The paper reports on a perception experiment in German that investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of information structural concepts and their prosodic marking using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experimental conditions controlled the information status (given vs. new) of referring and non-referring target expressions (nouns vs.…

Child and adult speakers of English have different ideas of what "or" means in ordinary statements of the form "A or B". Even more far-reaching differences between children and adults are found in other languages. This tells us that young children do not learn what "or" means by watching how adults use "or". An alternative is to suppose that…

Study investigated the processing of ambiguous words that varied in frequency of use of their multiple interpretations. Results indicate that, whereas lexical access is an autonomous process, selection of the appropriate interpretation is a post-lexical process that is influenced by frequency information and context. (MM)

An experiment is reported that uses cross-modal priming to look at the resolution of anaphoric reference. Subjects given a visual lexical decision test simultaneously with an auditorily presented sentence showed selective semantic activation of the pronoun's referent on the basis of the pronoun's lexical properties. This finding is discussed in…

Two experiments showed that functional completeness--the explicit propositional surface realization of deep-structure clause relations--isolated effective and integral comprehension units, which definitions of comprehension units couched in levels of syntactic structure failed to do. (Author/RL)

Data obtained from seventh graders does not support Chomsky's hierarchy of language rules, whereby degrees of sentence grammaticality can be assigned to ungrammatical sentences. (RB)

Reports a study investigating surface structure complexity, transformational sentence type, and sentence length as variables in a sentence imitation task with preschool children. (TO)

Describes a study which examines the relationship between context redundancy and keyword intelligibility in sentences having both high and low redundancy. Word pairs were placed in similar positions in two sets of sentences: sentence pairs that one might find in text, and adages together with sentences that might be spoken. (SED)

The results of study examining several indices of language use of normal and retarded children show the greatest difference between groups in sentence complexity and diversity. (TO)

Examines the occurrence of filled pauses (FP) in the spontaneous speech of 11 speakers, finding that FP's occur (1) less often than expected before nouns, verbs, and adverbs, (2) more often than expected before pronouns, and (3) about as often as expected before adjectives. Tables and references. (VJ)

Describes an investigation of the notion that sentence perception involves holding single clauses or propositions in a temporary buffer. Concludes that this notion is false and that, instead, more recently presented or important material may become more accessible in memory as presentation of the sentence proceeds. (Author/SED)

Investigates the availability of surface representations for the interpretation of verb-phrase ellipsis. Results show that an elliptical verb phrase is most easily interpreted if its antecedent is in the immediately preceding sentence and that this can not be explained in terms of the unnaturalness of the passages with distant antecedents. (MM)

Reports part of a continuing project to develop a theory of children's first-language acquisition using computer modeling techniques. Notes the correspondence of structures formed by the computer program with recognized structures in English. Discusses anomalies in the program's performance. (RL)

The role of syntactic/semantic structure in the motor programing of speech by five-year-olds, eight-year-olds, and adults was investigated. Repetition durations were found to be shorter for simple than for complex sentences at all ages. However, linguistic complexity affected durational variability only for adults. (Author/SED)