Manipulated shared knowledge and focus on specific entities, the verb in the sentence, and whether the description was definite or indefinite. Each factor influenced interpretation of the description. Confirmed that changing verbs alone affected reference choice. Indicated that both referentially and attributively introduced entities are…

Presents results from a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese investigating attachment preferences for relative clauses to three ensuing potential nominal heads. Results are discussed in light of two types of parsing models. (Author/VWL)

When forecasters and decision makers describe uncertain events using verbal probability terms, there is a risk of miscommunication because people use different probability phrases and interpret them in different ways. In an effort to facilitate the communication process, the authors investigated various ways of converting the forecasters' verbal…

The study presented here investigated the role of memory in normal sentence processing by looking at ERP effects to normal sentences and sentences containing grammatical violations. Sentences where the critical word was in the middle of the sentence were compared to sentences where the critical word always occurred in sentence-final position.…

This paper investigates the processing of long-distance filler-gap dependencies in Japanese, a strongly head-final language. Two self-paced reading experiments and one sentence completion study show that Japanese readers associate a fronted "wh"-phrase with the most deeply embedded clause of a multi-clause sentence. Experiment 1 demonstrates this…

Hudson (1990) proposes that each conjunct in a coordinate phrase forms dependency relations with heads or dependents outside the coordinate phrase (the "multi-head" view). This proposal is tested through corpus analysis of Wall Street Journal text. For right-branching constituents (such as direct-object NPs), a short-long preference for conjunct…

Fixed prepositional phrases of the type in this way and on the other hand are used in written and spoken English to connect sentences into larger units (text, dialogues). German prefers simple adverbials like so. Appended is a check-list of the most common such phrases in English and possible German equivalents.

This lesson uses a text about the houseboats of Kashmir to give students practice with descriptions, compound words, and participles. The lesson plan could be adapted to tourist destinations familiar to the students. Students are asked to write a description of their homes and create a tourism brochure for their own cities or towns.

The purposes of this study are to test whether the processing of subject relative (SR) clauses is easier than that of object relative (OR) clauses in Turkish and to investigate whether the comprehension of SRs can be better explained by the linear distance hypothesis or structural distance hypothesis (SDH). The question is examined in two groups…

Findings from a longitudinal study of bilingual children acquiring Cantonese and English pose a challenge to the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977), which predicts that object relatives should not be acquired before subject relatives. In the children's Cantonese, object relatives emerged earlier than or…

The word length effect has been a central feature of theorising about immediate memory. The notion that short-term memory traces rapidly decay unless refreshed by rehearsal is based primarily upon the finding that serial recall for short words is better than that for long words. The decay account of the word length effect has come under pressure…

Binding theory (e.g., Chomsky, 1981) has played a central role in both syntactic theory and models of language processing. Its constraints are designed to predict that the referential domains of pronouns and reflexives are nonoverlapping, that is, are complementary; these constraints are also thought to play a role in online reference resolution.…

This study investigates the phenomenon of "Locative Inversion" in Cantonese. The term "Locative Inversion" indicates that the locative phrase (LP) syntactic process in Cantonese and the appears at the sentence-initial position and its logical subject occurs postverbally. It is demonstrated that this Locative Inversion is a…

The structures of quantifier phrases in Thai are studied in the X-Syntax framework. Syntactic and semantic arguments are provided to prove that this model remedies the deficiency of traditional and early transformational grammar as it provides insightful analyses based on distinctions between intermediate level nodes that display internal…

The author divides the appositive noun phrases in German into two types, the relative and the performative, and describes the structure of each type. (Text is in German.) (TL)