The authors assessed 4,865 middle and high school students for the ability to recognize and understand written and spoken morphologically simple words, morphologically complex words, and the syntactic structure of sentences and for the ability to answer questions about facts presented in a written passage and to make inferences based on those…

The functional architecture of the verbal processing resource system was studied by testing aphasic patients in Canada and Boston for their abilities to use syntactic structure in sentence comprehension in isolation and under dual-task conditions. Results indicate that the processing resource system underlying syntactic processing is separate from…

Reports five experiments; the first two assessed the effect of the selectional restriction requirements of verbs and the animacy of nouns on sentence comprehension, the third determined the cause of the interaction found in the first set of studies, and the fourth and fifth were self-paced reading experiments. (52 references) (Author/CK)