Biomedical subjects

H Loebell

Publications and source records attributed to H Loebell.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1992

From conceptual roles to structural relations: bridging the syntactic cleft.

The distinction between underlying and superficial linguistic structure is a staple of modern cognitive psychology. Despite increasingly diverse conceptions of syntactic relations in linguistic theory, the received view in psycholinguistics has remained one in which the entities assigned to underlying relations may assume different surface relations. The present article examines this view in the context of language production and reviews evidence that the disposition to bind animate entities to the surface subject relation is a basic feature of language use, suggesting that mappings from conceptual categories to syntactic relations form a main support of the bridge from conception to language. Proceeding on this assumption, the article also evaluates competing accounts of the mapping process in production. The results argue against syntactic relation-changing operations, but favor a division between meaning- and form-related mechanisms.

Concept Formation↗

PubMed1990

Framing sentences.

The sentence frames formed during language production are commonly and rather uncontroversially represented as hierarchical constituent structures. There is less accord about whether the frames are pure structural configurations or limnings of meaning. We examined these alternatives with a sentence priming paradigm in which the primes and targets shared phrase structures and event structures, or only phrase structures. The results of the first and second experiments indicated that event-structure changes had no impact on a reliable tendency to replicate the phrase structures of the primes within sentence targets. The last experiment showed that this tendency could not be attributed to metrical or to closed-class lexical similarities. The implication is that sentence frames are not identifiable with metrical or conceptual information, but are comparatively independent syntactic representations.

Adult↗