In language, recombination of a discrete set of meaningless building blocks forms an unlimited set of possible utterances. How such combinatorial structure emerged in the evolution of human language is increasingly being studied. It has been shown that it can emerge when languages culturally evolve and adapt to human cognitive biases. How the…

The systems underlying incremental sentence comprehension are, in general, highly successful -- comprehenders typically understand sentences of their native language quickly and accurately. The occasional failure of the system to deliver an appropriate representation of a sentence is therefore potentially illuminating. There are many ways the…

This paper examines the essential features of a group of constructions that belong to the family of complementary alternation discourse constructions in English. In this group of constructions, X and Y are two situations such that Y is less likely (or more likely) to happen than X. Each member of this group (X Let Alone Y, X Much Less Y, X Never…

Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is "structural priming," a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced…

A quantitative method is introduced for detecting and correcting artifactual signal changes in BOLD time series data arising from the magnetic field warping caused by motion of the articulatory apparatus when speaking aloud, with extensions to detection of subvocal articulatory activity during silent reading. Whole-head images allow the large,…

We present two ERP studies on the processing of word order variations in Japanese, a language that is suited to shedding further light on the implications of word order freedom for neurocognitive approaches to sentence comprehension. Experiment 1 used auditory presentation and revealed that initial accusative objects elicit increased processing…

Examines how one interprets and reacts to dirty-word descriptors. Subjects judged how much they would like a fictitious person described with dirty and non-dirty adjective pairs. Liking was influenced by: (1) semantic interpretation, (2) intrinsicalness of the adjective for the person described, and (3) contextual relations between speaker and…

A source of regularity in sentence construction is the recurrent use of certain fixed syntactic formats in explaining, describing, etc. Subjects exploit these regularities in sentence perception. An experiment on the perception of "perverse" sentences shows that listeners assimilate some of the features of sentences to "formulation frames."…

Event-related potentials (EPRs) were employed to compare word category and verb inflection violations in Spanish. A similar frontal negativity was found between 250-400 ms for both violation types, suggesting that they equally disrupt initial syntactic analyses. These and other findings are discussed in detail. (VWL)

Through corpus analysis and experimentation, this article demonstrates that both grammatical complexity (heaviness) and discourse status (newness) simultaneously and independently influence word order in two English constructions. Argues that heavy and new constituents facilitate the processes of planning and production. (Author/VWL)

Through analyses of text corpora, sentence completion, and self-paced reading, examined role of structurally defined parsing principles, local information (lexically specific biases), and contextual information (referential pragmatics) in resolving syntactic ambiguities. Subjects were 32 undergraduate native English speakers. Found that local and…

Very long-term memory for abstract materials was examined for subjects who had served in a synthetic grammar learning experiment two years earlier. Knowledge of these grammars was retained. The form and structure of knowledge and the manner in which it is put to use remained similar to the original. (Author/RD)

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

Studied "pre-ambiguity" plausibility information, information about verb argument structure frequencies, and "post-ambiguity" constraints in undergraduates. All three types of constraints were helpful in the resolution of ambiguities. Ambiguity resolution becomes more difficult as the competitor interpretations becomes stronger. Study items are…

Investigated the source of agrammatic aphasic patients' difficulty comprehending semantically reversible sentences. Found approximately equal distributions of three distinct patterns. Results conflict with explanations of comprehension failure which state that a single pattern of performance on sentence structures characterizes comprehension of…