An investigation of the relationship between a speaker's decision to treat portions of the information in a sentence as given or new and the syntactic form of the sentence produced. A tendency of English speakers to use alternative surface structure rules to present given information before new information is demonstrated. (AMH)

Research based on a master's thesis submitted at Michigan State University. (VM)

Research performed, in part, while the author was a research assistant at the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning; remainder conducted at the University of Texas under a National Science Foundation - USDP grant. (VM)

A presentation of an experiment testing the claim that on-line syntactic processing is autonomous and not affected by semantic content. Results suggested that before the clause boundary is reached, syntactic decisions can be influenced by prior semantic context. An appendix containing numerous examples of clauses and probe words is included. (AMH)

The question of whether word meanings have internal structure identical in kind to the syntax of sentences is examined. Evidence is sought for the structural aspects of word meaning and the issue of whether judgements of similarity between words is based on meaning content or on meaning structure is raised. Four hypotheses were tested: (1)…

Based on results reported in a doctoral dissertation completed at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Investigation carried out while the author held a National Institutes of Mental Health Predoctoral Research Fellowship. (VM)

Surface structure morphology in child second language acquisition is investigated with emphasis on mastery of correct forms and consequent implications for teachers and researchers. Communication strategies used by the second language learner are discussed. (RM)

Linear syllogisms present two premises, each describing a relation between two terms. The individual's task is to infer the relation among the three terms of the linear syllogism, and then answer a question about one or more of these relations. For example, "John is taller than Bob. Sam is shorter than Bob. Who is the tallest?" Students…

This review of Bever's psycholinguistics survey is for the most part favorable. Commentary is centered on sections 1, 2, 4, and 6 of the report. The survey's first part is judged significant in that Wundt's pioneering work in psycholinguistics is discussed. The second section, on grammar as a psychological process, is found obscure in its…

The "levels effect," the finding that the more central to the meaning of a passage an idea is the more likely that idea is to be retained, does not seem to hold for immediate recognition. Therefore, a study was conducted to test a model of information storage that predicted that when surface structure information was preserved in its…

The experiments discussed in this report are designed to explore the relationship between language and thought and implications for foreign language learning. Three basic issues are considered: whether or not thought and language are sufficiently distinct to require separate attention and planning as distinct factors in language teaching; the role…

This paper discusses the validity and role of linguistic theory in terms of philosophy and logic and considers the relationship among these fields of human knowledge. The main objective of linguistic science is to discover the composition laws actually used by speech communities at any given moment in history. Linguistics is therefore not…

The acquisition of rules for formulating causative verbs was studied with children over a period of a few years. Most of the data is based on the spontaneous speech of the author's two daughters, from age 2;6 to 6;2 and from age 2;4 to 3;11. It was hypothesized that there are at least two prerequisites for the child's formulation of a general rule…

The author finds Katz and Postal's 1964 generative semantic theories concerning the organization of grammar incorrect and proposes an interpretive approach to semantics in which syntactic structures are given interpretations by an autonomous semantic component. The research reported leads the author to describe a generative grammar consisting of…

This report presents a summary of the research designed to develop a psycholinguistics of comprehension and memory for meaningful written prose paragraphs. The approach departs from most previous ones by seeking to formulate an explicit theory, instead of relying on informal qualitative judgments as to paragraph structure, the scoring of data, and…