Short-term memory (STM) for serially presented visual items is disrupted by task-irrelevant, to-beignored speech. Five experiments investigated the extent to which irrelevant speech is processed semantically by contrasting the following two hypotheses: (1) semantic processing of irrelevant speech is limited and does not interfere with serial STM…

This study investigates the phenomenon that listeners of English were surprisingly accurate at predicting the temporal end of a sentence when only given the part up to the "potentially last word," that is a noun before an optional prepositional phrase of varying lengths. Results of four experiments using either French or English are given. (35…

It was reasoned that if the right ear/left brain hemisphere is more efficient than the left ear/right hemisphere at extracting the meaning of a sentence, then verbatim information presented to the right ear may be more difficult to retrieve than verbatim information presented to the left ear immediately after the sentence is heard. This idea was…

Examines what linguistic devices speakers use to make an entity salient in a discourse and how they re-refer to discourse entities moving in and out of focus. Speakers' center of attention was manipulated via a videotaped basketball game. Speakers referred to prominent entities as subjects; when they referred to them as objects, they repeated the…