Adjacency,animacy, and intensionality as cues to oral and written sentence comprehension |
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| Authors: | Robert J Scholes Brenda J Willis |
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| Institution: | (1) Institute for Advanced Study of the Communication Processes, Department of Speech, University of Florida, USA;(2) Program in Linguistics, University of Florida, USA;(3) Division of Communications, Central Florida Community College, USA;(4) IASCP, University of Florida, Dauer 53, 32611 Gainesville, FL, USA |
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| Abstract: | Subjects of verbs in English sentences may be indicated by any one of a number of cues. In some cases, the subject of the verb is determined by semantic constraints, as when the verb requires an animate noun phrase as subject; in other cases the subject is determined by syntactic factors, as in the case of third person singular verb markers; and, as is commonly the case in informal language, the most immediately preceding noun phrase is the subject of the verb. These three types of cues, semantic (here described as extensional), syntactic (here labeled intensional), and adjacency are investigated in a series of tests of sentence comprehension using university undergraduates as subjects.The results of these experiments show that when the adjacency strategy does not apply, even these highly literate native speakers have great difficulty in correctly comprehending subject-verb correspondences.These results are discussed in the context of the relationship between intensional linguistic processing and literacy. |
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| Keywords: | Semantics Syntax Adjacency Sentence comprehension |
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