This paper summarises recent research concerning the relationship between intonation and the syntactic analysis of sentences. After introductory comments on the nature of intonation, we discuss methodological problems in determining the relationship between syntactic and intonational structure, and the potential dangers of basing claims about this relationship on scripted readings rather than o...

Human language comprehension is so effortless that it often appears instantaneous. Someone speaks, and we understand them without any awareness of how. It is only when we step back and examine the structure of language that it becomes clear just how complex this ability is. To understand speech, we must: transform the acoustic input into a phonological representation, identify each word that is...

In this chapter we explore the possibility that within Optimality Theory, a single syntactic grammar directly yields not only competence theoretic results on the grammatical distributions of elements, but also performance theoretic results on relative preferences when processing sentences with various syntactic ambiguities. Whereas the competence theory applies the grammar at the level of an en...

People have the capability to process text three times faster than they would naturally read it, yet many current theories of sentence processing rely on natural reading times as a proxy for processing difficulty. How can people read material so quickly in spite of information processing limitations suggested by sentence processing theories? One possibility is that surprisal effects on reading ...

Sentence processing problems form a common consequence of left-hemisphere brain injury, in some patients to such an extent that their pattern of language performance is characterized as "agrammatic". However, the location of left-hemisphere damage that causes such problems remains controversial. It has been suggested that the critical site for syntactic processing is Broca's area of the frontal...