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 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)

This article discusses the notion of the proposition in the philosophy of language. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Research performed, in part, while the author was a research assistant at the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning; remainder conducted at the University of Texas under a National Science Foundation - USDP grant. (VM)

This study, part of an on-going investigation, analyzes the syntactic aspects of code-switching. A series of empirical studies has confirmed that there are only two general linguistic constraints where code-switching may occur, the free morpheme constraint and the equivalence constraint. This study describes in formal terms how the two constraints…

A polemic is made for frame semantics and the linguistic phenomenon of anaphoric reference without noun phrase (NP) antecedent is examined within this frame. Non-syntactic anaphora is that which does not point out into the real world but rather points back into the discourse in a frame which has been built up between the speaker and hearer in a…

This research examines how semantic information influences syntactic parsing decisions during sentence processing. In the first experiment, subjects were presented lexical strings having syntactically identical surface structures but with two possible underlying structures: "The children taught by the Berlitz method," and "The…

Two experiments on unaided and cued recall of sentences presented in context to college students are reported in this study. Key nouns in the sentences were arranged to have uniform surface functions, but to vary independently in deep syntactic category and semantic function. Cued recall for sentences in which the semantic function of actor and…

This volume of working papers includes two papers concerned with syntactic analysis in English. The first paper deals with a number of problems that arise in conjunction with the necessary, allowed, or disallowed coreferentiality of a complement sentence subject with some noun-phrase in a higher sentence. The author seeks to prove that the…

A presentation of an experiment testing the claim that on-line syntactic processing is autonomous and not affected by semantic content. Results suggested that before the clause boundary is reached, syntactic decisions can be influenced by prior semantic context. An appendix containing numerous examples of clauses and probe words is included. (AMH)

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)