Previous evidence suggests that when speakers produce sentences from memory or as picture descriptions, their choices of sentence structure are influenced by how easy it is to retrieve sentence material (accessibility). Three experiments assessed whether this pattern holds in naturalistic, interactive dialogue. Pairs of speakers took turns asking…

Seven experiments using self-paced reading and eyetracking suggest that omitting the middle verb in a double centre embedding leads to easier processing in English but leads to greater difficulty in German. One commonly accepted explanation for the English pattern--based on data from offline acceptability ratings and due to Gibson and Thomas…

Relative clauses have been implicated alternately as a strength and a weakness in the language of people with Williams Syndrome (WS). To clarify the facts, an elicited production test was administered to 10 people with WS (age 10-16 years), 10 typically developing children (age 4-7 years), and 12 typically developing adults. Nearly every WS…

Two eye-tracking experiments and two self-paced reading experiments investigated processing of sentences containing reduced relative clauses. Processing of a reduced relative is facilitated when it is preceded by a sentence that has the same syntactic structure, as long as the preceding sentence contains the same critical verb as the target…

Provides evidence that sentence processing does not make use of grammatical theories with empty categories. A linguistic account is provided of unbounded dependencies that do not use empty categories and can serve as the basis of a processing model. It is concluded that empty categories are not psychologically real. (28 references) (JL)

The current study examines whether young and older adults have similar preferences for animate-subject and active sentences, and for using the order of activation of a verb's arguments to determine sentence structure. Ninety-six participants produced sentences in response to three-word stimuli that included a verb and two nouns differing in…

This study examines sentence-level language abilities of amnesic H.M. to test competing theoretical conceptions of relations between language and memory. We present 11 new sources of experimental evidence indicating deficits in H.M's comprehension and production of non-cliche sentences. Contrary to recent claims that H.M.'s comprehension is…

In order to study the role of working memory in sentence formulation, we elicited errors of subject-verb agreement in spoken sentence completion, while speakers did or did not maintain an extrinsic memory load (a word list). We compared participants with low and high speaking spans (a measure of verbal working memory for sentence production). As…

Three studies are reported that addressed methodological problems in Stowe's (1989) study, which reported that semantic information eliminates garden paths in sentences with direct object versus subject ambiguity, such as in "Even before the police stopped the driver was frightened." Findings support a sentence processing system relying on…

Using the speeded-grammaticality judgment task, shows that factors that regulate garden path strength in ambiguous sentences also have an influence on processing of corresponding ungrammatical sentences in that they determine how reliably the ungrammaticality is detected. Argues that this processing correlation provides evidence for serial parsing…

Examined whether the preferences of verbs for appearing in particular subcategory structures can influence parsing and whether this influence is graded according to the strength of the preferences. Findings suggest that the verb subcategory preferences do produce a graded influence on the parse, according to their strength. (28 references)…

Recent investigations of filler-gap dependencies in sentence processing have assumed that the parser must compute an antecedent-trace relationship in which the trace site is identical to the canonical position of the moved phrase. Pickering and Barry's challenge to this view is refuted and a "direct association hypothesis" is suggested.…

Pickering and Barry's recent argument against the existence of empty categories (ECs) in human sentence processing is disputed. It is argued here that ECs may still play a linking role between thematic role assigners and wh-phrases. One possible parsing algorithm is given that accounts for Pickering and Barry's data. (28 references) (Author/LB)

Papers by Gorrell and by Gibson and Hickok question Pickering and Barry's (PB) arguments against empty categories in sentence processing. This reply disputes Gorrell's claims that PB's interpretation of the data is inadequate and, in agreement with Gibson and Hickok, reinforces the arguments that the gap location is irrelevant to the formation of…

This study focuses on the question of whether structural analyses of verb-arguments are postponed until the head has been processed or initiated prior to the appearance of the verb. To explore this question in relation to a head-final language, a Japanese dative argument attachment ambiguity was examined in both a questionnaire study and a…