Bücher der Reihe Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics

In this trend, which has no precedent, studies in language processing have followed studies in language acquisition and theoretical linguistics in considering language universals in a broader scope than only in English.

Recent developments in linguistic theory, as well as the growing body of evidence from languages other than English, provide new opportunities for deeper explorations into how language is represented in the mind of learners.

Aims to offer a retrospective view on the research on aspectuality and temporality, as well as to develop different perspectives on the future development of the field. Articles contain overviews of the development of the field and/or present the state of the art of research, suggesting various lines of research.

Studies of language acqUiSItion have largely ignored processing prin ciples and mechanisms. Thus their peripheral role in accounts of language development may reflect accidental factors, rather than any inherent fuzziness or irrelevance to the language acquisition problem.

The papers in this volume are intended to exemplify the state of experimental psycho linguistics in the middle to later 1980s. Our over­ riding impression is that the field has come a long way since the earlier work of the 1950s and 1960s, and that the field has emerged with a renewed strength from a difficult period in the 1970s. Not only are the theoretical issues more sharply defined and integrated with existing issues from other domains ("modularity" being one such example), but the experimental techniques employed are much more sophisticated, thanks to the work of numerous psychologists not necessarily interested in psycholinguistics, and thanks to improving technologies unavailable a few years ago (for instance, eye-trackers). We selected papers that provide a coherent, overall picture of existing techniques and issues. The volume is organized much as one might organize an introductory linguistics course - beginning with sound and working "up" to mean­ ing. Indeed, the first paper, Rebecca Treiman's, begins with considera­ tion of syllable structure, a phonological consideration, and the last, Alan Garnham's, exemplifies some work on the interpretation of pro­ nouns, a semantic matter. In between are found works concentrating on morphemes, lexical structures, and syntax. The cross-section represented in this volume is by necessity incom­ plete, since we focus only on experimental work directed at under­ standing how adults comprehend and produce language. We do not include any works on language acquisition, first or second.

The conference was conceived in the belief that there is a new possibility of tightly connecting grammatical studies and language acquisition studies, and that this new possibility has grown out of the new generation of ideas about the relation of Universal Grammar to the grammar of particular languages.

In this trend, which has no precedent, studies in language processing have followed studies in language acquisition and theoretical linguistics in considering language universals in a broader scope than only in English.

The conference was conceived in the belief that there is a new possibility of tightly connecting grammatical studies and language acquisition studies, and that this new possibility has grown out of the new generation of ideas about the relation of Universal Grammar to the grammar of particular languages.

The papers in this volume are intended to exemplify the state of experimental psycho linguistics in the middle to later 1980s. Our over­ riding impression is that the field has come a long way since the earlier work of the 1950s and 1960s, and that the field has emerged with a renewed strength from a difficult period in the 1970s. Not only are the theoretical issues more sharply defined and integrated with existing issues from other domains ("modularity" being one such example), but the experimental techniques employed are much more sophisticated, thanks to the work of numerous psychologists not necessarily interested in psycholinguistics, and thanks to improving technologies unavailable a few years ago (for instance, eye-trackers). We selected papers that provide a coherent, overall picture of existing techniques and issues. The volume is organized much as one might organize an introductory linguistics course - beginning with sound and working "up" to mean­ ing. Indeed, the first paper, Rebecca Treiman's, begins with considera­ tion of syllable structure, a phonological consideration, and the last, Alan Garnham's, exemplifies some work on the interpretation of pro­ nouns, a semantic matter. In between are found works concentrating on morphemes, lexical structures, and syntax. The cross-section represented in this volume is by necessity incom­ plete, since we focus only on experimental work directed at under­ standing how adults comprehend and produce language. We do not include any works on language acquisition, first or second.

Comprising articles on the theory, acquisition and processing of island constraints, this work takes an interdisciplinary approach to this syntactic phenomenon. Both transformational and non-transformational approaches to island constraints are represented.

At present there exists no empirically-motivated theory of how perceivers assign a grammatically-permissible interpretation to a sentence. This work explores important, but overlooked questions in on-line sentence interpretation and attempts to erect some of the scaffolding for an eventual theory of sentence interpretation.