Memory and storage for base and surface sentence forms were compared by examining memory for these kinds of sentences. It was hypothesized that a subject hearing a sentence transforms it to its base form, stores it in this form, and recalls it, again transforming it, in its surface form. Thirty undergraduate educational psychology students,…

THIS PAPER CONSIDERS SEVERAL TYPES OF ENGLISH SENTENCES WHICH ARE UTTERED FOR THE PURPOSE OF ELICITING A LINGUISTIC RESPONSE FROM THE HEARER AND WHICH, ON THAT BASIS, CAN BE CLASSED AS QUESTIONS. A SEMANTIC UNIT "PLUS INTERROGATIVE", WHOSE MEANING IS THAT THE SPEAKER REQUESTS NEW INFORMATION FROM THE HEARER, IS SEEN TO PLAY A ROLE IN MORE THAN ONE…

Discusses trends and developments in generative phonology; metatheory and evidence in phonology; and segments, features, and marking. (RL)

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)

Two experiments measured the frequency of perceptual errors as a function of differential presupposition in descriptive sentences. More errors occurred when misrepresentation involved presupposition than when it involved the focused proposition. Several surface structures of English, in combination, increased the presuppositional strength of the…

Reports a study investigating surface structure complexity, transformational sentence type, and sentence length as variables in a sentence imitation task with preschool children. (TO)

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

This report describes part of a longer study on sentence comprehension. The long range goal is to identify distinct levels of processing in terms of the types of linguistic and extralinguistic information each level uses. The focus of this part of the study is sentences with filler-gap relations, such as, "This is the girl the teacher wanted to…

An investigation of the relationship between a speaker's decision to treat portions of the information in a sentence as given or new and the syntactic form of the sentence produced. A tendency of English speakers to use alternative surface structure rules to present given information before new information is demonstrated. (AMH)

A number of experimental tasks were conducted in which subjects were asked to interpret and create novel noun-noun compounds. Results indicate that semantic relationships that hold between members of these compounds cannot be characterized in terms of a finite list of appropriate compounding relationships. (CHK)

A sentence-reading procedure was used to study the influence of syntactic structure on the timing of syllables in speech production. The study was designed to test whether syllable lengthening might be sensitive to the distinction between surface and underlying structure. (Author/RM)

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

Sketches Noam Chomsky's conception of language, the ways it can and should be studied, and how it works as a scientific enterprise. (Author/GT)