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…

An analysis of adverbial placement in written contemporary English focuses not on the sentence or clause context, as in conventional analyses, but on the textual or discoursal influences on placement. Specifically, the study examines: (1) the major textual and discoursal motivations behind clause-initial placement of adverbials of time and place…

The relationship between lower level code availability and top-down contextual processing in word recognition was investigated in two experiments. The major finding was that the increment in performance resulting from coherent organization relative to the random passage was equivalent in both normal and reversed orthographic forms. (Author/GK)

In English, the word 'to' functions as a preposition (e.g., 'to the store') and also as part of an infinitive (e.g., 'to go'). Two experiments investigated how the word 'to' is resolved by fluent undergraduate student readers. Readers comprehended sentences that contained the word 'to' preceded by sentence context that either did or did not…

An experiment replicating earlier research on the pronoun bias effect in reading comprehension, in which the pronoun "they" in an auditory fragment influences the syntactic analysis of an ambiguous expression, used a new technique in which words in a fragment are cumulated on an electronic monitor rather than being presented one by one.…

Study explored the manner in which young children utilize meaning clues implicit in nonlinguistic aspects of context to aid comprehension of difficult sentences. (Editor)

The parameters that help learners decipher imperfective usage (particularly KF) in Russian are described. Subcategories of KF which do not overlap are analyzed through their contextual usage in detective stories. Suggestions are made for helping learners decode KF in speech and writing. (PMJ)

Among the features characterizing human language is creativity, the ability to produce an infinite number of sentences with a finite number of rules. What is expected of creativity is non-conformity, violation of rules, and challenges to accepted convention. Words may be used to activate possible contexts. Most textbook sentence examples do not…

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…

Suggests that, for the assessment of performance in low and intermediate levels of reading, sentence-completion tasks can play an informative role and that, for students who have acquired these skills, the tests are valuable for ascertaining vocabulary acquisition or comprehension of syntactic structures. (JM)

Written for the third- and fourth-grade levels, this workbook gives students practice in using context clues and reading comprehension to apply punctuation rules, as well as in carefully reading and following directions. Noting that the activities are based on the idea that punctuation is necessary to make written communication clear, the…

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

Context speeds up the processing of the basic semantic relationships of a sentence. But the presence of context requires an additional process: context-sentence integration. (Author)

Describes three experiments that investigated the influence of a context sentence on the processing of a subsequent sentence. Concludes that context can affect within-sentence processes in comprehension. Test materials used in the experiments are appended. (FL)

Argues that WH-Movement in American Sign Language (ASL) is a leftward specifier of CP. Also argues that the occurrence of rightward WH-elements derives from independently motivated syntactic and discourse factors leading to the appearance of WH-elements in a sentence- or discourse-final positions--not by rightward WH-movement. This analysis…