In three structural priming experiments, we investigated temporarily ambiguous sentences such as "While the man was visiting the children who were surprisingly pleasant and funny played outside." Participants produced more transitive sentences following such temporarily ambiguous sentences than following unambiguous sentences that were…

Two experiments were carried out to see what parts of a sentence are best retained, whether those parts retained best immediately after acquisition are also remembered best after a 48 hour retention interval, and whether or not the parts of a sentence which are retained depend on the semantic and syntactic structure of that sentence. In the first…

Subjects read sets of active or passive sentences, and an active or passive question was asked about one. Errors were compared. Results suggest that surface form of a single sentence is retained; surface and deep structures are retained for two, and only deep structures of four and eight sentences. (CHK)

Current transformational linguistic theory holds that there are two levels of sentence structure, derived constituent or surface structure and underlying or deep structure. Both have been proposed as the memory representation of sentences, but recent evidence suggests that the latter is the more likely. However, two recent studies have directly…

This paper describes and gives the results of a psycholinguistic experiment investigating the impact of certain surface syntactic structures on the perception and memory of language. The basic assumption is that the content of an utterance must be its most salient aspect in memory. The for of an utterance, its surface grammar and phonology, must…

This review of Bever's psycholinguistics survey is for the most part favorable. Commentary is centered on sections 1, 2, 4, and 6 of the report. The survey's first part is judged significant in that Wundt's pioneering work in psycholinguistics is discussed. The second section, on grammar as a psychological process, is found obscure in its…

There is a need for a new kind of linguistic theory which, while being concerned with both generation and analysis, must include the roles of memory, non-linguistic knowledge, and inference. The role of logic is diminished according to such a theory because inference has no real logical content. Meaning must be studied with respect to the actual…