An important aspect of language processing is the comprehender's ability to determine temporal relations between an event denoted by a verb and events already established in the discourse. This often requires the tense of a verb to be evaluated in relation to specific temporal discourse properties. W e investigate the time course of this process by examining how the temporal properties of a discourse influence the initial processing of temporarily ambiguous reduced relative clauses. M u c h of tfie empirical work on the reading of reduced relative clauses has revealed that readers experience a large mis-analysis effect (or *gardenpatfi') in reduced relatives like "The student spotted bv the proctor received a warning" because the reader has initially interpreted the verb "spotted" as a past tense verb in a main clause. Recent results from an eye movement study are provided which irnlicate that this mis-analysis of relative clauses can be eliminated when the temporal constraints of a discourse do not easily permit a main clause past tense interpretation. Such a flnding strongly suggests that readers process tense in relation to the temporal properties of the discourse, and that constraints from these properties can n^ndly influence processing at a stnKtural level.

A crucial component of event recognition is understanding the roles that people and objects take: did the boy hit the girl, or did the girl hit the boy? We often make these categorizations from visual input, but even when our attention is otherwise occupied, do we automatically analyze the world in terms of event structure? In two experiments, participants made speeded gender judgments for a continuous sequence of male-female interaction scenes. Even though gender was orthogonal to event roles (whether the Agent was male or Female, or vice- versa), a switching cost was observed when the target character’s role reversed from trial to trial, regardless of whether the actors, events, or side of the target character differed. Crucially, this effect held even when nothing in the task required attention to the relationship between actors. Our results suggest that extraction of event structure in visual scenes is a rapid and automatic process.

The role of processing constraints on sentence structure has been a topic of central interest in cognitive science. One proposal (Hawkins, 2004) suggests that language production system is organized to facilitate efficient parsing. We experimentally test this hypothesis using a miniature artificial language learning paradigm. Our findings support this account. Even though the input languages did not favor early placement of cues to grammatical function assignment (case and word order), participants used these cues in their own productions significantly more often in such a way as to allow early correct parsing commitments. This preference interacted with a bias to mark the less expected: Participants tended to use more case-marking in non-English OSV sentences. Our results underscore the potential of miniature artificial learning for language production research.