Reports on five experiments that studied ambiguous sentences, such as "I asked the pretty girls WHO is cold." The presence of a prominent pitch accent on the interrogative constituent biased listeners to add an embedded question interpretation, whereas it absence biased them to a relative clause or temporal adjunct analysis.(Author/VWL)

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

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)