The present response time study investigated how a hypothesized time-based working memory constraint of 2-3 s affects the resolution of grammatical and semantic dependencies. Congruent and incongruent object relative (OR) and subject relative sentences were read at different presentation rates so that the distance between dependent words was…

Three experiments explored online recognition in a nonspeech domain, using a novel experimental paradigm. Adults learned to associate abstract shapes with particular melodies, and at test they identified a played melody's associated shape. To implicitly measure recognition, visual fixations to the associated shape versus a distractor shape were…

Previous evidence suggests that when speakers produce sentences from memory or as picture descriptions, their choices of sentence structure are influenced by how easy it is to retrieve sentence material (accessibility). Three experiments assessed whether this pattern holds in naturalistic, interactive dialogue. Pairs of speakers took turns asking…

The aim of this study was to determine if two dimensions of song, the phonological part of lyrics and the melodic part of tunes, are processed in an independent or integrated way. In a series of five experiments, musically untrained participants classified bi-syllabic nonwords sung on two-tone melodic intervals. Their response had to be based on…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

Three phoneme monitoring experiments examined the manner in which additional processing time influences spoken word recognition. Experiment 1a introduced a version of the phoneme monitoring paradigm in which a silent interval is inserted prior to the word-final target phoneme. Phoneme monitoring reaction time decreased as the silent interval…