Papers by Gorrell and by Gibson and Hickok question Pickering and Barry's (PB) arguments against empty categories in sentence processing. This reply disputes Gorrell's claims that PB's interpretation of the data is inadequate and, in agreement with Gibson and Hickok, reinforces the arguments that the gap location is irrelevant to the formation of…

In this study, we focused on the formulation of relative clauses with preposition and genitive pied-piping. Thirty child (5;9 to 8;4) and 30 adult Polish speakers were given an elicited production task and a grammaticality judgment task. Almost all of the children accepted preposition pied-piping, but only half of them produced it. We suggest that…

We present interpretation-based processing--a theory of sentence processing that builds a syntactic and a semantic representation for a sentence and assigns an interpretation to the sentence as soon as possible. That interpretation can further participate in comprehension and in lexical processing and is vital for relating the sentence to the…

Four experiments examined the nature of forgetting and the processing--storage relationship during performance on a prevalent working memory task, the reading span test. Using two different presentation paradigms, Experiments 1 and 2 replicated Towse, Hitch, and Hutton's (1998, 2000) finding that the Short-Final lists, which presented a long…

Two eye movement experiments examined whether skilled readers include vowels in the early phonological representations used in word recognition during silent reading. Target words were presented in sentences preceded by parafoveal previews in which the vowel phoneme was concordant or discordant with the vowel phoneme in the target word. In…

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences in which two noun phrases or two independent clauses were connected by the word or (NP-coordination and S-coordination, respectively). The word either could be present or absent earlier in the sentence. When either was present, the material immediately following or was read more quickly,…

The goal of this study is to understand the ways in which humans apply relevant modules of knowledge of language to an input sentence in a parsing process. To this end, quantifier float constructions in Japanese are analyzed, as a case study, on the basis of the view that the output in parsing comprises discrete and multiple categories. Then, a…

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)

Supports the idea that word stress and passivization mark new information. Does not support the theory that there is an information ordering in active sentences. (Author/RL)

This study focuses on the question of whether structural analyses of verb-arguments are postponed until the head has been processed or initiated prior to the appearance of the verb. To explore this question in relation to a head-final language, a Japanese dative argument attachment ambiguity was examined in both a questionnaire study and a…

The current study examines whether young and older adults have similar preferences for animate-subject and active sentences, and for using the order of activation of a verb's arguments to determine sentence structure. Ninety-six participants produced sentences in response to three-word stimuli that included a verb and two nouns differing in…

We report 3 experiments that examined younger and older adults' reliance on "good-enough" interpretations for garden-path sentences (e.g., "While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib") as indicated by their responding "Yes" to questions probing the initial, syntactically unlicensed interpretation (e.g., "Did Anna dress the baby?"). The…

In two experiments, we explore how recent experience with particular syntactic constructions affects the strength of the structural priming observed for those constructions. The results suggest that (1) the strength of structural priming observed for double object and prepositional object constructions is affected by the relative frequency with…

This paper investigates how people resolve syntactic category ambiguities when comprehending sentences. It is proposed that people combine: (a) context-dependent syntactic expectations (top-down statistical information) and (b) context-independent lexical-category frequencies of words (bottom-up statistical information) in order to resolve…

A number of studies have shown that structural factors play a much larger role than the linear order of words during the production of grammatical agreement. These findings have been used as evidence for a stage in the production process at which hierarchical relations between constituents have been established (a necessary precursor to…