An eye movement study of temporarily ambiguous closure sentences confirmed that the early closure penalty in a sentence like "While John hunted the frightened deer escaped" is larger for a simple past verb ("hunted") than for a past progressive verb ("was hunting"). The results can be explained by the observation that simple past tense verbs…

Discusses a 1993 study by Frazier, d'Arcais, and Coolen intended to test Schreuder's (1990) Morphological Integration model concerning the processing of separable and inseparable verbs, and attempts to refute Kempen's objections to their interpretation of the experimental results in this issue. (DR)

Five experiments investigated the interpretation of quantified noun phrases in relation to discourse structure. They demonstrated, using questionnaire and on-line reading techniques, that readers in English prefer to give a quantified noun phrase in (VP-external) subject position a presuppositional interpretation, in which the noun phrase limits…