Several studies have shown that concepts spread activation to words of both of a bilingual's languages. Therefore, a central issue that needs to be clarified is how a bilingual manages to restrict his speech production to a single language. One influential proposal is that when speaking in one language, the other language is inhibited. An…

Research has shown that following a sentence fragment such as "John impressed Mary because...," people are most likely to refer to John, whereas following "John admired Mary because...," Mary is the preferred referent. Two written completion experiments investigated whether such semantic biases affect the choice of anaphor (pronouns vs. names).…

While syntactic reanalysis has been extensively investigated in psycholinguistics, comparatively little is known about reanalysis in the semantic domain. We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to keep track of semantic processes involved in understanding short narratives such as "The girl was writing a letter when her friend spilled coffee…

We use syntactic priming to test the abstractness of the sentence representations of young 3-year-olds (35-42 months). In describing pictures with inanimate participants, 18 children primed with passives produced more passives (11 with a strict scoring scheme, 16 with lax scoring) than did 18 children primed with actives (2 on either scheme) or 12…

This paper examines the hypothesis that grammatical function reanalyses in simple sentences should not be treated as phrase structure revisions, but rather as increased costs in "linking" an argument from a syntactic to a semantic representation. To this end, we investigated whether subject-object reanalyses in German verb-final sentences can be…

In the present study, we looked at cross-modal priming effects produced by auditory presentation of morphologically complex pseudowords in order to investigate semantic integration during the processing of French morphologically complex items. In Experiment 1, we used as primes pseudowords consisting of a non-interpretable combination of roots and…

Two rating studies demonstrate that English speakers willingly produce reduced relatives with internal cause verbs (e.g., "Whisky fermented in oak barrels can have a woody taste"), and judge their acceptability based on factors known to influence ambiguity resolution, rather than on the internal/external cause distinction. Regression analyses…

This paper reports three experiments that test the Presupposition-Denial account of complement set reference. According to the theory, complement set focus arises when focus is on the difference between the amount conveyed by a natural language quantifier and a large presupposed amount. We call this difference the shortfall. In this paper, what is…

Presents three studies which examined adults' and preschoolers' sensitivity to implicit causality in interpersonal verbs. Findings suggest that the scenes concerning the causes and consequences of interpersonal events can readily be activated in the process of understanding these verbs. This finding holds true for both preschoolers and adults.…

Discusses experiments that investigated the sources of knowledge that are employed in spoken word identification. The interactive assumption that normal spoken word identification processes require the presence of semantic and syntactic context and the special status given to word-initial acoustic-phonetic information in cohort theory were…

Describes three experiments that show that when requesting information, speakers estimate the greatest potential obstacles to compliance and try to overcome them through their choice of indirect, or conditional, requests. In selecting their request, speakers in most situations try to pinpoint the obstacles as specifically as they can. (SED)

Reports three studies which explored relationships between prototypicality and sentence structure in recall, preference ratings, and natural dictionary definitions. The results can be explained in terms of the sensitivity of sentence production processes to the lexical or conceptual accessibility of prototypes. (Author/AMH)