Prosodic Effects in Minimal Attachment

This experiment explores the role of prosodic cues in resolving temporary morphosyntactic ambiguities in spoken language comprehension. Using a cross-modal naming task, we find that prosodic cues are as effective as overt lexical cues in controlling how the listener resolves attachment ambiguities. This suggests that prosodic factors can affect the early stages of parsing and interpretation.     

The Gradual Deterioration of Syntax and Semantics in a Patient with Progressive Aphasia

FM is a progressive aphasic patient whose language comprehension we studied over a 4-year period. We developed a variety of implicit and explicit tasks to chart progressive changes in the representation of linguistic knowledge (in particular, syntax and semantics) and the automatic and controlled processes which operate on that knowledge. The representation of FM's semantic knowledge remained essentially intact over the years, but she became increasingly impaired at combining the meanings of words. She also showed progressive impairments in the processes of syntactic combination. Thus, FM's disease resulted in a progressive inability to engage in those combinatorial processes necessary for the normal comprehension of a spoken utterance. This is not a selective deficit in the traditional sense of the term, since aspects of both syntax and semantics are implicated; but it is selective in the sense that other aspects of language comprehension remain intact.     

Use of derivational morphology during reading

This study examines contrasting predictions made by models of the lexicon in which stem morphemes play a central accessing role versus models in which stem morphemes play no particular role. Models which assign an independent role to morphemes predict that derivationally suffixed words have both inhibitive and facilitative effects on the reading process. A reading comprehension task was administered to good and poor high-school-age readers to assess their use of both the lexical-semantic and syntactic information provided by morphemes in derivationally suffixed target words. The subjects appeared to use the stem morpheme of a derivationally suffixed word to establish overall sentence meaning but often did not use the syntactic information contained in the derivational suffix. The failure to use syntactic information in the suffix was significantly greater for lower-ability readers than for those reading at or above grade level. The results offer support for morphologically organized models of the lexicon.     

A programmable circuit for varying light intensity

An inexpensive circuit is described for the control of light intensity. The control is obtained by a method that produces no color changes and may be programmed by any system that can express itself in four-digit binary numbers.