We report two experiments investigating subject-verb and object-verb agreement in Basque. Participants repeated and completed preambles containing singular or plural subjects and objects in sentences with canonical subject-object-verb (SOV) or non-canonical object-subject-verb (OSV) order; in Experiment 2, they did so while remembering two…

This study investigated whether speakers strategically decide where to interrupt their speech once they need to stop. We conducted four naming experiments in which pictures of colored shapes occasionally changed in color or shape. Participants then merely had to stop (Experiment 1); or they had to stop and resume speech (Experiments 2-4). They…

Two experiments using a sentence recall task tested the effect of animacy on syntactic processing in Japanese sentence production. Experiment 1 and 2 showed that when Japanese native speakers recalled transitive sentences, they were more likely to assign animate entities earlier positions in the sentence than inanimate entities. In addition,…

Languages differ from one another and must therefore be learned. Processing biases in word order can also differ across languages. For example, heavy noun phrases tend to be shifted to late sentence positions in English, but to early positions in Japanese. Although these language differences suggest a role for learning, most accounts of these…

In four experiments, we investigated the role of shared word order and alignment with a dialogue partner in the production of code-switched sentences. In Experiments 1 and 2, Dutch-English bilinguals code-switched in describing pictures while being cued with word orders that are either shared or not shared between Dutch and English. In Experiments…

Two experiments are reported that examine how manipulations of visual attention affect speakers' linguistic choices regarding word order, verb use and syntactic structure when describing simple pictured scenes. Experiment 1 presented participants with scenes designed to elicit the use of a perspective predicate ("The man chases the dog/The dog…

A broad range of priming data has been used to explore the structure of semantic memory and to test between models of word representation. In this paper, we examine the computational mechanisms required to learn distributed semantic representations for words directly from unsupervised experience with language. To best account for the variety of…

Psycholinguistic investigations of reanalysis phenomena have typically focused on revisions of phrase structure. Here, we identify a further subcomponent of syntactic reanalysis, namely the revision of case marking. This aspect of reanalysis was isolated by examining German subject-object ambiguities that require a revision towards a…

We report two experiments examining the role of concreteness and word phonological neighborhood characteristics on immediate serial recall. In line with previous findings concreteness, word frequency, and larger neighborhood size are associated with better serial recall. Both concreteness and word neighborhood size were also positively associated…

Three experiments investigated whether speakers use constituent ordering as a mechanism for avoiding ambiguities. In utterances like ''Jane showed the letter to Mary to her mother,'' alternate orders would avoid the temporary PP-attachment ambiguity (''Jane showed her mother the letter to Mary,'' or ''Jane showed to her mother the letter to…

Reports three studies which explored relationships between prototypicality and sentence structure in recall, preference ratings, and natural dictionary definitions. The results can be explained in terms of the sensitivity of sentence production processes to the lexical or conceptual accessibility of prototypes. (Author/AMH)