Native speakers of English regularly hear sentences without overt subjects. Nevertheless, they maintain a [[superscript -]pro] grammar that requires sentences to have an overt subject. It is proposed that listeners of English recognize that speakers reduce predictable material and thus attribute null subjects to this process, rather than changing…

The human sentence parsing device assigns phrase structure to sentences in two steps. The first stage parser assigns lexical and phrasal nodes to substrings of words. The second stage parser then adds higher nodes to link these phrasal packages together into a complete phrase marker. This model is compared with others. (Author/RD)

Two eye movement experiments explored the roles of verbal subcategorization possibilities and transitivity biases in the processing of heavy NP shift sentences in which the verb's direct object appears to the right of a post-verbal phrase. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences in which a prepositional phrase immediately followed the verb,…

The model of sentence perception proposed by Fodor, Bever and Garrett (1974) emphasizes the importance of grammatical cues signalling clause boundaries, and suggests that segmentation of a sentence into clauses precedes computation of the internal structure of those clauses. However, this model has nothing to say about the many sentences in which…

Traditional syntactic accounts of verb phrase ellipsis (e.g., ''Jason laughed. Sam did [ ] too.'') categorize as ungrammatical many sentences that language users find acceptable (they ''undergenerate''); semantic accounts overgenerate. We propose that a processing theory, together with a syntactic account, does a better job of describing and…

This report describes part of a longer study on sentence comprehension. The long range goal is to identify distinct levels of processing in terms of the types of linguistic and extralinguistic information each level uses. The focus of this part of the study is sentences with filler-gap relations, such as, "This is the girl the teacher wanted to…

Five experiments investigated the interpretation of quantified noun phrases in relation to discourse structure. They demonstrated, using questionnaire and on-line reading techniques, that readers in English prefer to give a quantified noun phrase in (VP-external) subject position a presuppositional interpretation, in which the noun phrase limits…