A number of recent electrophysiological studies of sentence processing have shown that a subclass of syntactic violations elicits very rapid ERP responses, occurring within around 200 ms of the onset of the violation. Such findings raise the question of how it is possible to diagnose violations so quickly. This paper suggests that very rapid…

Eight experiments evaluated a core assumption of several theories of text processing, the shared resource assumption, which states that component text processes share limited processing resources. Short texts each contained two critical sentences that together warranted a causal inference. The syntactic structure of the second sentence was either…

Analysis of six cross-linguistic properties characterizing the head verb in the resultative construction in Chinese shows that the first verb, and not the second verb, should be analyzed as the head verb. (15 references) (Author/CB)

In two experiments, we explore how recent experience with particular syntactic constructions affects the strength of the structural priming observed for those constructions. The results suggest that (1) the strength of structural priming observed for double object and prepositional object constructions is affected by the relative frequency with…

This paper uses paraphrastic analysis to clarify several concepts related to the syntax of the plural in English sentences. (CK)

Contradicts a theory of determining the presuppositions and assertions of complex sentences. (CK)

Discusses theories of Chafe and Halliday and of Searles regarding idioms in English. The former two show that the division into "old" and "new" information determines English sentence structure. Chafe's definition of lexical and grammatical idioms makes possible prediction regarding their syntax and function. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Argues that psycholinguists should become aware of the information available to readers at levels beyond the individual sentence. (RB)

Examines the distribution and function of the French conjunctions "ou,""soit," and "tantot." (AM)

Describes and compares restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses and shows that, when studying their superficial differences, there is no need for construction-specific stipulations that distinguish between them. All the superficial differences between the two are derived from the single basic difference that one is a modifier and the other is not.…

Using evidence from eye-tracking studies, Van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, and Liversedge (2005) have argued against currently implemented constraint-based models of syntactic ambiguity resolution. The case against these competition models is based on a mismatch between reported patterns of reading data and the putative predictions of the models.…

Analyzes the circumstrances in which a German verb complex in a sentence can be separated by inserting various syntactic elements. Examples are provided. (Text is in German.) (DS)

The grammatical subject of sentences in English is regularly but not invariably perceived as the sentence topic. Attempts to express this regularity as a rule of grammar are frustrated by the numerous cases in which there is no topic or some other referring expression is the topic. An alternative account is one in which sentence topic is inferred…

Forty eight undergraduates were assigned to two groups of 24 subjects each. The high association (HA) group was given booklets that contained a series of nouns associatively related according to free association norms, one pair to a page; the low association (LA) group was given booklets containing pairs of associatively unrelated nouns. The…