Three phoneme monitoring experiments examined the manner in which additional processing time influences spoken word recognition. Experiment 1a introduced a version of the phoneme monitoring paradigm in which a silent interval is inserted prior to the word-final target phoneme. Phoneme monitoring reaction time decreased as the silent interval…

The current study investigated the modulation by orthographic knowledge of the final overlap phonological priming effect, contrasting spoken prime-target pairs with congruent spellings (e.g., "carreau-bourreau", /karo/-/buro/) to pairs with incongruent spellings (e.g., "zero-bourreau", /zero/-/buro/). Using materials and…

Argues that language is a global concept consisting of three interrelated aspects (functions, determinants, and components). Notes the significance of this model for first and second language learning and language deviation. Demonstrates the need for a multidisciplinary approach to language study. (RL)

Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. The rhythmic similarity hypothesis holds that where two languages have similar rhythm, listeners of each language should segment their own and the other language similarly. Such similarity in listening was…

Reports on two experiments that focus on clause boundaries in Japanese that suggest that minimal change restriction is unnecessary to characterize reanalysis. Proposes that the data and previous observations are more naturally explained by a constraint-driven model in which revisions are performed only when required by parsing constraints.…

Hesitation disfluencies after phonetically prominent stranded function words are thought to reflect the cognitive coding of complex structures. Speech fragments following the Swedish function word "att" "that" were analyzed syntactically, and divided into two groups: one with "att" in disfluent contexts, and the other with "att" in fluent…

Creating compound nouns is the most productive process of Dutch morphology, with an interesting pattern of form variation. For instance, "staat" "nation" simply combines with "kunde" "art" ("staatkunde" "political science, statesmanship"), but needs a linking element "s" or…

Study investigated the processing of ambiguous words that varied in frequency of use of their multiple interpretations. Results indicate that, whereas lexical access is an autonomous process, selection of the appropriate interpretation is a post-lexical process that is influenced by frequency information and context. (MM)

In the past years, there have been an increasing number of instrumental investigations as to the nature of speech production errors, prompted by the concern that decades of transcription-based speech error data may be tainted by perceptual biases. While all of these instrumental studies suggest that errors are not, as previously thought,…

Supplements Hans Basboll's state-of-the-art report on generative phonology (EJ 227 659), focusing on "abstract" v "concrete" approaches to surface data. Includes a summary of a discussion on phonology. (RL)

Results of three experiments are reported that investigated the processing of locally ambiguous object-subject sentences in German. The aim was to test whether the type of grammatical information that signals garden-path has an impact on how difficult it is to arrive at the correct structural assignment. (Author/VWL)

The article describes the contrastive possibilities of alignment of high accents in three Romance varieties, namely, Central Catalan, Neapolitan Italian, and Pisa Italian. The Romance languages analyzed in this article provide crucial evidence that small differences in alignment in rising accents should be encoded phonologically. To account for…

An experiment is reported that uses cross-modal priming to look at the resolution of anaphoric reference. Subjects given a visual lexical decision test simultaneously with an auditorily presented sentence showed selective semantic activation of the pronoun's referent on the basis of the pronoun's lexical properties. This finding is discussed in…

Reports a study on coding operations during visual word recognition. Subjects made lexical judgments about words and nonwords when phonological recoding was either beneficial or detrimental to making decisions; the phonological model was used by subjects when helpful. This supports a dual retrieval model of word recognition. (Author/PJM)

Contains status reports of research in three areas of speech production: functional properties of the speech production apparatus, control principles underlying speech production, and the biological basis of the speech production process. (RL)