Syntactic priming occurs when structural information from one sentence influences processing of a subsequently encountered sentence (Bock, 1986; Ledoux et al., 2007). This article reports 2 eye-tracking experiments investigating the effects of a prime sentence on the processing of a target sentence that shared aspects of syntactic form. The…

In a previous gaze-contingent boundary experiment, Angele and Rayner (2013) found that readers are likely to skip a word that appears to be the definite article "the" even when syntactic constraints do not allow for articles to occur in that position. In the present study, we investigated whether the word frequency of the preview of a…

Recent research has demonstrated that knowledge of real-world events plays an important role in guiding online language comprehension. The present study addresses the scope of event knowledge activation during the course of comprehension, specifically investigating whether activation is limited to those knowledge elements that align with the local…

Just as syntax differentiates coherent sentences from scrambled word strings, the comprehension of sequential images must also use a cognitive system to distinguish coherent narrative sequences from random strings of images. We conducted experiments analogous to two classic studies of language processing to examine the contributions of narrative…

Two experiments using a sentence recall task tested the effect of animacy on syntactic processing in Japanese sentence production. Experiment 1 and 2 showed that when Japanese native speakers recalled transitive sentences, they were more likely to assign animate entities earlier positions in the sentence than inanimate entities. In addition,…

Previous evidence suggests that when speakers produce sentences from memory or as picture descriptions, their choices of sentence structure are influenced by how easy it is to retrieve sentence material (accessibility). Three experiments assessed whether this pattern holds in naturalistic, interactive dialogue. Pairs of speakers took turns asking…

Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving-picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are…

The results of two text-change experiments are reported. The experiments were designed to investigate the syntactic representation of garden path sentences such as "While the man hunted the deer that was brown and graceful ran into the woods", specifically the claim that a significant number of misinterpretations of such sentences are due to…

In two experiments, we explore how recent experience with particular syntactic constructions affects the strength of the structural priming observed for those constructions. The results suggest that (1) the strength of structural priming observed for double object and prepositional object constructions is affected by the relative frequency with…

Partial report of data presented at the 1971 convention of the Eastern Psychological Association. (VM)

Revised version of a paper presented at the December 27, 1972 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Atlanta, Georgia; research supported by the National Science Foundation. (DD)

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

Revised version of a paper presented to the Canadian Linguistic Association Annual Meeting, Montreal, Quebec, 1972; research partially supported by the Canada Council. (DD)

Research part of a Senior Honors Thesis submitted to Kent State University by Patricia Sorce, who was a National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Participant while conducting this research. (VM)