Three measures were found to contribute significantly to the prediction of comprehensibility: mean linguistic depth, the number of self-embedded structures in the sentence, and the number of conjoinging transformations in the derivational history of the sentence. (Author/FB)

Two experiments measured the frequency of perceptual errors as a function of differential presupposition in descriptive sentences. More errors occurred when misrepresentation involved presupposition than when it involved the focused proposition. Several surface structures of English, in combination, increased the presuppositional strength of the…

WITHIN THE GENERAL FRAMEWORK OF PRINCIPLES OF LEARNING, THE AUTHOR DISCUSSES THE LINGUISTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE STUDY OF GRAMMAR AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR, AND HOW THIS RELATIONSHIP CORRELATES WITH THE MECHANISMS OF HUMAN PERCEPTION AND LEARNING. HE EMPHASIZES THAT LANGUAGE IS NEITHER ENTIRELY INNOVATIVE NOR A "HABIT STRUCTURE," BUT RATHER IS…

One theory of linguistic information processing asserts that there is a preliminary incomplete analysis of linguistic information which lets people judge how difficult the information will be to process completely. The present study investigates the reliability and validity of such judgments of comprehensibility and discusses some of their…

TWENTY-EIGHT SS (SUBJECTS) WERE PRESENTED WITH COMPUTER-GENERATED AGRAMMATICAL STATEMENTS, AND ASKED TO CARRY OUT TWO TASKS ON EACH OF TWO EXPERIMENTAL DAYS. TASK 1 WAS A FORCED-CHOICE EXPERIMENT IN WHICH 50 PAIRS OF STATEMENTS WERE PRESENTED AURALLY TO EACH S, WHO HAD TO SELECT THAT MEMBER OF THE PAIR WHICH HE FELT WAS THE BEST APPROXIMATION TO A…

Language development in preschool children was studied using pairs of pictures with three types of verbal elaboration formed for each pair. After a training trial thirty children listened to one of three types of elaboration (simple sentence, compound or complex sentence, and paragraph). They were asked to name the corresponding response item.…

Investigation supported by a grant from the U.S. Office of Education. (VM)

Two experiments and two questionnaire studies investigated the processing of sluiced sentences among college student participants. Results show that, because the interpretation of a sluiced constituent takes place at the representational level of logical form (LF), implicit arguments are not made explicit at LF, but focus is important in the…

This report describes part of a longer study on sentence comprehension. The long range goal is to identify distinct levels of processing in terms of the types of linguistic and extralinguistic information each level uses. The focus of this part of the study is sentences with filler-gap relations, such as, "This is the girl the teacher wanted to…

An investigation of the relationship between a speaker's decision to treat portions of the information in a sentence as given or new and the syntactic form of the sentence produced. A tendency of English speakers to use alternative surface structure rules to present given information before new information is demonstrated. (AMH)

Based on part of a dissertation submitted to the University of Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree. Revised version of a paper given at the 80th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Houston, Texas, November 1970. (VM)

Reviews recent research on simultaneous interpretation and discusses a psycholinguistic model as one way of describing certain aspects of the interpreter's on-the-job performance. (AM)

Investigates factors which condition deletion of plural /s/ in Peruvian Spanish. There is more /s/ deletion in plural forms than in monomorphemic forms. But 1,304 examples of plural /s/ from informal interviews with native speakers of Peruvian Spanish show plural marker tends to be retained when ambiguity would otherwise result. (Author/LMO)

Fifth graders were asked to learn 32 syntactically varied semantically unrelated sentences containing combinations of agentive, objective, and instrumental case relations. Results were discussed in terms of ways to store sentences. (ST)