This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

Research on Tip of the Tongue (ToT) states has been used to determine whether access to syntactic information precedes access to phonological information. This paper argues that previous studies have used insufficient analyses when investigating the nature of seriality of access. In the first part of this paper, these complex issues are discussed…

Previous research has shown evidence for priming of rate in scripted speech. Two experiments examined the persistence of rate in production of unscripted picture descriptions. In Experiment 1, speakers heard and repeated priming sentences presented at a fast or slow rate and in a passive or active form. Speakers then described a new picture. The…

In this experiment, syntactic constraints on the retrieval of orthography were investigated using homophones embedded in sentence contexts. Participants typed auditorily presented sentences that included a contextually appropriate homophone that either shared part of speech with its homophone competitor (i.e., was syntactically unambiguous) or had…

According to "noun-cue" models, arbitrary linguistic categories, like those associated with case and gender systems, are difficult to learn unless members of the target category (i.e., nouns) are marked with phonological or semantic cues that reliably co-occur with grammatical morphemes (e.g., determiners) that exemplify the categories. "Syntactic…

This volume of working papers includes eight papers dealing mainly with experimental topics in linguistics and in phonology and speech. The following articles are in the collection: "Units in Speech Perception,""The Temporal Realization of Morphological and Syntactic Boundaries,""Comparison of Controlled and Uncontrolled Normal Speech Rate,""Word…