Both off-line and on-line comprehension studies suggest not only toddlers and preschoolers, but also older school-age children have trouble interpreting contrast-marking pitch prominence. To test whether children achieve adult-like proficiency in processing contrast-marking prosody during school years, an eye-tracking experiment examined the effect of accent on referential resolution in six- to...

Previous studies of auditory statistical learning have typically presented learners with sequential structural information that is uniformly distributed across the entire exposure corpus. Here we present learners with nonuniform distributions of structural information by altering the organization of trisyllabic nonsense words at midstream. When this structural change was unmarked by low-level a...

The present study investigated 3- to 7-year-olds' (N = 91) comprehension of two-clause sentences containing the temporal connectives before or after. The youngest children used an order of mention strategy to interpret the relation between clauses: They were more accurate when the presentation order matched the chronological order of events: "He ate his lunch, before he played in the garden" (c...

the studies performed regarding the reasons for villagers’ migration to cities confirm the fact that the motivation for migrants to migrate is to attain higher incomes. the proposed method in this research to recuce migration is to transform the farmer into portfolio entrepreneurs. the applicability of this method to increase farmers' income to reduce their migration is tested throughout t...

Stowe (1989) reported that semantic information eliminates garden paths in sentences with the direct-object vs. subject ambiguity, such as Even before the police stopped the driver was very frightened. Three experiments are presented which addressed some methodological problems in Stowe's study. Experiment 1, using a word-by-word, self-paced reading task with grammaticality judgements, manipula...

The limited capacity of working memory is intrinsic to human sentence processing, and therefore must be addressed by any theory of human sentence processing. I assume that the amount of short term memory that is necessary at any stage in the parsing process is determined by the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of the structure(s) that have been built up to that point in the parse. A...

Recent work on the nature of syntactic ambiguity has focused on the properties of lexical items that may be relevant to resolving such ambiguities. A variety of lexical properties have been proposed as having significant influence on syntactic ambiguity resolution. Ranging from referential properties (Ni, Crain, & Shankweiler 1996), in the context of the Referential Model of language processing...

Spontaneous speech differs in several ways from the sentences often studied in psycholinguistics experiments. One important difference is that naturally produced utterances often contain disfluencies. In this study, we examined how the presence of ‘‘uh’’ in a spoken sentence might affect processes that assign syntactic structure (i.e., parsing). Four experiments are reported. In the first, part...

This report describes a theory of garden path phenomena that is emerging from work on NL-Soar, a computational model of language comprehension embedded within the Soar architecture. The theory is constrained by a corpus of two kinds of sentences: garden paths (GP), which reveal the limitations of human comprehension in dealing with local ambiguities, and non-garden-paths (NGP), which reveal its...