Cognitive linguists claim that verb-particle constructions are compositional and analyzable, and that the particles contribute to the overall meaning in the form of image schemas. This article examined this claim with a behavioral experiment, in which participants were asked to judge the sensibility of short sentences primed by image-schematic…

A hypothesis based on the psycholinguistic derivation of sentences was tested. The task required that sentences temporarily stored in memory be transformed and spoken with delayed auditory feedback. Available from Plenum Publishing Corp., 227 W. 17th St., New York, NY 10011. (Author/RM)

Tested a hypothesized relationship between rules of sentence transformation and preresponse processing time in a short-term memory and transformation task. Data showed that the amount of processing required by different grammatical transformations does not relate to the theoretical derivation. Available from Plenum Publishing Corp., 227 W. 17th…

It is suggested that twin discourse functions are served by thematization and topicalization, the former providing stable referential focus and the latter providing momentary referential focus. (Author/AM)

Event-related potentials were recorded to substantiate the claim of a distinct psycholinguistic status of (a) pronouns vs. proper names and (b) ellipses vs. proper names. In two studies 41 students read sentences in which the number of intervening words between the anaphor and its antecedent was either small or large. Comparing the far with the…

Seven different age levels were used to test the correlation between age and unfilled pauses (UP) and between age and parenthetical remarks (PR) in narratives elicited by visual stimuli. (Author/AM)

A psycholinguistic hypothesis regarding the use of interjections in spoken utterances, originally formulated by Ameka (1992b, 1994) for the English language, but not confirmed in the German-language research of Kowal and O'Connell (2004 a & c), was tested: The local syntactic isolation of interjections is paralleled by their articulatory isolation…

The mother tongue of the absolute majority of native Arabic speakers is Spoken Arabic (SA), which is a local dialect that does not have a written form. For reading and writing, as well as for formal communication Literary Arabic (LA) is used. For the literate Arabs, these two languages are extensively inter-twined in every day life. Consequently,…