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)

Research supported by fellowships from the Canada Council and the National Service Foundation. (DS)

Research is reported in which subjects were required to perceive sentences in noise. A series of sentences having the same syntax and rhythm was presented. On a final sentence either rhythm alone or rhythm plus syntax were changed. The results stress the importance of rhythm in speech perception. (Author/RM)

The validity of using phoneme monitoring techniques to measure syntactic processing in French was validated by two experiments. Significant differences in the reaction times of 80 French-speaking academic professionals to phonemes immediately following reversible subject relative clauses and those following object relative clauses demonstrate the…

Research supported by a United States Office of Education grant. (DS)

A phoneme confusion matrix consisting of 1,620 spontaneous speech errors was analyzed. It is shown that there is no tendency for linguistically unmarked consonants to replace marked consonants and that sound segment errors almost always involve the movement of unitary segments and not the movement of component distinctive features. (SW)