Grammatical agreement flags the parts of sentences that belong together regardless of whether the parts appear together. In English, the major agreement controller is the sentence subject, the major agreement targets are verbs and pronouns, and the major agreement category is number. The authors expand an account of number agreement whose tenets are that pronouns acquire number lexically, whereas verbs acquire it syntactically but with similar contributions from number meaning and from the number morphology of agreement controllers. These tenets were instantiated in a model using existing verb agreement data. The model was then fit to a new, more extensive set of verb data and tested with a parallel set of pronoun data. The theory was supported by the model's outcomes. The results have implications for the integration of words and structures, for the workings of agreement categories, and for the nature of the transition from thought to language.

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When speakers produce words, lexical access proceeds through semantic and phonological levels of processing. If phonological processing begins based on partial semantic information, processing is cascaded; otherwise, it is discrete. In standard models of lexical access, semantically processed words exert phonological effects only if processing is cascaded. In 3 experiments, speakers named pictures of objects with homophone names (ball), while auditory distractor words were heard beginning 150 ms prior to picture onset. Distractors speeded picture naming (compared with controls) only when related to the nondepicted meaning of the picture (e.g., dance), exhibiting an early phonological effect, thereby supporting the cascaded prediction. Distractors slowed picture naming when categorically (e.g., frisbee) related to the depicted picture meaning, but not when associatively (e.g., game) related to it. An interactive activation model is presented.

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Idioms are sometimes viewed as unitized phrases with interpretations that are independent of the literal meanings of their individual words, In three experiments, the nature of idiom representation was explored with a speech-error elicitation task In the task, speakers briefly viewed paired idioms, After a short delay they were probed to produce one of the two idioms, and their production latencies and blend errors were assessed. The first experiment showed greater interference between idioms with the same syntactic structure, demonstrating that idiom representations contain syntactic information, The second experiment indicated that the literal meaning of an idiom is active during production, These syntactic and literal-semantic effects on idiom errors argue against a representation of idioms as noncomponential lexicalized phrases. In the final experiment, no differences were found between decomposable and nondecomposable idioms, suggesting that the lexical representation of these two types of idioms is the same.Recently, a friend commented that "the road to Chicago is straight as a pancake," This was a blend of two idioms, straight as an arrow andjlat as a pancake. Although slips of the tongue are often studied in order to provide insight into language-production processes, phrase and idiom blends have received little attention (Fay, 1982;Garrett, 1980). The purpose of the experiments presented here was to examine such errors for clues to the nature of idiom representation.Idioms are often regarded as phrases with interpretations that are not directly related to the literal meanings of their individual words (Dik, 1989;Fraser, 1970;Katz & Postal, 1963;Weinreich, 1969;Wood, 1986). Challenges to this view have come from psycho1inguistic research on how idioms are understood. This research has focused mainly on two related issues: (1) how idioms are mentally represented, and (2) whether their literal meaning plays any role in their use.The standard pragmatic model of idiom comprehension (Bobrow & Bell, 1973;Katz & Postal, 1963) proposes that idioms are stored as whole chunks, roughlyThe experiments reported here are part of the first author's master's thesis presented to the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (BNS 90-09611, SBR 94-11627) and the National Institutes of Health (ROI HD21011). Portions of the work were presented at the 66th Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association in Chicago, in 1994. The authors thank Gary Dell, Gregory Murphy, Rose Zacks, and Thomas Carr, for their comments and suggestions, and Brian Kleiner, for his assistance in administering the experimental tests and in scoring transcriptions. Requests for reprints and other correspondence may be sent to 1.C. Cutting, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, 603 E. Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820 (e-mail: jcutting@s.psych.uiuc.edu). 57 equivalent to a single word, in an idiom lexicon that is separ...