An investigation of the relationship between a speaker's decision to treat portions of the information in a sentence as given or new and the syntactic form of the sentence produced. A tendency of English speakers to use alternative surface structure rules to present given information before new information is demonstrated. (AMH)

Describes two experiments which demonstrated that readers use specific lexical information in comprehending sentences to anticipate and prepare for the appearance of lexical noun phrases and to postulate "gaps" that are associated with "fillers." Results also indicated that lexically based expectations involve the use of information about…

Three experiments were conducted to ascertain the effect of contextual restraints on pronoun assignment. Pronoun selection is based on integration of the context even where it is already syntactically constrained. Integration occurs during and not following the assignment of the pronoun. (PMJ)