Metonymic verbs like "start" or "enjoy" often occur with artifact-denoting complements (e.g., "The artist started the picture") although semantically they require event-denoting complements (e.g., "The artist started painting the picture"). In case of artifact-denoting objects, the complement is assumed to be type shifted (or "coerced") into an…

Constraint on syntax may be reflected in the transient processing demands of lexical retrieval suggesting syntactic-lexical processing interaction. The syntactic structure of utterances appears sensitive to the accessibility of lexical information with more accessibility occurring earlier in sentences. Models of interactions within a…

The human sentence parsing device assigns phrase structure to sentences in two steps. The first stage parser assigns lexical and phrasal nodes to substrings of words. The second stage parser then adds higher nodes to link these phrasal packages together into a complete phrase marker. This model is compared with others. (Author/RD)

Examines research on the interpretation of ambiguous sentences and the presence or absence of contextual override effects. This study also examines the requirements placed on computational models of word-by-word incremental processing. The emerging picture is of a multiple constraint-based system in which knowledge ranging from lexical through…

Describes an experiment to test two assumptions concerning what is stored in the memory with regard to sentence structure: (1) that the linear effect observed is based on a tally model rather than on an integrationist mechanism; (2) that this linear effect is not uniquely the result of a mechanism operating at comprehension. (CLK)

Research supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. (RS)

Proposes an alternative to transformational grammars, based on the notion that a grammatical system should be open to psycholinguistic interpretation, and disallowing grammatical transformations, dealing instead with the information content of sentence surface structure. (Author/AM)

Describes the "Competition Model" (Bates and MacWhinney, 1982) dealing with second-language sentence processing by bilinguals and research that has further developed theories dealing with the model. (CB)

The model of sentence perception proposed by Fodor, Bever and Garrett (1974) emphasizes the importance of grammatical cues signalling clause boundaries, and suggests that segmentation of a sentence into clauses precedes computation of the internal structure of those clauses. However, this model has nothing to say about the many sentences in which…

Reviews some history of how lexical representations have acquired an important role in sentence processing research. Discusses relevant issues, including the importance of timecourse information in theorizing; the importance of frequency information in theories of sentence processing; and the question of the grain of frequency information. (42…

In a study using eye-voice span (EVS) measures to determine the relationship between the types and numbers of transformations in sentences and the predictability of the sentences for readers, sentences with varying types and numbers of transformations were embedded in paragraphs projected onto a screen and read aloud by the subjects, 20 graduate…

The purpose of this series of four studies was to precisely describe the code and dialect features of the speech of both lower class Negro children and middle class white children. In the first study, 16 white middle class (WMC) children were compared to 16 Negro lower class (NLC) children on both an imitation and a comprehension task. The WMC…

The role of syntactic/semantic structure in the motor programing of speech by five-year-olds, eight-year-olds, and adults was investigated. Repetition durations were found to be shorter for simple than for complex sentences at all ages. However, linguistic complexity affected durational variability only for adults. (Author/SED)

Explores the prediction of the referential theory, which maintains that the relative complexity of discourse representations plays a key role in determining the perceiver's immediate parsing preferences. Results indicate that semantic/referential principles are applied immediately in an online ambiguity resolution and preempt general world…

The feedback model of maternal language indicates that maternal language development is tailored to child feedback. The conversational model indicates that adjustment in mothers' speech occurs before the onset of child language. In order to verify the validity of these models, the language of mothers of six hearing and six deaf 13- to…