Three measures were found to contribute significantly to the prediction of comprehensibility: mean linguistic depth, the number of self-embedded structures in the sentence, and the number of conjoinging transformations in the derivational history of the sentence. (Author/FB)

A group of 40 preschool children, ranging in age from three to five years, were required to illustrate the meaning of reversible passive sentences in which noun animacy was systematically varied. (Author/JMB)

Described is the system of mental operations occurring in text comprehension and in recall and summarization. A processing model is outlined: 1) the meaning elements of a text become organized into a coherent whole, 2) the full meaning of the text is condensed into its gist, and 3) new texts are generated from the comprehension processes.…

Two experiments showed that functional completeness--the explicit propositional surface realization of deep-structure clause relations--isolated effective and integral comprehension units, which definitions of comprehension units couched in levels of syntactic structure failed to do. (Author/RL)

Do children integrate pronoun sentences in memory as adults seem to do, i.e., processing anaphoric reference between two propositions into a form in which their common element is represented only once (jointly) for the two propositions? Data from two experiments involving third and fourth grade students revealed that a few very vivid sentences…

One theory of linguistic information processing asserts that there is a preliminary incomplete analysis of linguistic information which lets people judge how difficult the information will be to process completely. The present study investigates the reliability and validity of such judgments of comprehensibility and discusses some of their…

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

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

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

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)

It has long been said that there are an infinite number of English sentences. "This is the cat that caught the rat" is an Enqlish sentence. So is "This is the cat that caught the rat that stole the cheese.""This is the cat with white paws that caught the rat that stole the cheese" is unobjectionable as well. Since a…

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)