SYMMETRY OF CLAUSES AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF LEFT-BRANCHING.

This paper deals with the questions of symmetry in sentence clauses, and of the psychological significance of left-branching. Texts based on spontaneous and prepared speech, drawn from populations ranging from political speakers to schizophrenic patients were analysed. Much of recent psycholinguistic work has aimed at describing aspects of grammar and sentence structure in terms of psychological processes involved in the encoding or decoding of grammatical entities. Material for analysis consisted of prepared as well as spontaneous natural speech. Whenever possible, passages were chosen so as to contain about 100 clauses of uninterrupted speech.