Languages differ in how they encode causal events, placing greater or lesser emphasis on the agent or patient of the action. Little is known about how these preferences emerge and the relative influence of cognitive biases and language-specific input at different stages in development. In these studies, we investigated the emergence of sentence…

There is general agreement that stuttering is caused by a variety of factors, and language formulation and speech motor control are two important factors that have been implicated in previous research, yet the exact nature of their effects is still not well understood. Our goal was to test the hypothesis that sentences of high structural…

In a series of seven studies, this paper examines acoustic characteristics of the spontaneous speech production of the English dative alternation ("gave the book to the boy/ the boy the book") as a function of the probability of the choice between alternating constructions. Probabilistic effects on the acoustic duration were observed in the…

Two studies investigated the effects of prosody and pragmatic context on off-line and on-line processing of sentences like "John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben today". Such sentences are ambiguous between the so-called "nongapping" reading, where "John greeted Ben", and the highly unpreferred "gapping" reading, where "Ben greeted Paul". In the…

The position taken in this paper is that the sentence adverb should be viewed not as an occurrence within a sentence but as a kind of illocutionary force marker of a speech art. Three points are argued in the paper: (1) that current linguistic analyses of sentence adverbs are inadequate even to the purposes of the analysts; (2) that treating…

Stuttered sentences pronounced by 12 4- to 6-year-old children in spontaneous conversation were analyzed for length and grammatical complexity. Results indicated that sentences in which stuttering occurred within the first three words were significantly longer and more complex than sentences where no fluency failure was found. Implications for…

The effects of speech rate, intonation, and sentence length on children's ability to imitate sentences were examined. Results indicate that adult speech is more readily imitated by children when intonation is normal, sentences are short, and speech rate is close to that of the child. (Author/AM)

Research indicates that first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition involve some of the same processes, yet L2 learners apparently acquire the structures of the target language in a systematic way by passing through a sequence of developmental stages. This study shows that in the earliest stages of syntactic development the L2 learner's…

The source of syntactic ambiguity and facts concerning the resolution of such ambiguity are discussed in this paper. The attitude of qenerative linguists towards ambiguity is examined, and a working distinction is drawn between vaqueness and ambiguity. The consequences of this distinction are then examined for syntactic ambiguity and an ordering…

The chapters in this volume represent a type of current psycholinguistic research that focuses both on the nature of human information processing and the coding of linguistic structure. The chapters and authors are as follows: (1) "The Wherefores and Therefores of the Competence-Performance Distinction," by V. Valian; (2) "Levels of Processing and…

Examines the idea of a mismatch between grammaticality and acceptability. Evidence is used to refute the claim that ungrammatical but acceptable sentences are theoretically plausible in the case of the sentence, "A not unhappy person entered the room." (AMH)