This paper examines the hypothesis that grammatical function reanalyses in simple sentences should not be treated as phrase structure revisions, but rather as increased costs in "linking" an argument from a syntactic to a semantic representation. To this end, we investigated whether subject-object reanalyses in German verb-final sentences can be…

A word-by-word human sentence processing complexity metric is presented. This metric formalizes the intuition that comprehenders have more trouble on words contributing larger amounts of information about the syntactic structure of the sentence as a whole. The formalization is in terms of the conditional entropy of grammatical continuations, given…

This article discusses a study designed to ascertain the comprehension of the role of "because" in a sentence in children between the ages of 5;8 and 10;11. (CFM)

This report summarizes two years of research by a team at the University of Austin, aimed at developing and testing a model of sentence comprehension. The general model that has guided the work maintains that, on the basis of cues available in a sentence's surface form, the hearer projects hypotheses about the grammatical relations and semantic…

Research supported in part by a graduate traineeship from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to the author and by a grant from the Advanced Research Project Agency to the Harvard University Center for Cognitive Studies. (VM)

An experiment is described that involved presenting sentences to the subject for study and then testing single words for recognition (the subject had to decide whether the test word was in one of the study sentences). A large priming effect was obtained. (Author/RM)

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…

Evidence from 3 experiments reveals interference effects from structural relationships that are inconsistent with any grammatical parse of the perceived input. Processing disruption was observed when items occurring between a head and a dependent overlapped with either (or both) syntactic or semantic features of the dependent. Effects of syntactic…

Sentences were constructed in which the terms "before" and "after" were embedded in logically constrained and logically reversible sequences. The preschool children in the study found the constrained sentences easier to comprehend. (Author/CFM)

The temporal order comprehension of 64 normal elementary students (grades 2, 4, 6, and 8) was measured in center-embedded and right-embedded clause sentences that described a specific order of events through the variation of verb tenses in each clause. (Author/CL)

Two experiments are reported to distinguish between the representation of sentences in immediate versus longer-term memory. It is indicated that the immediate representation is a verbatim image of the sentence but at delays there are both verbatim images and propositional representations. (Author/RM)

A study testing two theories about the processing of ambiguous sentences is reported. Results suggest that parallel processing and reciprocal interactions underlie the comprehension of ambiguous sentences. (RM)

The development of sentence coordination in children using sentences conjoined by "and" was studied to test the adequacy of the transformationally based derivational theory of complexity. Two cross-sectional experiments were conducted using 18 sentence types with children between the ages of three and five. One experiment used an elicited…

A study is reported investigating the question whether inferences made from sentences occur immediately in comprehension or are in part a function of the way material from sentences is stored in memory. (Author/RM)

A sample of 14 kindergarten children were tested on their understanding of the relations between active and passive sentences when the nouns being related differed as to how readily they could be assimilated to the child's prior knowledge. (Author/JMB)