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In a series of experiments. Bock and colleagues have demonstrated that subjects show a reliable increase in the use of particular syntactic constructions after having heard and repeated that construction in an unrelated sentence. Aspects of the data seem to indicate that it is syntactic constituent structure, independent of meaning, that underlies the facilitation in these situations. In this study we investigate whether more semantic factors might also lead to priming, and specifically whether the assignment of a semantic role to a particular participant in a prime sentence can increase the probability of a target sentence whose structure allows a similar assignment. To test this we replicate Bock's study and include a further set of primes (provide-with primes) which have the syntactic constituent structure of the dative, but share semantic role assignment with the ditransitive. If syntactic priming were triggered by constituent structure alone, primes like this would lead to more dative responses, relative to a ditransitive prime. If semantic involvement were crucial, on the other hand, this prime should elicit more ditransitive responses. In this study we find significantly more ditransitive responses following the provide-with sentence than following a dative prime, and no difference between the provide-with and ditransitive primes, suggesting that semantic factors indeed play a role.

An important issue in recent work on lexical representation is whether inflected past tense forms are represented as single units or in morphologically decomposed form, and whether this varies according to the regulartity of the fonns involved. W e investigated this by looking at competitor effects between homophonic past tense forms (paced/paste, made/maid) where we varied the relative frequencies of the past tense form and its homophonic competitor. In particular, if regular forms are represented in morphologicaly decomposed form, as is widely argued, and irregular forms are listed as single units, this should lead to contrasting effects. To investigate this we used two tasks - writing to dictation and cross modal priming to compare frequency effects for regular and irregular forms. The results for both type of experiment were highly consistent, showing parallel effects of frequency for both regular and irregular forms. W e discuss the implications of this for claims about the lexical representation of morphologically complex forms.

This paper describes a technique developed for modelinghistorical change in connectionist networks, and Weflyreviews previous work applying that technique to theproblem of the historical development of the regular verbsystem from early to late Old English. W e then broadenthe scope of the simulations and ask what the effect wouldbe of having such changes occur in a single mechanismwhich is processing both the regular and inegular verbs,and extended over a longer time period. A s w e shall see,the results are highly consistent with the major historicaldevelopments. Furthermore, the results are readily under-stood in terms of network dynamics, and provide a ratio-nale for the shape of the attested historical changes.

We used a cross-modal repetition priming task toinvestigate the mental representation of regular andirregular past tense forms in English. Subjects hearda spoken prime (such as walked) immediatelyfollowed by lexical decision to a visual probe (such aswalk). W e contrasted three types of English verbs,varying in the phonological and morphologicalregularity of their past tense inflection. These were(i) Regular verbs {jump/jumped), with the regular 1-61inflection and no stem change, (ii) Semi-Weak verbs{burn/burnt, feel/felt), with irregular alveolarinflection and some phonologically regular stemvowel change, and (iii) Vowel Change verbs{sing/sang, give/gave), which mark past tensethrough phonologically irregular changes in the stemvowel. T h e stem forms of these verbs were presentedin three prime conditions ~ preceded either by theIdentity Prime, a Past Tense Prime, or a ControlPrime. T h e Identity Prime significantly facilitatedlexical decision responses for all three verb classes,but the Past Tense Prime, while significantlyfacilitating responses in the Regular verb class,produced no overall effect for the Semi-Weak verbs,and significant interference for the Vowel Changeverbs. W e conclude that phonological irregularity inthe relation between a stem and an inflected form canlead to very different lexical structures than w e findfor more regular phonological relationships.

One example of linguistic productivity that has been much discussed in the developmental literature is the verb inflection system of English. Opinion is divided on the issue of whether regular^rregular distinctions in surface behavior must be attributed to an underlying distinction in the mechanisms of production. Looking at the course of historical development in English, the current paper evaluates potential shortcomings of two competing approaches. T w o sets of simulations are presented. The first argues that a single-mechanism model offers a natural account of historical facts that would be problematic for a dual mechanism approach. The second addresses a potential problem for a single-mechanism account, the question of default behavior, and demonstrates that even in the absence of superior type frequency a network is capable of developing a "default" category. W e conclude that the single network account offers a more promising mechanism for explaining English verb inflection.'

Over the last 10 years, the assimilation process referred to as vowel harmony has served as a test case for a number of proposals in phonological theory. Current autosegmental approaches successfully capture the intuition that vowel harmony is a dynamic process involving the interaction of a sequence of vowels; still, no theoretical analysis has offered a non-stipulative account of the inconsistent behavior of the so-called "transparent", or disharmonic, segments. The current paper proposes a connectionist processing account of the vowel harmony phenomenon, using data from Hungarian. The strength of this account is that it demonstrates that the same general principle of assimilation which underiies the behavior of the "harmonic" forms accounts as well for the apparently exceptional "transparent" cases, without stipulation.

In some theories of sentence comprehension, linguistically relevant lexical knowledge, such as selectional restrictions, is privileged in terms of the time-course of its access and influence. We examined whether event knowledge computed by combining multiple concepts can rapidly influence language understanding even in the absence of selectional restriction violations. Specifically, we investigated whether instruments can combine with actions to influence comprehension of ensuing patients of (as in Rayner, Warren, Juhuasz, & Liversedge, 2004; Warren & McConnell, 2007). Instrument-verb-patient triplets were created in a norming study designed to tap directly into event knowledge. In self-paced reading (Experiment 1), participants were faster to read patient nouns, such as "hair", when they were typical of the instrument-action pair ("Donna used the shampoo to wash" vs. "the hose to wash"). Experiment 2 showed that these results were not due to direct instrument-patient relations. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 1 using eyetracking, with effects of event typicality observed in first fixation and gaze durations on the patient noun. This research demonstrates that conceptual event-based expectations are computed and used rapidly and dynamically during on-line language comprehension. We discuss relationships among plausibility and predictability, as well as their implications. We conclude that selectional restrictions may be best considered as event-based conceptual knowledge rather than lexical-grammatical knowledge. (Contains 2 figures, 12 tables and 1 footnote.)

This research tests whether comprehenders use their knowledge of typical events in real time to process verbal arguments. In self-paced reading and event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments, we used materials in which the likelihood of a specific patient noun ("brakes" or "spelling") depended on the combination of an agent and verb ("mechanic checked" vs. "journalist checked"). Reading times were shorter at the word directly following the patient for the congruent than the incongruent items. Differential N400s were found earlier, immediately at the patient. Norming studies ruled out any account of these results based on direct relations between the agent and patient. Thus, comprehenders dynamically combine information about real-world events based on intrasentential agents and verbs, and this combination then rapidly influences online sentence interpretation. (Contains 2 figures and 2 tables.)

An increasing number of results in sentence and discourse processing demonstrate that comprehension relies on rich pragmatic knowledge about real-world events, and that incoming words incrementally activate such knowledge. If so, then even outside of any larger context, nouns should activate knowledge of the generalized events that they denote or typically play a role in. We used short stimulus onset asynchrony priming to demonstrate that (1) event nouns prime people ("sale-shopper") and objects ("trip-luggage") commonly found at those events; (2) location nouns prime people/animals ("hospital-doctor") and objects ("barn-hay") commonly found at those locations; and (3) instrument nouns prime things on which those instruments are commonly used ("key-door"), but not the types of people who tend to use them ("hose-gardener"). The priming effects are not due to normative word association. On our account, facilitation results from event knowledge relating primes and targets. This has much in common with computational models like LSA or BEAGLE in which one word primes another if they frequently occur in similar contexts. LSA predicts priming for all six experiments, whereas BEAGLE correctly predicted that priming should not occur for the instrument-people relation but should occur for the other five. We conclude that event-based relations are encoded in semantic memory and computed as part of word meaning, and have a strong influence on language comprehension. (Contains 4 tables.)

Two rating studies demonstrate that English speakers willingly produce reduced relatives with internal cause verbs (e.g., "Whisky fermented in oak barrels can have a woody taste"), and judge their acceptability based on factors known to influence ambiguity resolution, rather than on the internal/external cause distinction. Regression analyses demonstrate that frequency of passive usage predicts reduced relative frequency in corpora, but internal/external cause status does not. The authors conclude that reduced relatives with internal cause verbs are rare because few of these verbs occur in the passive. This contrasts with the claim in McKoon and Ratcliff (McKoon, G., & Ratcliff, R. (2003). "Meaning through syntax: Language comprehension and the reduced relative clause construction." "Psychological Review," 110, 490-525) that reduced relatives like "The horse raced past the barn fell" are rare and, when they occur, incomprehensible, because the meaning of the reduced relative construction prohibits the use of a verb with an internal cause event template.

The authors argue that the meaning through syntax (MTS) model proposed by G. McKoon and R. Ratcliff fails to account for the comprehension of sentences with reduced relative clauses. First, the theory's core assumptions regarding verb-based event representations and how they link to constructions are incompatible with well-established analyses from the lexical semantics literature. Second, the MTS theory provides neither a principled nor a consistent account for why some reduced relatives are hard whereas others are easy. Finally, McKoon and Ratcliff's critique of constraint-based models is flawed in that sometimes they tested a nonexistent theory and sometimes they provided evidence for the constraint-based models against which they were arguing.

Linguistic and psycholinguistic research has documented that there exists a close relationship between a verb's meaning and the syntactic structures in which it occurs, and that learners and comprehenders take advantage of this relationship both in acquisition and in processing. We address implications of these facts for issues in structural ambiguity resolution, arguing that comprehenders are sensitive to meaning-structure correlations based not on the verb itself but on its specific senses, and that they exploit this information on-line. We demonstrate that individual verbs show significant differences in their subcategorisation profiles across three corpora, and that cross-corpora bias estimates are much more stable when sense is taken into account. Finally, we show that consistency between sense-contingent subcategorisation biases and experimenters' classifications largely predicts results of recent experiments. Thus comprehenders learn and exploit meaning-form correlations at the level of individual verb senses, rather than the verb in the aggregate.

A potential problem for connectionist accounts of inflectional morphology is the need to learn a "default" inflection. This article demonstrates that given appropriate architectural assumptions, connectionist models are capable of learning a default category and generalizing as required, even in the absence of superior type frequency. (22 references) (Author/CK)

Anticipation plays a role in language comprehension. In this article, we explore the extent to which verb sense influences expectations about upcoming structure. We focus on change of state verbs like shatter, which have different senses that are expressed in either transitive or intransitive structures, depending on the sense that is used. In two experiments we influence the interpretation of verb sense by manipulating the thematic fit of the grammatical subject as cause or affected entity for the verb, and test whether readers' expectations for a transitive or intransitive structure change as a result. This sense-biasing context influenced reading times in the postverbal regions. Reading times for transitive sentences were faster following good-cause than good-theme subjects, but the opposite pattern was found for intransitive sentences. We conclude that readers use sense-contingent subcategorization preferences during on-line comprehension. Keywords: Sentence processing; Language comprehension; Lexical semantics; Psycholinguistics; Event memory

Byline: Mary Hare (a), Michael K. Tanenhaus (b), Ken McRae (c) Keywords: Lexical semantics; Language comprehension; Language production; Meaning through syntax (MTS) Abstract: Two rating studies demonstrate that English speakers willingly produce reduced relatives with internal cause verbs (e.g., Whisky fermented in oak barrels can have a woody taste), and judge their acceptability based on factors known to influence ambiguity resolution, rather than on the internal/external cause distinction. Regression analyses demonstrate that frequency of passive usage predicts reduced relative frequency in corpora, but internal/external cause status does not. The authors conclude that reduced relatives with internal cause verbs are rare because few of these verbs occur in the passive. This contrasts with the claim in McKoon and Ratcliff (McKoon, G., & Ratcliff, R. (2003). Meaning through syntax: Language comprehension and the reduced relative clause construction. Psychological Review, 110, 490-525) that reduced relatives like The horse raced past the barn fell are rare and, when they occur, incomprehensible, because the meaning of the reduced relative construction prohibits the use of a verb with an internal cause event template. Author Affiliation: (a) Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA (b) University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA (c) University of Western Ontario, London, Ont., Canada Article History: Received 23 January 2006; Revised 8 August 2006 Article Note: (footnote) [star] This work was supported by NIH grant MH6051701 to the first and third author, NIH grant HD27206 to the second author, and NSERC grant OGP0155704 to the third author. We would like to thank Dana Subik for assistance with materials and analysis for Study 2, Doug Roland for his input to Study 3, and Wendy Fogo for helping with the item classification in that study.

The authors argue that the meaning through syntax (MTS) model proposed by G. McKoon and R. Ratcliff (2003) fails to account for the comprehension of sentences with reduced relative clauses. First, the theory's core assumptions regarding verb-based event representations and how they link to constructions are incompatible with well-established analyses from the lexical semantics literature. Second, the MTS theory provides neither a principled nor a consistent account for why some reduced relatives are hard whereas others are easy. Finally, McKoon and Ratcliff's critique of constraint-based models is flawed in that sometimes they tested a nonexistent theory and sometimes they provided evidence for the constraint-based models against which they were arguing. Keywords: lexical semantics, sentence processing, meaning through syntax

A simple recurrent neural network was used to represent the mapping from the variant surface form of speech to the underlying form to examine speech recognition using connectionist learning methods. The network was able to phonologically deduce the meaning of speech patterns despite slight changes in words. Findings showed that connectionist learning principles can be successfully applied to the mappings used in cognitive processing.