In a comparative study of American English speakers and British English speakers, it was examined whether segmental effects can be used in speech production as cues to syntactic structure. American speakers could use the segmental cues in syntax perception, while British speakers could not. Speakers of British English who were long-term residents…

Results of a study indicated that adults reading for retention spent more time focusing on syntactic structure, while those reading for immediate comprehension focused more of their time on semantic content. However, the children (fifth graders) used reading strategies that involved mixtures of both of the adult components. (SL)

Supports claim that linguistic and psycholinguistic accounts based on study of English may prove unreliable as guides to sentence processing in even closely related languages such as German and Italian. Results of a test of sentence interpretation indicate that English-speaking Americans rely overwhelmingly on word order, Germans rely on both…