Research results indicated that children were able to use information from a number of sources in interpreting commands in which the relational terms were replaced by nonsense. Linguistic and nonlinguistic context and prior repetition presented constraints to children's responses. (Author/JB)

Proposes a top-down procedural model for the dynamic extraction and use of context structure to resolve references. (FL)

Research into the influence of a context sentence on the processing of a subsequent sentence in spoken discourse examined two issues: (1) whether context influences the immediate processing and organization of a subsequent clause, and (2) whether listeners make certain types of context-based inferences prior to the end of a sentence. Three…

A total of 19 good and 19 poor readers participated in an examination of the extent to which first grade children who were successful beginning readers would exhibit better syntactic skills in auditory and reading tasks than would less successful readers. To isolate differences specifically related to sentence processing skills, the two groups…

The testing of a number of hypotheses about the effect of hearing a prior context sentence on immediate processing of a subsequent target sentence is described. According to the standard deep structure model, higher level processing (e.g. semantic interpretation, integration of context-tarqet information) does not occur immediately as speech is…

This study investigated sensitivity to morphological, semantic, and syntactic cues to grammatical gender among 64 students of college-level Italian. Results showed sensitivity to cues in word-final phonemes, but low awareness of gender associations of derivational suffixes. Students had more difficulty dealing with multiple cues, particularly when…