Two experiments measured the frequency of perceptual errors as a function of differential presupposition in descriptive sentences. More errors occurred when misrepresentation involved presupposition than when it involved the focused proposition. Several surface structures of English, in combination, increased the presuppositional strength of the…

Five studies were carried out to analyze role of short-term storage in reading of organized text. By interrupting the subject's reading with a distractor task, information that was being carried in short-term storage was removed. It was found that this interruption effect could be countered by giving the subject the last one or two sentences that…

Investigation supported by a grant from the U.S. Office of Education. (VM)

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)

Recalls from five passages learned by undergraduates in the course of growing up in America were obtained. Recalls, while partial, were exact with no evidence of constructive memory. Results fit a simple model of associative chaining retrieval of passively stored surface structure units. (CHK)

Research supported in part by U.S. Public Health Service, National Institute of Mental Health. (DD)

Research based on a master's thesis submitted at Michigan State University. (VM)

Based on part of a dissertation submitted to the University of Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree. Revised version of a paper given at the 80th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Houston, Texas, November 1970. (VM)

Revised version of an M.A. thesis submitted at the University of California, Santa Barbara, 1970, by Linda J. Rodd. (VM)

A series of three experiments investigated repetition effects on recall with homographic responses. It was concluded that the repetition increment was mediated solely by commonality of surface features and that semantic features played no role. (Author/AM)

Research supported by a U.S. Public Health Service Research Grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. (DD)

Research performed, in part, while the author was a research assistant at the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning; remainder conducted at the University of Texas under a National Science Foundation - USDP grant. (VM)

A presentation of an experiment testing the claim that on-line syntactic processing is autonomous and not affected by semantic content. Results suggested that before the clause boundary is reached, syntactic decisions can be influenced by prior semantic context. An appendix containing numerous examples of clauses and probe words is included. (AMH)

This study demonstrates that a property of verbs, implicit causality, is important in determining coreference of potentially ambiguous anaphoric pronouns in a timed comprehension task. Verbs were classified according to bias toward a noun phrase; pairs of sentences were constructed for each. Response time was faster for congruent sentences. (CHK)

Based on part of a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Sate University of New York at Buffalo. (VM)