Though communicative goals clearly drive word choice in language production, online demands suggest that accessibility might play a role, too. If the benefits of accessibility are important enough to communication, more accessible words (high-frequency words) might be chosen over more accurate, less accessible ones. We used a novel artificial language learning paradigm to test whether high-frequency words are preferred over low-frequency words at a cost of meaning accuracy. Participants learned eight words which corresponded to precise angles on a compass. On test trials, participants viewed angles lying in-between two trained angles and were asked to produce a word for the angle. Across two experiments, we showed that participants extended their use of high- frequency words to more distal angles compared to low- frequency words. In cases of competition between high- and low-frequency words, the former tended to win out even when less accurate, suggesting that accessibility can compromise some accuracy.

Different theories of human syntactic parsing make conflicting claims concerning the role of non-syntactic information (e.g. semantics, real world knowledge) on on-line parsing. W e address this debate by examining the effect of plausibility of thematic role assignments on the processing of syntactic ambiguities. In a selfpaced reading experiment, ambiguous condition reading times were longer than unambiguous condition times at the point of syntactic disambiguation only when plausibility cues had supported the incorrect interpretation. Off-line measures of plausibility also predicted reading time effects in regression analyses. These results indicate that plausibility information m ay influence thematic role assignment and the initial interpretation of a syntactic ambiguity, and they argue against parsing models in which the syntactic component is blind to plausibility information.

Two experiments explore how pronoun resolution is influenced by a) properties of discourse referents, specifically whether they are underspecified and in need of description, and b) the contribution of the pronoun-containing utterance, specifically whether it provides a description or specifies an event. W e find that these factors interact, such that when an underspecified referent is in focus, reading is facilitated for description continuations, but when a specified referent is in focus, reading is facilitated in event continuations when the specified referent continues as the topic. This study reveals one of the complex interactions that underlies pronoun resolution.

he past tense has been the source of considerable debate concerning the role of connectionist models in explaining linguistic phenomena. In response to Pinker and Prince (1988), several connectionist models have been developed that compute a mapping between the present tense phonological form of a verb to a past tense phonological form. Most of these models cannot distinguish between homophones such as F L Y - F L E W and FLY-FLffiD (as in "flied out"). Kim. Pinker, Prince, & Prasada (1991) have suggested that the addition of semantic information to such nets will not provide an adequate solution to this homophony problem. They showed that English speakers use derivational status, rather than semantic information in generating past tenses. W e provide evidence contradicting this account. Subjects' rated preferences for past tense forms are predicted by semantic measures; moreover, a simulation model shows that semantic distance provides a basis for learning the alternative past tenses for words such as F L Y . W e suggest a reconciliation of the two theories in which knowledge of "derivational status" arises out of semantic facts in the course of learning.

MacDonald, Pearlmutter, and Seidenberg (1993) propose an alternative to the dominant view in sentence processing that syntactic ambiguities are resolved by heuristics based on structural simplicity. MacDonald et al. argue that such ambiguities can be defined in terms of alternatives associated with information in individual lexical items, and thus that syntactic ambiguities can be resolved by lexical disambiguation mechanisms relying on access to the relative frequencies of alternatives and to biases created by contextual constraints. We present evidence from a computer simulation of the use of frequency-based and contextual constraints in the processing of the main verb/reduced relative syntactic ambiguity, showing that frequency and relatively limited contextual information from a sample of natural language can interact sufficiently to model basic results in the literature.

We routinely encounter speakers with different accents andspeaking styles. The speech perception literature offersexamples of disruption of comprehension for unfamiliarspeech and also of listeners’ rapid accommodation tounfamiliar accents. Much of this research uses a singlemeasure and/or focuses on isolated word perception. Weinvestigated listeners’ abilities to comprehend and shadowconnected speech spoken in a familiar or unfamiliar accent.We found increases in shadowing latencies andcomprehension errors in the Dissimilar Speech relative toSimilar Speech conditions—especially for relatively informalrather than more academic style speech. Additionally, therewas less accommodation over time to Dissimilar than SimilarSpeech. These results suggest that there are costs both in theimmediate timescale of processing speech (necessary forshadowing) and in the longer time scale of listeningcomprehension when accent and other speech quality is verydifferent from one’s own speech.