Purpose: Prosodic cues are used to clarify sentence structure and meaning. Two studies, one of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and one of adults with a history of learning disabilities, were designed to determine whether individuals with poor language skills recognize prosodic cues on par with their normal-language peers. Method:…

The present chapter bridges two lines of neurocognitive research, which are, despite being related, usually discussed separately from each other. The two fields, second language (L2) sentence comprehension and artificial grammar processing, both depend on the successful learning of complex sequential structures. The comparison of the two research…

In the study reported here, Japanese-speaking children aged 3-6 were confronted with making choices based on conflicting input from speakers who varied in the degree of certainty and the quality of evidence they possessed for their opinions. Certainty and evidentiality are encoded in Japanese both in high-frequency, closed-class, sentence-final…

The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence …

This paper describes how a constraint dependency grammar (CDG) parser performs a syntactic analysis of a single sentence (as part of a speech recognition system). The paper extends an existing CDG (developed by H. Maruyama) to process a lattice or graph of sentence hypotheses instead of separate text strings. The paper also describes how the CDG…

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…

Three studies are reported that addressed methodological problems in Stowe's (1989) study, which reported that semantic information eliminates garden paths in sentences with direct object versus subject ambiguity, such as in "Even before the police stopped the driver was frightened." Findings support a sentence processing system relying on…

Explored the processing of ambiguous sentences that may be assigned a gapping or nongapping structure. Focuses on what factors affect the ultimate interpretive preferences for these sentences. In a questionnaire, sentences with greater parallelism between arguments received more gapping responses, though an overall bias toward the nongapping…

Using the speeded-grammaticality judgment task, shows that factors that regulate garden path strength in ambiguous sentences also have an influence on processing of corresponding ungrammatical sentences in that they determine how reliably the ungrammaticality is detected. Argues that this processing correlation provides evidence for serial parsing…

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…

Describes a specific class of indirectly conveyed meanings which are definitional, or partly definitional, that is, although conveyed by the utterances of sentences, they are not part of the meaning of those sentences. The study considers Strawson's topic-centered approach to presupposition, thematic predicates, and the pragmatics of…

Two experiments showed that functional completeness--the explicit propositional surface realization of deep-structure clause relations--isolated effective and integral comprehension units, which definitions of comprehension units couched in levels of syntactic structure failed to do. (Author/RL)

Two experiments offer clear support for an interactive view of sentence comprehension; semantic factors do interact with syntactic factors. (RL)

Thirteen papers in this book illustrate MacWhinney and Bates's Competition Model (CM), with a focus on cross-linguistic processing. Studies in this volume show that (1) the CM is useful in predicting certain gross cross-linguistic differences of comprehension, particularly in relation to actor assignment and (2) children's processing strategies…

Investigated how adult monolinguals and bilinguals incorporate the context cue in assigning the agent role vis-a-vis intrasentential cues (animacy and word order). Subjects were first and second language speakers of Chinese and English. Results show that both Chinese and English controls paid less attention to context than to intrasentential cues…