Discusses attempt to replicate and extend Keil's study of effects of ontological knowledge on judgments of sentence acceptability (indicating there is hierarchical one-to-one mapping of predicate-term relations of language onto the basic structure of knowledge). New data does not support Keil but suggests that range of sentence interpretation…

Three experiments investigated factors influencing the integration of facts acquired from texts. Subjects encountered related facts in the context of relatively long, meaningful texts, a single text, or in two separate texts. Results indicate that integration can occur in both cases. (SW)

This study examines two views of lexical storage and word production, a derivational hypothesis and an independent unit hypothesis. Reaction times and errors were related to derivational complexity. A model of lexical retrieval process incorporating derivational processes is proposed. (Author/SW)

A study of linguistic judgment tasks and lexical decision tasks among English-German bilinguals supports the hypotheses that bilinguals have knowledge of two sets of phonotactic constraints, and that both sets of constraints are simultaneously available to the individual during language processing. (MSE)

The question of what constitutes a minimal appropriate context for understanding a metaphor is examined through the relative effectiveness of three types of contextual priming for metaphor comprehension. All three produced immediate and automatic metaphor comprehension. The use of context to disambiguate both literal and nonliteral speech messages…

Two experiments examined the role of presupposed (or old) and focal (or new) information in integrating sentences, by measuring comprehension time for various combinations of presupposed and focal information. (Author/AM)

Subjects listened to a story containing sentences with five quantifiers (all, many, some, a few, and none) and were tested to determine recognition of quantifiers. The degree of confusion between any two quantifiers declined monotonically with the separation of the two terms in a linear order. (SW)

Two experiments examined the nature of access, storage, and comprehension of idiomatic phrases, using a phrase classification task. Results support a lexical representation hypothesis for the processing of idioms. (Author/AM)

Experiments were conducted to determine the effects of sentence contexts on word recognition and reading. The questions of whether context is predominantly facilitating or inhibiting and how automatic the influence of contexts is on word retrieval were investigated. (SW)