Studies of discourse relations have not, in the past, attempted to characterize what serves as evidence for them, beyond lists of frozen expressions, or markers, drawn from a few well-defined syntactic classes. In this paper, we describe how the lexicalized discourse relation annotations of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) led to the discovery of a wide range of additional expressions, annota...

Although many theories of on-line syntactic processing invoke the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, we exploited the continuous and non-ballistic properties of computer mouse movements, identified by recording streaming x, y coordinates, in order to determine the validity of serial versus parallel ...

People have a tendency to repeat the types of sentences they use during language production. Recent experimental work has shown that this phenomenon is at least partly due to 'syntactic priming', whereby the act of processing an utterance with a particular form facilitates processing a subsequent utterance with the same or a related form. In this review, we first provide an overview of the evid...

This paper deals with the problem of the projection of arguments, i.e., how the arguments of a predicate are integrated into a syntactic structure. My starting point is the model offered in Borer (1993). This model is defined by Borer as a 'syntactic predicate based account' of the projection of arguments. In the next section I will briefly sketch the different approaches to the problem of argu...

Syntactic comprehension is a fundamental aspect of human language, and has distinct properties from other aspects of language (e.g. semantics). In this article, we aim to identify if there is a specific locus of syntax in the brain by reviewing imaging studies on syntactic processing. We conclude that results from neuroimaging support evidence from neuropsychology that syntactic processing does...

It is a well-known intuition that human sentence understanding works in an incremental fashion, with a seemingly constant update of the interpretation through the left-to-right processing of a string. Such intuitions are backed up by experimental evidence dating from at least as far back as Marslen-Wilson (1973), showing that under many circumstances, interpretations are indeed updated very qui...

Syntactic priming occurs when structural information from one sentence influences processing of a subsequently encountered sentence (Bock, 1986; Ledoux et al., 2007). This article reports 2 eye-tracking experiments investigating the effects of a prime sentence on the processing of a target sentence that shared aspects of syntactic form. The experiments were designed to determine the degree to w...

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences in which two noun phrases or two independent clauses were connected by the word or (NP-coordination and S-coordination, respectively). The word either could be present or absent earlier in the sentence. When either was present, the material immediately following or was read more quickly, across both sentence types. In addition, there ...

The quantitative study of the role of communicative efficiency in language production and comprehension has gained increasing attention recently. However, in online production most investigation has focused on the phonetic/phonological level, leaving open the question of whether the communicative pressures involved extend to the syntactic level. I present a corpus study which investigates the o...

Does syntactic information affect the production of bare nouns? Research into this issue has explored word-specific features (e.g., gender). However, word-independent syntactic distributions may also play a role. For example, studies of word recognition have uncovered strong effects of the diversity of a word's syntactic distribution – its syntactic flexibility – on response times in the lexica...