Speakers should be motivated to produce easy-to-understand sentences, but they must successfully say sentences that are harder to produce. Four experiments assessed how verb bias influences the mention of the optional "that" in sentence-complement structures. Without the "that", such sentences can be incorrectly interpreted as including direct objects (garden paths), and especially so after dir...

This paper focuses on wh-in-situ phenomena under phase-based approach and discusses the asymmetry between wh-arguments and wh-adjuncts in Mandarin Chinese. Wh-adjuncts, contrary to wh-arguments, are considered to be operators and must undergo movement so that the wh-island effects in this case can be explained. This paper attributes the subjacency effect to the locality requirement of wh-adjunc...

We develop a uniform analysis of single-wh and multiple-wh questions couched in dynamic inquisitive semantics. The captures the effects number marking on which-phrases, derives both mention-some mention-all readings as well an often neglected partial reading questions.

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether early bilingual Basque-Spanish speakers, who acquired Spanish by the age of 5, comprehend Spanish wh-dependences as effortlessly as native Spanish speakers. Given that Basque and Spanish are structurally different languages, we hypothesized that predictive processing strategies from the first language (L1) would interfere with predictive...

This article provides an overview of the issues and proposals surrounding wh-insitu since the 1980s. In particular, it discusses the question of whether or not in-situ wh-phrases undergo covert wh-movement. Aside from reviewing the basic arguments for and against covert wh-movement, it considers alternative proposals put forth, ranging from movement of elements other than wh-phrases themselves,...

This paper investigates the relation between the linguistic structure of the breath group and breathing kinematics in spontaneous speech. 26 female speakers of German were recorded by means of an Inductance Plethysmograph. The breath group was defined as the interval of speech produced on a single exhalation. For each group several linguistic parameters (number and type of clauses, number of sy...

Syntactic analysis, i.e., parsing of text is used during various tasks, e.g., machine translation, question answering, etc. The structure of a sentence is represented with a tree. Parsing long sentences is a difficult task. The motivation was to analyze sub-units of the sentence independently, which could improve the overall parsing accuracy. We developed a new parsing algorithm that includes i...

This paper investigates the extent to which existing structural commitments constrain the human parser’s search for analyses of new incoming material, specifically whether a Reanalysis as a Last Resort (RALR) strategy applies to sentence parsing. Two self-paced reading experiments investigated this issue using a structural ambiguity in which a local, easy reanalysis parse is pitted against a no...

This study investigates the interaction of lexical tone and intonation in embedded clauses in the two-tone Kwa language Akan. The claim is that embedded clauses show recursive prosodic phrasing at the level of intonation phrases (ι-phrase). The prosodic boundary of an embedded clause is expressed by means of a pitch register reset. At the boundary, lexical tonal distinctions are maintained in t...