Discusses two auditory comprehension studies that investigated the role of focus, as conveyed by a pitch accent, in the comprehension of relative clauses preceded by a complex noun phrase. Findings include focus attracts modifiers, and pitch accents for new phrases differ acoustically from pitch accents for contrastive phrases. (46 references)…

Suggests that thematic roles might best be viewed as verb-specific concepts and that this conceptual/world knowledge is computed and used immediately in online language processing. Discusses results in relation to other recent treatments of thematic roles as well as constraint-based and garden path models. (68 references) (Author/CK)

Investigates the influence of linguistic structure on non-linguistic cognition by comparing Russian and English behavior on tasks involving the color blue. Russians, who differentiate this region into "dark blue" and "light blue," were expected to separate blues more often than English subjects for whom the colors belong to one lexical category.…