Purpose: This review article summarizes programmatic research on sentence diversity in toddlers developing language typically and explores developmental patterns of sentence diversity in toddlers at risk for specific language impairment. Method: The first half of this review article presents a sentence-focused approach to language assessment and…

Understanding language requires readers and listeners to cull meaning from fast-unfolding messages that often contain conflicting cues pointing to incompatible ways of interpreting the input (e.g., "The cat was chased by the mouse"). This article reviews mounting evidence from multiple methods demonstrating that cognitive control plays…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) have become widespread in second language acquisition (SLA) research and a growing body of literature has been produced in recent years. We surveyed 61 SLA papers that use ERPs to study L2 sentence processing in healthy late learners. Our main aim was to provide a critical summary of findings from the decade…

Reorganization of language networks in aphasia takes advantage of the facts that (a) the brain is an organ of plasticity, with neuronal changes occurring throughout the life span, including following brain damage; (b) plasticity is highly experience dependent; and (c) as with any learning system, language reorganization involves a synergistic…

Anaphoric expressions such as repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns serve a major role in the creation and maintenance of discourse coherence. The felicitous use of an anaphoric expression is highly dependent on the discourse salience of the entity introduced by the antecedent. Gordon et al. ("Cogn Sci" 17:311-347, 1993)…

This article reviews research that has investigated the role of verbal working memory (VWM) in sentence comprehension in both typical and atypical developmental populations. Two theoretical approaches that specify different roles for VWM in sentence comprehension are considered: (i) capacity-limit approaches, which treat VWM as a theoretical…

Background: In recent years there has been significant interest in the differential processing of nouns and verbs in people with aphasia, but more limited consideration about whether the differences have implications for therapy. It remains unclear whether verbs can be treated in a similar way to nouns or should be treated using approaches that…

Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is "structural priming," a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced…

Investigated the source of agrammatic aphasic patients' difficulty comprehending semantically reversible sentences. Found approximately equal distributions of three distinct patterns. Results conflict with explanations of comprehension failure which state that a single pattern of performance on sentence structures characterizes comprehension of…

Describes how two conversants can jointly produce a single syntactic unit, such as a sentence, discussing the types of sentences achieved through joint production, the single utterance construction format, syntax for conversation, interactionally relevant features of talk, and the resources needed to complete an utterance-in-progress. (37…

Combining concepts of cognitive theory with those of rhetoric and linguistics can help writing teachers understand the kinds of activities that will enable basic writers to produce syntactic constructions appropriate for the content they have generated. A review of research studies of sentence combining, syntactic constructions, grammatical…

Thirteen papers in this book illustrate MacWhinney and Bates's Competition Model (CM), with a focus on cross-linguistic processing. Studies in this volume show that (1) the CM is useful in predicting certain gross cross-linguistic differences of comprehension, particularly in relation to actor assignment and (2) children's processing strategies…

Presents examples of syntactic structures that may confuse children when reading. Suggests ways in which teachers can help overcome problems presented by these structures. (FL)

Suggests a conceptual basis for asserting a relationship between sentence combining and reading improvement. (RL)

In some psycholinguistic models, processing is characterized by generation of multiple outputs using information from higher processing levels. Such models are considered autonomous in word recognition domain but interactive in sentence processing domain. This confusion arises not from differences between lexical and syntactic processing, but from…