Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and…

Formal theories of mental representation have receded from the importance they had in the early days of cognitive science. I argue that such theories are crucial in any mental domain, not just for their own sake, but to guide experimental inquiry, as well as to integrate the domain into the mind as a whole. To illustrate the criteria of adequacy…

This paper reports on a study conducted to determine the abilities of children to make optional transformations in sentences conjoined with "and." The subjects were 35 middle-class children between the ages of five and eight, who demonstrated average school achievement, spoke standard American English, and had normal speech and hearing. A…

This is an attempt to compile, from public sources, as complete a bibliography as possible of works related to linguistics and having to do with transformational generative grammar. The arrangement is alphabetical by author and chronological by publication or delivery date of works of a given author. The majority of items are also indexed by…

The psycholinguistic experiments reported here lead the author to the conclusion that there is a definite interdependence between semantic values and syntactic functions in the construction of sentences and that a satisfactory interpretation of syntactic encoding demands a consideration of the personality structure of the individual speaker.…

The author endeavors to penetrate the "mists o f mentalistic myth" which enshroud the "very real, solid, and substantial results of generative or transformational linguistics." In attempting to clarify and clear up misunderstandings about theories of grammar as put forth by Chomsky (whose practice, the author feels, is "superior to his description…

The theme of this book is the concept of a sentence and the role which it plays in child language acquisition. The author argues that the concept of a sentence is innately available to children and is the "main guiding principle in a child's attempt to organize and interpret the linguistic evidence that fluent speakers make available to him."…

Research supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. (DD)

Two claims about early stages of language development--that of a limitation on length of utterance and that of reduction rules which delete major constituents from simple sentences--are questioned. Supporting arguments are reviewed, and alternative explanations offered. (RM)

This report reviews the psychological and psycholinguistic literature from the last decade that deals with memory for sentences. It is concluded that the encoded representation of a sentence reflects both syntactic and semantic content, with the semantic content being far less transient. (Author)

It has been demonstrated (in the research described here) that people hearing sentences on a tape recording process underdetermined sentences differently than people hearing them in a conversation. It has been shown that this difference is caused by the presence of underdetermined elements but not ordinary transformations. The effect of ordinary…

Section I of this report discusses the theoretical issues relating to the development of syntax recognition routines based on psychological models of human speech recognition and reviews the relevant psychological literature. The research reported deals with attempts to relate various syntactic variables to measures of the perceptual complexity of…

The individual components of language -- on the semantic, syntactic, and phonological levels -- mean little or nothing as individual constructs. Language research must proceed according to a concept of linguistic structure which reflects the correlation of elements within and between levels of structure. (VM)

A report on a study in progress of the acquisition of a syntax rule: inversion in questions beginning with "Wh..". Its purpose is to show how certain modifications of linguistic theory and practice can contribute to this study and to psychology of language in general. (Text is in French.) (AMH)