Novice users engaged in task-oriented dialogues with an adviser to learn how to use an unfamiliar statistical package. The users', task was analyzed and a task structure was derived. The task structure was used to segment the dialogue into subdialogues associated with the subtasks of the overall task. The representation of the dialogue structure into a hierarchy of subdialogues, partly correspo...

Many influential models of sentence production (e.g., Bock & Levelt, 1994; Kempen & Hoenkamp, 1987; Levelt, 1989) emphasize the central role of verbs in structural encoding, and thus predict that verbs should be selected early in sentence formulation, possibly even before the phonological encoding of the first constituent (Ferreira, 2000). However, the most direct experimental test of this hypo...

The authors examined whether people can use their knowledge of the wider discourse rapidly enough to anticipate specific upcoming words as a sentence is unfolding. In an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment, subjects heard Dutch stories that supported the prediction of a specific noun. To probe whether this noun was anticipated at a preceding indefinite article, stories were continued...

This paper describes a system that resolves prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity in English sentence processing. This attachment problem is ubiquitous in English text, and is widely known as a place where semantics determines syntactic form. The decision is made based on a four-tuple composed of the head verb of the verb phrase, the head noun of the noun phrase, and the preposition and hea...

Most L2 learners cannot process a second language as native speakers do because of their less automatic syntactic processing ability. In this article, the author reports two experiments that used a word-by-word self-paced reading task to examine how Japanese language learners of English process English prepositional phrases. The study also examined whether these learners could improve their syn...

We conducted a norming study amongst Dutch children (6-12 years) to investigate whether they would correctly interpret our set of 208 color drawings, developed for longitudinal research on the production and comprehension transitive sentences, if action each drawing was described with an active or passive sentence. The provided 93.02% correct answers pictures, which indicates that pictures are ...

Communication in general requires a process for (a) producing an optimal form given a certain meaning, and recovering that meaning given the optimal form, and (b) arriving at an optimal interpretation given a certain form, and reproducing that form given the optimal interpretation (Blutner et al. 2006). Hence, optimal communication involves more than the sum of two unidirectional processes of o...

Communication in general requires a process for (a) producing an optimal form given a certain meaning, and recovering that meaning given the optimal form, and (b) arriving at an optimal interpretation given a certain form, and reproducing that form given the optimal interpretation (Blutner et al. 2006). Hence, optimal communication involves more than the sum of two unidirectional processes of o...

Communication in general requires a process for (a) producing an optimal form given a certain meaning, and recovering that meaning given the optimal form, and (b) arriving at an optimal interpretation given a certain form, and reproducing that form given the optimal interpretation (Blutner et al. 2006). Hence, optimal communication involves more than the sum of two unidirectional processes of o...