Research has shown that following a sentence fragment such as "John impressed Mary because...," people are most likely to refer to John, whereas following "John admired Mary because...," Mary is the preferred referent. Two written completion experiments investigated whether such semantic biases affect the choice of anaphor (pronouns vs. names).…

In four experiments, we investigated the role of shared word order and alignment with a dialogue partner in the production of code-switched sentences. In Experiments 1 and 2, Dutch-English bilinguals code-switched in describing pictures while being cued with word orders that are either shared or not shared between Dutch and English. In Experiments…

Many recent models of language comprehension have stressed the role of distributional frequencies in determining the relative accessibility or ease of processing associated with a particular lexical item or sentence structure. However, there exist relatively few comprehensive analyses of structural frequencies, and little consideration has been…

Describes three experiments that show that when requesting information, speakers estimate the greatest potential obstacles to compliance and try to overcome them through their choice of indirect, or conditional, requests. In selecting their request, speakers in most situations try to pinpoint the obstacles as specifically as they can. (SED)

Reports three studies which explored relationships between prototypicality and sentence structure in recall, preference ratings, and natural dictionary definitions. The results can be explained in terms of the sensitivity of sentence production processes to the lexical or conceptual accessibility of prototypes. (Author/AMH)