In spoken English, pitch accents can convey the focus associated with new or contrasted constituents. Two listening experiments were conducted to determine whether accenting a subject makes its predicate a more tempting antecedent for an elided verb phrase, presumably because the accent helps focus the subject of the antecedent clause, increasing…

Background: During speech perception, the ability to integrate auditory and visual information causes speech to sound louder and be more intelligible, and leads to quicker processing. This integration is important in early language development, and also continues to affect speech comprehension throughout the lifespan. Previous research shows that…

When presented with a pair of objects, one familiar and one unfamiliar, and asked to select the referent of a novel word, children reliably demonstrate the disambiguation effect and select the unfamiliar object. The current study investigated two competing word learning accounts of this effect: a pragmatic account and a word learning principles…

The current studies used a syntactic priming paradigm with 3- and 4-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were asked to describe a series of drawings depicting transitive and dative relations to establish baseline production levels. In Experiment 2, an experimenter described a similar series of drawings using one of two syntactic forms…

In 4 chronometric experiments, influences of spoken word planning on speech recognition were examined. Participants were shown pictures while hearing a tone or a spoken word presented shortly after picture onset. When a spoken word was presented, participants indicated whether it contained a prespecified phoneme. When the tone was presented, they…

In typical interactions, speakers frequently produce utterances that appear to reflect beliefs about the common ground shared with particular addressees. Horton and Gerrig (2005a) proposed that one important basis for audience design is the manner in which conversational partners serve as cues for the automatic retrieval of associated information…

In this study we investigate the production of verb inflection in agrammatic aphasia. In a number of recent studies it has been argued that tense inflection is harder to produce for agrammatic individuals than agreement inflection. However, results are still inconclusive, at least for Dutch and German. Here, we report three experiments in which…

In two experiments, we explored the time course and flexibility with which speakers' eye gaze can be used to disambiguate referring expressions in spontaneous dialog. Naive director/matcher pairs were separated by a barrier and saw each other's faces but not their displays. Displays held identical objects, with the matcher's arranged in a row and…

Two experiments tested predictions derived from serial lexical processing and parallel distributed models of eye movement control in reading. The boundary paradigm (K. Rayner, 1975) was used, and the boundary location was set either at the end of word n - 1 (the word just to the left of the target word) or at the end of word n - 2. Serial lexical…

The neural networks associated with processing related pairs of words forming literal, novel, and conventional metaphorical expressions and unrelated pairs of words were studied in a group of 15 normal adults using fMRI. Subjects read the four types of linguistic expressions and decided which relation exists between the two words (metaphoric,…

The placement of laughter in the speech of hearing individuals is not random but "punctuates" speech, occurring during pauses and at phrase boundaries where punctuation would be placed in a transcript of a conversation. For speakers, language is dominant in the competition for the vocal tract since laughter seldom interrupts spoken phrases. For…

This work examines the relationship between implicit procedural and implicit verbal processes as they occur in natural adult conversation. Theoretical insights and empirical findings are rooted in a move towards integration of Bucci's "Referential Activity" (RA) and "Multiple Code" perspectives and Beebe and Jaffe's…

Williams syndrome is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by deletion of approximately 25 genes on chromosome 7q11.23. Children with the syndrome evidence large individual differences in both broad language and reading abilities. Nevertheless, as a group, children with this syndrome show a consistent pattern characterized by relative…

English sentences containing the universal quantifiers "each", "every", and "all" are highly complex structures in view of the subtleties of their scope properties and resulting ambiguities. This study explored the acquisition of universal quantifier sentences as reflected in the performance of three diverse college-level student groups on a…

In six analyses using the Child Language Data Exchange System known as CHILDES, we explored whether and how parents and their 1.5- to 5-year-old children talk about writing. Parent speech might include information about the similarity between print and speech and about the difference between writing and drawing. Parents could convey similarity…