This paper reports the results of three studies examining comprehension and real-time processing of pronominal (Experiment 1) and Wh-movement (Experiments 2 and 3) structures in agrammatic and unimpaired speakers using eyetracking. We asked the following questions: (a) Is off-line comprehension of these constructions impaired in agrammatic…

A study was made investigating whether or not the two-person conversational speech behavior (mean duration of utterance, mean reaction time, latency and frequency of interruption) of an individual who is fluent in two languages is the same or different when he is conversing in each of these two languages. (Author/RM)

Children (2;10 to 4;7 years) taught passive sentences with forms employing animate patients could produce and comprehend passives better than children taught with forms employing inanimate patients. This indicates that "perspective" is the cognitive counterpart to the formal category of subject and that language acquisition is connected…

Experimentally manipulated differences in mental state can systematically alter the linguistic intuitions which speakers render about acceptability of sentences. The processes underlying intuitions must be taken into consideration when they are used as empirical data to test grammatical theories. A theory of introspection must be part of the…

In an experiment in which preschool children were asked questions such as "Which box is taller than it is fat?" the results were interpreted to mean that the linguistic strategy of attending to the first clause is more resistant to change than the preference for simply choosing the largest object. (Author/RM)

Criticizes psycholinguistic experiments where messages are presented in vacuo and where the linguist has no intention of conveying a message to the subject, who fills in his own contextual frame. When utterances were presented with pictures, they were remembered more accurately than when they were repeated ten times. (SCC)

This study examines the relative contributions of rote-memorization, analogic formation and rule-operation in the production of plurals. Rule-operation was found to be important in that children producing responses characteristic of a given stage did not produce responses for later stages. Contributions of analogic formation and rote-memorization…

Infants learn their language by first determining, independent of language, the meaning which a speaker intends to convey to them, and by then working out the relationship between the meaning and the expression they heard. (Author)

Selects technical and popular writings from three scientists in each of four fields, and finds differences in the visual-verbal imagery which each field uses. (MB)

The difficulty of understanding embedded sentences is discussed in relation to Bever's hypothesis: if a sentence segment has a double function by means of the same processing strategy it is difficult to interpret the sentence. An alternative to this theory is proposed due to the author's experiments. (SCC)

In order to ascertain the effect of different demands on cognitive processes as reflected in speech rate, pause and hesitation phenomena, 90 young men, 45 native speakers of English (U.S.A.) and 45 native speakers of Spanish (Mexico), were asked to retell a story presented in one of three ways: (1) film plus narration; (2) film only; (3) narration…

Seven different age levels were used to test the correlation between age and unfilled pauses (UP) and between age and parenthetical remarks (PR) in narratives elicited by visual stimuli. (Author/AM)