Clause boundaries and recognition latencies for words in sentences

Abstract

Ss listened to sentences which consisted of two clauses. After the entire sentence was presented, the S either heard (intramodal test) or law (crossmodal test) a word from the sentence (the probe word). In both the intramodal and crossmodal tests, probe words which were taken from within the final clause of a complex sentence provoked shorter recognition latencies than probe words taken from the first clause. In a second set of controlled experiments, the effect was shown to be independent of intonation contours, serial position, and lexical material. The results argue for a clause-by-clause model of sentence decoding. © 1972 Psychonomic Society, Inc.