9616833 TRUESWELL This research project will examine the rapid grammatical decisions that people make during reading, listening and speaking. The comprehension of a sentence requires readers and listeners to make immediate decisions about how incoming words combine with other words and phrases, in order to develop an interpretation of "who is doing what to whom" in a sentence. In this way, people are able to maintain, in an incremental fashion, an interpretation of the events and actions described in each sentence. This research will focus on the processing of temporary syntactic ambiguities, which occur when a comprehender must choose between two possible grammatical alternatives of an ambiguous word or phrase. Examining this rapid decision process can help uncover how the language processing system is organized to consult linguistic and non-linguistic information. One line of research will examine how readers and listeners process syntactically ambiguous phrases. The experiments will test the hypothesis that a comprehender's initial guess about the intended interpretation of a phrase is determined automatically by consulting prior experiences concerning how often individual words have appeared in different syntactic contexts. The experiments will focus on the hypothesis that recognizing a word includes the rapid retrieval not only of the meaning of the word but also of probabilistic information concerning how often the word has appeared in different types of phrases. This research will use a variety of different experimental techniques which are aimed at uncovering the time-course of language processing, including the monitoring of eye fixations during reading and the measurement of the response time to words during listening. A second line of experiments will examine whether speakers are sensitive to syntactically ambiguous phrases in their own speech, and whether this impacts the way in which they produce sentences. In particular, the experiments will examine whether speakers provide helpful phrasing (prosodic) cues when there is an increased chance that the listener may incorrectly interpret an ambiguous phrase. These two lines of research may help the development of computational systems that interact with humans via language. In addition, furthering the understanding of how normal adults process language may improve the treatment and education of those individuals with language impairments. ***
