It has been argued that children learning a second language (L2) omit agreement inflection because of communication demands. The conclusion of these studies is that L2 children know the morphological and syntactic properties of agreement inflection, but sometimes insert an inflectional default form (i.e., the bare verb) in production. The present…

In the current study we explored lexical, syntactic, and semantic processes during text comprehension in English monolinguals and Spanish/English (first language/second language) bilinguals with different experience in interpreting (nontrained bilinguals, interpreting students and professional interpreters). The participants performed an…

Although pragmatic deficits are well documented in autism, little is known about the extent to which grammatical knowledge in this disorder is deficient, or merely delayed when compared to that of typically developing children functioning at similar linguistic or cognitive levels. This study examines the knowledge of constraints on the…

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…

Environmentally contaminated speech errors (irrelevant words or phrases derived from the speaker's environment and erroneously incorporated into speech) are hypothesized to occur at a high level of speech processing, but with a relatively late insertion point. The data indicate that speech production processes are not independent of other…

A study of a brain-damaged subject's impaired performance on tasks involving production of verbal numbers found that lexical errors occurred in spoken production but not in written production, while syntactic error occurred in both modes. (Author/CB)

Tested comprehension of syntactic structures by presenting each structure with both plausible and implausible content. Results revealed that cognitive nonlinguistic factors were important for comprehension and that errors and reaction time increased with age. The minimal contribution of neuropsychological factors to this decline suggests that the…

Two experiments were conducted to explore processing of relative clause structures by normal elderly adults. Four groups of subjects (aged 20-29 years, 60-69 years, 70-79 years, and 80-89 years) participated in a lexical decision task and a sentence repetition task. (19 references) (VWL)

Investigates the case of a 7-year-old boy with severe word-finding difficulties. The study used a series of theoretically motivated questions as a framework for psycholinguistic investigation to determine the cause of his difficulties. Findings indicated pervasive deficits in phonological processing, deficits interpreted as a developmental…

Examines the source of poor readers' comprehension failures in spoken sentences containing complex syntactic structures. Although research literature indicates that the difficulties poor readers display are usually associated with some aspect of phonological processing, other components of language processing may be involved. (58 references)…