This article aims to account for the impact of the interactional setting on adults' referential uses by determining if telling a story to/with a child impacts the referential strategies of adults. The long-term goal of this study is to better understand the models of reference in narratives children are exposed to in order to account for young…

Do the cognitive benefits of "interleaving"--the method of alternating between two or more skills or concepts during training--extend to foreign language learning? In four experiments, we investigated the efficacy of interleaved versus conventional blocked practice for teaching adult learners to conjugate Spanish verbs in the…

The relationship between different linguistic manifestations of an eventuality-denoting concept, referred to in the literature as diatheses or voices, is well-studied in theoretical linguistics. Among researchers studying this phenomenon, it is widely agreed that there is a systematic relationship between the various diatheses of a concept.…

An experimental study was conducted on children aged 2;6-3;0 and 3;6-4;0 investigating the priming effect of two WANT-constructions to establish whether constructional competition contributes to English-speaking children's infinitival to omission errors (e.g., *"I want ___ jump now"). In two between-participant groups, children either…

This article reports one eye-tracking and one sentence-completion experiment, examining the antecedent preferences for plural anaphora "they" and demonstrative "these." Our results show that the antecedent-grouping preference depends on type of referring expressions: specifically, the preference for "they" is to refer…

This study examines the extent to which instructions to self-explain vs. "other"-explain a text lead readers to produce different forms of explanations. Natural language processing was used to examine the content and characteristics of the explanations produced as a function of instruction condition. Undergraduate students (n = 146)…

This paper investigates whether three-year-olds are able to process attributive adjectives (e.g., "soft pillow") as they hear them and to predict the noun ("pillow") on the basis of the adjective meaning ("soft"). This was investigated in an experiment by means of the Visual World Paradigm. The participants saw two…

This study investigates the role of probabilistic grammatical constraints on the dative alternation in English as a second language (ESL). It presents the results of an experiment in which the different factors that are influential in first language (L1) English are tested with advanced learners of English whose L1 is German. Second language (L2)…

Four picture-word interference experiments aimed to test the role of grammatical class in lexical production. In Experiment 1 target nouns and verbs were produced in presence of semantically unrelated distractors that could also be nouns and verbs. Participants were slower when the distractor was of the same grammatical category of the target. To…

Two experiments investigated whether 4- and 5-year-old children choose to learn from informants who use more complex syntax (passive voice) over informants using more simple syntax (active voice). In Experiment 1 (N = 30), children viewed one informant who consistently used the passive voice and another who used active voice. When learning novel…

Previous research has shown L1 attrition to be restricted to structures at the interfaces between syntax and pragmatics, but not to occur with syntactic properties that do not involve such interfaces ("Interface Hypothesis", Sorace and Filiaci in "Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian." "Second Lang…

English speakers talk and think about Time in terms of physical space. The past is behind us, and the future is in front of us. In this way, we "map" space onto Time. This dissertation addresses the specificity of this physical space, or its topography. Inspired by languages like Yupno (Nunez, et al., 2012) and Bamileke-Dschang (Hyman,…

The present response time study investigated how a hypothesized time-based working memory constraint of 2-3 s affects the resolution of grammatical and semantic dependencies. Congruent and incongruent object relative (OR) and subject relative sentences were read at different presentation rates so that the distance between dependent words was…

This study investigates the preferences for attachment of a relative clause (RC) to a complex noun phrase (NP) of the type: NP1 of NP2, in Spanish-English bilinguals and advanced learners of Spanish. Spanish speakers show a moderate preference for attaching the RC to the first NP, while speakers of English prefer the second NP. Subjects were…

Resumptive pronouns are often regarded as a last-resort strategy for rescuing illicit long-distance dependencies. Previous work has demonstrated a facilitative role for resumptive pronouns in production as well as in comprehension, though not a grammatical option in the languages. This study examined whether the same pattern is found in Cantonese,…