The purpose of this study was to determine whether processability theory (PT; Pienemann, 1998, 2005) accounts for the emergence of grammatical forms and structures in comprehension. Sixty-one learners of English participated in oral interviews that elicited a variety of structures relevant to PT. Learners were divided into two groups: those who…

Most current idiom processing models acknowledge, after Gernsbacher and Robertson (1999) that deriving an idiomatic meaning entails suppression of contextually inappropriate, literal meanings of idiom constituent words. While embedding idioms in the rich disambiguating context can promote earlier suppression of incompatible literal meanings,…

Although several theories of online syntactic processing assume the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, the continuous and non-ballistic properties of computer mouse movements are exploited, by recording their streaming x, y coordinates to procure…

The function of syntax as a factor in comprehension is described in terms of transformations of basic sentence patterns. Examples of transformations of the basic indirect object sentence are included to show emphasis, questions, negations, and coordinate or subordinate relationships. The term grammeme is defined as the minimum unit of syntactical…

Two experiments indicated that sentence verification times were significantly longer when a discrepancy between target sentence and context was in the syntactic presupposition, rather than in the assertion. Findings are best explained by a structural hypothesis, not by strategies designed to locate given and new information. (Author/CP)

This paper reports on an investigation about the relation between a student's conscious awareness of the structure of a sentence and the degree of his/her intonation accuracy as well as his/her reading comprehension. The research was done based on the hypothesis that: "if the students are made conscious of the infrastructure of lengthy…

Investigates the relationship between focusing and coherence relations in pronoun comprehension. Examines a function of connectives: that of signaling coherence relations between two clauses. In three studies, coherence relations between sentence fragments ending in pronouns and participants' continuations to the fragments were identified.…

The research investigated the time course of integrative semantic processing during sentence processing. Reading time was measured on sentences containing an NP composed of an adjective and a noun whose combined meaning was plausible or anomalous (Experiment 1) or was typical or atypical (Experiment 2). The noun in the NP was either plural or…

Research funded by a contract from the U.S. Office of Education to Rutgers University. (DS)

Sentence comprehension is more than a syntactically autonomous issue and relies on the clues that are not part of the grammar. This paper considers "world knowledge," in this case prior knowledge of the story being read, as one such clue. In section 1, "reversibility" of sentences is discussed. "Sentence ambiguity" is discussed in section 2.…

This paper focuses on four studies of pupils' reading comprehension completed at the University of Alberta. A number of investigators have described the acquisition and use of connectives by pupils and have indicated the importance of connectives in the development of abstract logical thinking. (Teachers often consider these words too simple to…

This study examined the effects of children's cognitively based role expectations on their judgments of the grammatical acceptability of sentences. Sixty children, 12 each in grades 4 through 8, individually heard 10 sentences violating the Minimum Distance Principle (MDP). The sentences were grammatical, but linguistically complex, and violated…

Sentence patterns are often crucial to the degree of understanding a child derives from the printed page, and if he is to fully understand what he reads, he must be able to analyze the written language patterns in which the information is conveyed. This study analyzed selected passages from three grade 4 basal reader series to determine which…

This research explored the fundamental processes involved in comprehending linguistic material: the duration of the process, the sequence of processes, and the sources of errors. One project examined the comprehension of affirmative and negative sentences that are read and verified with respect to a picture. A model developed to account for the…