Two eye-tracking experiments examined the effects of sentence structure on the processing of complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., "began the memo"). Previous work has demonstrated that these expressions impose a processing cost, which has been attributed to the…

English-speaking children exhibit difficulty in their comprehension of raising patterns, such as (1), in which the NP the boy is semantically linked to the VP in the embedded clause, but is syntactically realized as the subject of the matrix clause. (1) Raising pattern: [s "The boy" seems to the girl [s _ to be happy]]. This dissertation…

We expect that word knowledge accumulates gradually. This article draws on earlier approaches to assessing depth, but focuses on one dimension: richness of semantic knowledge. We present results from a study in which three distinct item types were developed at three levels of depth: knowledge of common usage patterns, knowledge of broad topical…

This study reports intraindividual variations in the semantic and syntactic complexity of language and in the linguistic errors produced by mildly and moderately impaired adult aphasic subjects (N=10) in different communication contexts. Aphasic patients exhibited at least as many linguistic variations as controls in response to changing…

Several exercises are presented that are intended to challenge and "limber up" the translator's manipulation of words, meanings, and connotations. The exercises point up the complexity of the translating task and encourage the translator to make the most of this fact. The focus is on French and English. (MSE)

Thirty-two hearing-impaired adolescents were assessed on comprehension of three anaphoric forms within conjoined sentences: repeated noun, personal pronouns, and null form. The null form anaphora in a semantically acceptable environment, in which some hearing-impaired students apply a deviant object-subject deletion rule, was significantly more…