This article provides experimental evidence for the role of lexically specific representations in the processing of passive sentences and considerable education-related differences in comprehension of the passive construction. The experiment measured response time and decision accuracy of participants with high and low academic attainment using an…

This study examines syntactic and morphological aspects of the production and comprehension of pronouns by 99 typically developing French-speaking children aged 3 years, 5 months to 6 years, 5 months. A fine structural analysis of subject, object, and reflexive clitics suggests that whereas the object clitic chain crosses the subject chain, the…

The development of mental imagery in relation to the comprehension of concrete proverbs (e.g., "one rotten apple spoils the barrel") was examined in children, adolescents, and adults who were ages 11 to 29 years old (n = 210). The findings indicated that age-related changes occurred in mental imagery and in proverb comprehension during the years…

English sentences containing the universal quantifiers "each", "every", and "all" are highly complex structures in view of the subtleties of their scope properties and resulting ambiguities. This study explored the acquisition of universal quantifier sentences as reflected in the performance of three diverse college-level student groups on a…

We join other responders in thanking Clahsen and Felser (CF) for pulling together these observations about the development of language processing. We are especially impressed by the generality and inclusiveness of CF's treatment of development in L1 and L2. Because most of their specifics concerned comprehension processes, our contribution will…

The proposal by Clahsen and Felser (CF) has the potential of marking a turning point in second language (L2) acquisition research. Contrary to much L2 research to date, it suggests that some of the differences between native and (advanced) nonnative speakers may be at the level of grammatical processing, rather than grammatical representations.…

Study examined the relationship between comprehension and production of lexical items when children are taught to both comprehend and produce new lexical items and when children are taught either to comprehend or produce new lexical items. Study involved teaching 12 adults and 12 children a miniature language. Results indicate production training…

Comprehension and strategy use of 18 autistic children was compared with that of normal 3- and 4-year olds. Subjects were asked to act out certain syntactic and semantic patterns in two experiments. Autistic children performed below the levels of the normal subjects, suggesting that autism is a semantic/cognitive deficit. (PJM)

Two investigations of preschool children's relative dependence upon contextual and linguistic information to discriminate between speech acts revealed that younger subjects' discrimination of each speech act appeared relatively unaffected by reduction of linguistic information, while older subjects' performance was adversely affected. (Author/CB)