The so-called depth charge sentences (e.g., "no head injury is too trivial to be ignored") were investigated in a comprehension experiment measuring both whether participants understood the stimuli and how certain they were of their interpretation. The experiment revealed that three factors influence the difficulty of depth charge type…

This study investigates preverbal structural and semantic processing in Japanese, a head-final language, using the maze task. Two sentence types were tested--simple scrambled sentences (Experiment 1) and control sentences (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that even for simple, mono-clausal Japanese sentences, (1) there are online processing…

The results of two text-change experiments are reported. The experiments were designed to investigate the syntactic representation of garden path sentences such as "While the man hunted the deer that was brown and graceful ran into the woods", specifically the claim that a significant number of misinterpretations of such sentences are due to…

The experiments reported in this article used a delayed same/different sentence matching task with concurrent measurement of eye movements to investigate the nature of the plausibility effect. The results clearly show that plausibility effects are not due to low level lexical associative processes, but arise as a consequence of the processing of…

Three experiments are reported that examined whether stem complexity plays a role in inflecting polymorphemic words in language production. Experiment 1 showed that preparation effects for words with polymorphemic stems are larger when they are produced among words with constant inflectional structures compared to words with variable inflectional…

Research supported in part by a Public Health Service grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. (VM)