In this dissertation, I address two outstanding questions regarding how linguistic and extra-linguistic information are brought together in the interpretation of language situated within a discourse. The first part of this dissertation experimentally addresses how alternatives invoked by sentences containing the focus-sensitive operator 'only' are…

Hesitation disfluencies after phonetically prominent stranded function words are thought to reflect the cognitive coding of complex structures. Speech fragments following the Swedish function word "att" "that" were analyzed syntactically, and divided into two groups: one with "att" in disfluent contexts, and the other with "att" in fluent…

Presents and analyzes two experiments designed to explore the role of the syllable in perceptual segmentation of words. Results suggest the subjects' detection response probably precedes lexical access and is based on the prelexical code. (Author/BK)

The validity of using phoneme monitoring techniques to measure syntactic processing in French was validated by two experiments. Significant differences in the reaction times of 80 French-speaking academic professionals to phonemes immediately following reversible subject relative clauses and those following object relative clauses demonstrate the…

An investigation, analyzing the linking of skeleton and syntactical rules of Madurese, presents counterevidence to Marantz's claims about the nature of reduplication, and to Carrier-Duncan's claim that reduplication must precede all phonological rules. It is proposed that reduplication in Madurese is not affixation, as Marantz claims, and can be…

The authors report results of a study into the role of components of first-language (L1; Dutch) and second-language (L2; English) reading comprehension. Differences in the contributions of components of L1 and L2 reading comprehension are analyzed, in particular processing speed in L1 and L2. Findings indicate that regression weights of the L1 and…

Problems related to the structure of the mental lexicon are considered. The single access assumption, the passive memory assumption, and the heterogeneous memory assumption are rejected in favor of the theory which assumes several active memories, each able to store expression based on only one homogenous set of abstract primitives. One lexicon…

Examines how speakers and listeners make judgments on the relationship and truth of propositions connected by subordinating conjunctions. (EKN)

Presents an algorithm for use in natural language document retrieval systems which automatically determines if the conjunction "and" in a statement representing an information need should be translated into a Boolean "and" or "or." The results of an experiment that used the algorithm are reported, and further research is suggested. (CLB)

Describes a system developed for the automatic recognition of biological concepts in titles of scientific articles; reports results of several pilot experiments which tested the system's performance; analyzes typical ambiguity problems encountered by the system; describes a disambiguation technique that was developed; and discusses future plans…