias of a preceding implicit causality verb (e.g.,…