Can fluency in oral reading be facilitated by formatting text to preserve major syntactic boundaries? Seven-, 8-, and 9-year-old children read aloud passages under two text format conditions. In the structure-preserving condition, the ends of lines coincided with ends of clauses; in the phrase-disrupting condition, line breaks always interrupted a phrasal unit. Experiment 1 showed that oral reading fluency, as indexed by skill in phrasal reading, was rated higher when children were reading in the structurepreserving condition. In addition, the structure-preserving condition resulted in significantly fewer false starts at the beginning of lines following a return sweep. The results of Experiment 2, in which texts of varying levels of difficulty were read by slightly older readers, confirmed both findings. Measures of fluency were correlated with other language and reading measures; however, no effects of format were obtained on oral reading rate (words correct per minute). Taken as a whole, these findings indicate a benefit of keeping clausal units intact in promoting fluent reading by facilitating the transition from one line to the next.

Evidence is presented that eye-movement patterns during reading distinguish costs associated with the syntactic processing of sentences from costs associated with relating sentence meaning to real world probabilities. Participants (N = 30) read matching sets of sentences that differed by a single word, making the sentence syntactically anomalous (but understandable), pragmatically anomalous, or non-anomalous. Syntactic and pragmatic anomaly each caused perturbations in eye movements. Subsequent to the anomaly, the patterns diverged. Syntactic anomaly generated many regressions initially, with rapid return to baseline. Pragmatic anomaly resulted in lengthened reading times, followed by a gradual increase in regressions that reached a maximum at the end of the sentence. Evidence of rapid sensitivity to pragmatic information supports the use of timing data in resolving the debate over the autonomy of linguistic processing. The divergent patterns of eye movements support indications from neurocognitive studies of a principled distinction between syntactic and pragmatic processing procedures within the language processing mechanism.

Background There is still a dearth of information about grammatical aspects of language production in aphasia. Aims Making novel use of methods of elicited production aimed at testing the limits of competence, we studied three cases of chronic aphasia, stemming from major stroke. We asked: (1) Whether the elicited production method reveals sparing of language abilities not readily evidenced in spontaneous utterances or on conventional aphasia tests. (2) Which language production abilities survive damage to both Broca’s region and Wernicke’s region? Materials & Procedures Targeted words, morphological and syntactic structures were elicited by sentence completion with supporting linguistic and visual context. Targets were never modelled during the procedure. For verbs, visual and auditory contexts emphasise completed actions, targeting past tense forms. Lesion description was based on structural MRI scans. Outcomes & Results The three participants showed partially spared ability to produce nouns, adjectives, and verb stems in context. The elicitation method proved more productive in some cases than picture prompts or sentence prompts. Past tense inflections were usually omitted. Hence stems and inflections were dissociable. Two participants showed partial success with the passive, and no participant produced a full relative clause, including the relative pronoun, but two produced reduced forms of subject relatives. Partial sparing of production capability in these cases points to the likely importance of portions of the left hemisphere remote from Broca and Wernicke regions. Conclusions This application of elicited production methodology demonstrates possibilities of lexical, morphological, and syntactic production not evident in spontaneous utterances or by conventional aphasia tests. Some lexical and grammatical capabilities survived massive damage to both anterior and posterior portions of the left hemisphere.