Previous research has shown that usage preferences (non-categorical constraints on the distribution of syntactic structures) shape many grammatical alternations. In the present study, we show that usage preferences also influence which alternate listeners report hearing when presented with acoustically degraded input. We investigated the English…

When an elided constituent and its antecedent do not match syntactically, the presence of a word implying the non-actuality of the state of affairs described in the antecedent seems to improve the example. ("This information should be released but Gorbachev didn't." vs. "This information was released but Gorbachev didn't.") We model this effect in…

This paper presents findings from two eye-tracking studies designed to investigate the role of metrical prosody in silent reading. In Experiment 1, participants read stress-alternating noun-verb or noun-adjective homographs (e.g. "PREsent", "preSENT") embedded in limericks, such that the lexical stress of the homograph, as determined by context,…

There has been much debate, in both the linguistics and the psycholinguistics literature, concerning numbers and the interpretation of number denoting determiners ("numerals"). Such debate concerns, in particular, the nature and distribution of upper-bounded ("exact") interpretations vs. lower-bounded ("at-least") construals. In the present paper…

Traditional syntactic accounts of verb phrase ellipsis (e.g., ''Jason laughed. Sam did [ ] too.'') categorize as ungrammatical many sentences that language users find acceptable (they ''undergenerate''); semantic accounts overgenerate. We propose that a processing theory, together with a syntactic account, does a better job of describing and…

Two eye movement experiments explored the roles of verbal subcategorization possibilities and transitivity biases in the processing of heavy NP shift sentences in which the verb's direct object appears to the right of a post-verbal phrase. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences in which a prepositional phrase immediately followed the verb,…