Animal communication theory holds that many signals have evolved from nonsignal precursors. This field and laboratory study of California ground squirrels (Spermophilus beecheyi) provides evidence for the coexistence of such a precursor with its derived display. The precursor is an ancient, endogenously sequenced (syntactic) pattern of cephalocaudal grooming movements (CCGs) shared by all roden...

Abstract When a communicator faces word-formulation problem, they may use placeholder (PH) such as whatchamacallit to avoid producing target expression or delay it. A PH is dummy element used fill in the syntactic slot of item that unable unwilling produce (e.g. due memory lapse). Previous studies have generally been concerned with grammatically stable PHs , you-know-what ), ‘grammatically stab...

Branigan & Pickering (B&P) argue successfully that structural priming provides valuable information for developing psychologically plausible syntactic and semantic theories. I discuss how their approach can be used to help determine whether partially grammaticalized constructions that have undergone semantic change also have undergone syntactic reanalysis. I then consider cases in which evidenc...

Syntactic category ambiguities are very frequent in natural languages, and all architectures of language processing need a mechanism for disambiguating syntactic category ambiguities. Corley and Crocker (2000) suggested that syntactic category disambiguation can be assigned its own module within a modular architecture. We will show that the model defined by Corley and Crocker can account for a ...

Although several theories of online syntactic processing assume the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, the continuous and non-ballistic properties of computer mouse movements are exploited, by recording their streaming x, y coordinates to procure evidence regarding parallel versus serial processing....

There is considerable evidence showing that the human sentence processor is guided by lexical preferences in resolving syntactic ambiguities. Several types of preferences have been identified, including morphological, syntactic, and semantic ones. However, the literature fails to provide a uniform account of what lexical preferences are and how they should be measured. The present paper provide...