Heterogeneous logic

This paper considers the question: what becomes of the notion of a logic as a way of codifying valid arguments when the customary assumption is dropped that the premisses and conclusions of these arguments are statements from some single language? An elegant treatment of the notion of a logic, when this assumption is in force, is that provided by Dana Scott's theory of consequence relations; this treatment is appropriately generalized in the present paper to the case where we do not make this assumption of linguistic homogeneity. Several applications of the resulting concept of a heterogeneous logic are suggested, but the main emphasis is on the formal development. One topic touched on is a certain contrast between the boolean and the intensional sentence-connectives in this more general setting.     

Tasks and timing in the perception of linguistic anomaly

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the relative timing of syntactic and pragmatic anomaly detection during sentence processing. Experiment 1 was an eye movement study. Experiment 2 employed a dual-task paradigm with compressed speech input, to put the processing routines under time pressure. Experiment 3 used compressed speech input in an anomaly monitoring task. The outcomes of these experiments suggest that there is little or no delay in pragmatic processing relative to syntactic processing in the comprehension of unambiguous sentences. This narrows the possible explanations for any delays that are observed in the use of pragmatic information for ambiguity resolution.The research reported in this paper was supported by Program Project Grant HD-01994 to Haskins Laboratories from the National Institutes of Child and Human Development, and in part by a grant to Stephen Crain and Donald Shankweiler from the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. We thank Jacques Mehler and Gerry Altmann for helpful information about speech compression algorithms. We are especially grateful to Ignatius Mattingly for his generous expert advice on speech compression and design of the experimental materials, and also for recording all the speech stimuli. Julie Boland, Brian McElree, Janet Nicol, and Martin Pickering provided very helpful advice on an earlier draft.