An experiment is reported that uses cross-modal priming to look at the resolution of anaphoric reference. Subjects given a visual lexical decision test simultaneously with an auditorily presented sentence showed selective semantic activation of the pronoun's referent on the basis of the pronoun's lexical properties. This finding is discussed in…

Subjects completed sentences of the form NP1 aux V NP2 because (but) Pro...(e.g., John may scold Bill because he...) with a reason or motive for the action described. A basic perceptual strategy was hypothesized to underlie the comprehension of these sentences which have a potentially ambiguous pronoun in the subject position of the subordinate…

Research supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation. (DD)

In order to test hypotheses derived from the concept that grammatical, syntactic, semantic, and contextual cues affect the degree of reading comprehension in a visual display, the present investigation was undertaken using the French language. The subjects were approximately 30 college students in a second-semester elementary French course. Five…

Results of this study offer clear evidence that the verb facilitation effect in children's associative learning is not dependent on the presentation of a consistent verb connective. (Author)

Two experiments indicated that sentence verification times were significantly longer when a discrepancy between target sentence and context was in the syntactic presupposition, rather than in the assertion. Findings are best explained by a structural hypothesis, not by strategies designed to locate given and new information. (Author/CP)

Several examples of genre analysis are examined to identify criteria employed for the identification of textual boundaries. The conclusion is that there are nonlinguistic reasons for generic staging in texts and that the search for structural divisions is a search for cognitive boundaries in terms of convention, appropriacy, and content. (42…

Describes the longitudinal emergence of verb inflections as observed in the speech of four American English-speaking children emphasizing occurrence of inflections, their linguistic/non-linguistic contexts, and their conditional use. Discusses results in terms of sentence relations between verbs and other constituents and the semantics of verb…

Investigated the effects of cue adequacy on second language learners' ability to infer and remember the meaning of new words. Subjects who received cue-adequate sentences reported greater ease in word inference, scored higher in inferring and remembering the contextual meanings of new words, and better retained the contextual meanings of targeted…

The reversal of subject and predicate terms in quantified, categorical expressions was studied as an operation that is potentially important in issues of representation and comprehension of quantified relations. In two experiments students were asked to evaluate the relation between two quantified expressions. The salience of reversal in the…

A study investigated the separate and combined effects of the syntactic organization of the sentence, the contextual framework in which a message is embedded, and the readers' past experiences on children's inferential reading comprehension of pragmatic cause/effect statements. The subjects, 144 fourth grade students, were asked to specify the…

The four papers in this collection discuss language perception and comprehension and report on experiments in those areas. The first paper, "The Influence of Non-Linguistic Knowledge on Perceiving and Verifying Sentences," discusses the reliance of language perception and comprehension on the interaction of linguistic and world…

This paper is intended to be the first part of a study contrasting the subjunctive of French with that of English and comparing it in both languages with the syntactic devices that can replace it. It examines the syntactic constraints on the use of subjunctive forms in French, the semantic contrast between indicative and subjunctive forms, and the…

This paper defines the grammatical role of a particle in Swahili in terms of the semantic information which it contributes to all utterances in which it occurs. The particle -A occurs in the syntactic configuration Noun 1 -A Noun 2 and has been traditionally described as reflecting relations of possession and attribution between the two nouns in…