Investigates the relative effect of two types of explicit grammar instruction on learners' ability to interpret and produce sentences containing the French causative. Indicates processing instruction is as effective as traditional instruction in enabling learners to interpret the French causative; traditional instruction is more effective in…

Comparison of undergraduate students' (N=42) processing of equal- and unequal-length sentences with passive and active voices and positive and negative forms revealed a significant active-passive main effect when sentences were of unequal length. An active-passive difference for positive, but not negative, sentences was also shown. (Author/CB)

A study was undertaken to test the theory that canonical sentence schemas can sometimes assign argument structure to verbs. The theory has the advantage of explaining errors without postulating the acquisition of erroneous lexical entries that have to be learned, and it can be extended to other kinds of errors in the choice and placement of…

Addressed whether hierarchical relations and word order can be separated in sentence production. Assessed in two experiments whether subject-verb agreement errors require linear proximity of a so-called "local" noun to the verb. Found evidence for a stage in language production in which a syntactic structure is built prior to stage in which words…

In this study, a sentence interpretation experiment based on Bates and MacWhinney's Competition Model was administered to second language learners of English and Chinese at three different stages of learning. Examined how transfer patterns at the sentence processing level change as a function of proficiency and investigates whether or how transfer…

Three French-speaking agrammatic aphasics and three French-speaking Conduction aphasics were tested for comprehension of Active, Passive, Cleft-Subject, Cleft-Object, and Cleft-Object sentences with Stylistic Inversion using an object manipulation test. The agrammatic patients consistently reversed thematic roles in the latter sentence type, and…

A central question for psycholinguistics concerns the role of grammatical constraints in online sentence processing. Many current theories maintain that the language processing mechanism constructs a parse or parses that are grammatically consistent with the whole of the perceived input each time it processes a word. Several bottom-up, dynamical…

This article reflects one session of a course in thinking and communicating for Pace University (New York) faculty. The purpose of the course was to heighten awareness that language can seriously misrepresent events which it describes, thus affecting students' ability to perceive, evaluate, and make day-to-day decisions. Beginning with a concrete…

Analysis of the role of paraphrase in the cohesion of everyday oral discourse suggests that combining two methodological approaches to discourse analysis, using distribution of specific discourse elements and sequential relationships within discourse, creates a more empirical foundation for analysis, leading to a more accurate formulation of the…

An experiment was carried out to determine how the memory search of a two-clause complex sentence in immediate memory is carried out. An item-recognition task was performed with 32 native English-speaking, right-handed adults who listened to eight two-clause complex sentences presented to the left ear, each immediately followed by a probe word…

In two experiments, subjects were interrupted while listening to a two-clause sentence just before the last word of either the initial clause or the final clause. The two experiments together suggest that interclause semantic relations affect the immediate processing of clauses. (Author/EJS)

Outlines an approach to develop a computer program that can parse beginner-level English in BASIC through input processing, word matching, and phrase structure parsing. (CB)

This study examines children's knowledge of structural properties of expository text: topical relatedness, superordination, and cohesion. Nearly all who completed the paragraph-construction tasks were able to identify paragraphs. Seventh-graders were adept at describing what makes a paragraph but experienced difficulty in placing main-idea…

Reviews discourse analytic and text comprehension studies for their contributions to a cognitive process view of writing, then reports on a study that combines discourse analysis with online pause data to determine how semantic propositions reflect sentence-level planning patterns. (FL)

Reports three studies which explored relationships between prototypicality and sentence structure in recall, preference ratings, and natural dictionary definitions. The results can be explained in terms of the sensitivity of sentence production processes to the lexical or conceptual accessibility of prototypes. (Author/AMH)