Linguistic evidence suggests that syllables like bdam (with stop-stop clusters) are less preferred than bzam (with stop-fricative combinations). Here, we demonstrate that English speakers manifest similar preferences despite no direct experience with either structure. Experiment 1 elicited syllable count for auditory materials (e.g., does bzam have one syllable or two?); Experiment 2 examined t...

This study presents a corpus-based analysis of discourse-connective que (DCQ) in five varieties Spanish and across four different discursive genres. On the one hand, we show that DCQ is not only spoken phenomenon but at same time mainly restricted to colloquial language use. other results more entrenched Peninsular variety than Latin-American (Mexico shows lowest overall frequency). Moreover, a...

The PTIME-Cognition Hypothesis states that cognitive capacities are limited to those functions that are computationally tractable (Frixione 2001). We applied this hypothesis to semantic processing and investigated whether computational complexity affects interpretation preferences of reciprocal sentences with quantificational antecedents, that is sentences of the form Q dots are (directly) conn...

In noun compounds in English, the modifying noun may be singular (mouse-eater) or an irregularly inflected plural (mice-eater), but regularly inflected plurals are dispreferred (*rats-eater). This phenomenon has been taken as strong evidence for dual-mechanism theories of lexical representations, which hold that regular (rule-governed) and irregular (exception) items are generated by qualitativ...

Based on word order patterns in Czech, I argue that a cross-linguistically common partitioning of a sentence between given and new material is a result of an interplay of independently needed pragmatic notions: the Maximize Presupposition principle of Heim (1991) and presupposition failure. I formalize the intuition by introducing presuppositions by a freely insertable recursive operator which ...

To understand a discourse the reader needs to recover the relations between the discourse elements as intended by the writer Writers can and very often do help the reader along by providing explicit lexical signals of the intended discourse relations through the use of lexicalised discourse markers In this paper we present a novel approach for generating texts containing multiple embedded rheto...

We investigate two methods for enhancing variation in the output of a stochastic surface realiser: choosing from among the highest-scoring realisation candidates instead of taking the single highestscoring result (ε-best sampling), and penalising the words from earlier sentences in a discourse when generating later ones (anti-repetition scoring). In a human evaluation study, subjects were asked...

To understand a discourse, the reader needs to recover the relations between the discourse elements as intended by the writer. Writers can, and very often do, help the reader along by providing explicit lexical signals of the intended discourse relations through the use of lexicalised discourse markers. In this paper we present a novel approach for generating texts containing multiple, embedded...

The present study investigates syntactic priming with children aged three and four. It examines whether children can be primed to use two alternative complex noun phrases (an adjective+noun structure and a noun+relative clause construction) to describe pictures, how susceptible children are to priming (in comparison to adult subjects) and which of the two alternative phrases is preferred accord...

iChirp-evoked auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) yield a larger wave V amplitude at low intensity levels than traditional broadband click stimuli, providing a reliable estimation of hearing sensitivity. However, advantages of iChirp stimulation at high intensity levels are unknown. We tested to see if high-intensity (i.e., 85 dBnHL) iChirp stimulation results in larger and more reliable ABR wa...