Effects of disambiguating prior contexts upon processing of lexical ambiguities in sentences were investigated. Subjects listened to lexically ambiguous sentences after a neutral or a disambiguating prior contest, and monitored for phonemes occurring immediately after each ambiguous word. Reaction times were significnatly longer following…

Two experiments examine the extent to which the representation of a sentence depends upon the overall nature of a subject's task, in this case, memorization of a sentence and providing a continuation for a sentence. (AM)

Discusses three experiments which investigated the role of convention and context in understanding indirect requests. Experiments 1 and 2 showed the wide variety of conventions used and how context determines conventionality. Experiment 3 showed how conventional requests take less time to process than nonconventional ones. (Author/PJM)

Twenty-three subjects drew deductions from ten different pairs of conversationally conveyed requests, of which the first conveyed a positive request, the second, a negative. Some evidence shows the listener constructs the literal meaning before the conveyed meaning. (CK)

Discusses three experiments investigating the development of word-by-word comprehension in 5-, 7-, and 10-year olds. Subjects monitored for target words in a sentence. Variable included types of monitoring tasks and distribution and context of target words. Results are discussed in terms of the types of comprehension processes various tasks…

An experiment investigated the retrieval processes involving a noun with an adjective. Results suggest that a noun's meaning is retrieved in conjunction with an adjective when the phrase describes a familiar concept. (Author/AM)