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…

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

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)

Research supported in part by U.S. Public Health Service, National Institute of Mental Health. (DD)

Research based on a master's thesis submitted at Michigan State University. (VM)

Research supported by a U.S. Public Health Service Research Grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. (DD)

Research performed, in part, while the author was a research assistant at the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning; remainder conducted at the University of Texas under a National Science Foundation - USDP grant. (VM)

A presentation of an experiment testing the claim that on-line syntactic processing is autonomous and not affected by semantic content. Results suggested that before the clause boundary is reached, syntactic decisions can be influenced by prior semantic context. An appendix containing numerous examples of clauses and probe words is included. (AMH)

This study demonstrates that a property of verbs, implicit causality, is important in determining coreference of potentially ambiguous anaphoric pronouns in a timed comprehension task. Verbs were classified according to bias toward a noun phrase; pairs of sentences were constructed for each. Response time was faster for congruent sentences. (CHK)

Based on part of a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Sate University of New York at Buffalo. (VM)

Parts of this paper were presented at the Psychonomic Society Convention, 1969. (VM)

Based on results reported in a doctoral dissertation completed at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Investigation carried out while the author held a National Institutes of Mental Health Predoctoral Research Fellowship. (VM)

Subjects read sets of active or passive sentences, and an active or passive question was asked about one. Errors were compared. Results suggest that surface form of a single sentence is retained; surface and deep structures are retained for two, and only deep structures of four and eight sentences. (CHK)