All other things being equal the parser favors attaching an ambiguous modifier to the most recent possible site. A plausible explanation is that locality preferences such as this arise in the service of minimizing memory costs--more distant sentential material is more difficult to reactivate than more recent material. Note that processing any…

Four experiments examined whether 3-year-olds' comprehension of pronouns was affected by the discourse prominence of the possible antecedents. In each experiment, children listened to short stories. The final (test) sentence of each story differed in whether it continued the grammatical subject (and first-mentioned character) established in prior…

We investigate the planning of cause and consequence in language production by examining participants' continuations to discourse fragments in four experiments. Our studies indicate how the content of the continuation, and the association between the continuation and prior text, are influenced by the nature of prior discourse. People tend to…

Positron emission tomography was used to investigate two competing hypotheses about the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in word generation. One proposes a domain-specific organization, with neural activation dependent on the type of information being processed, i.e., surface sound structure or semantic. The other proposes a…

Is it possible to learn the relation between 2 nonadjacent events? M. Pena, L. L. Bonatti, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler (2002) claimed this to be possible, but only in conditions suggesting the involvement of algebraic-like computations. The present article reports simulation studies and experimental data showing that the observations on which Pe?a et…

In this paper we attempt to relate the prelexical processing of speech, with particular emphasis on functional neuroimaging studies, to the study of auditory perceptual systems by disciplines in the speech and hearing sciences. The elaboration of the sound-to-meaning pathways in the human brain enables their integration into models of the human…

The current study examines how patients with aphasia access the meanings of idioms during spoken sentence comprehension. In our experiment, we had 4 subjects whose native language is German: 2 left-hemisphere damaged patients (Wernicke's and global aphasia); 1 right-hemisphere damaged patient; and 1 age-matched healthy speaker. Ambiguous…

The cortical regions of the brain traditionally associated with the comprehension of language are Wernicke's area and Broca's area. However, recent evidence suggests that other brain regions might also be involved in this complex process. This paper describes the opportunity to evaluate a large number of brain-injured patients to determine which…

The performance of ADHD children on semantic category fluency (SCF) versus initial letter fluency (ILF) tasks was examined. For each participant, word production was recorded for each 15-s time slice on each task. Performance on both fluency tasks was compared to test the hypothesis that children with ADHD are characterized by a performance…

Forward masked word primes that differed from the target in the initial, the final or both the initial and final positions tended to slow target decision latencies and there were no significant differences among prime types. After forward masked nonword primes we observed non significant facilitation when primes differed from the target by one…

The understanding of the nature and extent of morphological processing is critical to the overall investigation of how words are organized in the mind. In this overview article, we discuss the nature of morphological processing and the domain of morphological processing research. We claim that investigations crucially involve the understanding of…

We report the performance of two aphasic patients in a morphological transformation task. Both patients are Spanish-Catalan bilingual speakers who were diagnosed with agrammatic Broca's aphasia. In the morphological transformation task, the two patients were asked to produce regular and irregular verb forms. The patients showed poorer performance…

This paper investigates the processing of long-distance filler-gap dependencies in Japanese, a strongly head-final language. Two self-paced reading experiments and one sentence completion study show that Japanese readers associate a fronted "wh"-phrase with the most deeply embedded clause of a multi-clause sentence. Experiment 1 demonstrates this…

References to developmental stages and continua seem to be part and parcel of investigations into the acquisition of new grammars. Nonetheless, there seems to be an equivocation in the literature about which is actually the most helpful way of explaining how learner grammars evolve through time. Some see development essentially as gradual growth…

We report the case of a patient who showed a marked deficit in compound reading after almost complete recovery from his aphasic disturbances. Omission of one of the two compound components was his most frequent type of error. The patient also produced many paraphasias, which always respected the compound structure of the target. Similar errors…