In this response to Demestre's comment, we first discuss the terms "legal" and "prohibited," applied to syntactic structures, stressing that there are boundaries in which the legality of certain constructions appears imprecise and is a matter of discussion. This coalesces with actual and daily use by native speakers of a language, who can normally…

We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the time course and distribution of brain activity while adults performed (1) a sequential learning task involving complex structured sequences and (2) a language processing task. The same positive ERP deflection, the P600 effect, typically linked to difficult or ungrammatical syntactic…

Focusing on children's production of the dative alternation in English, we examine whether children's choices are influenced by the same factors that influence adults' choices, and whether, like adults, they are sensitive to multiple factors simultaneously. We do so by using mixed-effect regression models to analyse child and child-directed…

Hungarian is a language with morphological case marking and relatively free word order. These typological characteristics make it a good ground for testing the crosslinguistic validity of theories on processing sentences with relative clauses. Our study focused on effects of structural factors and processing capacity. We tested 43 typically…

During the last years there has been an increasing interest in examining the brain responses to word order variations. In one ERP study conducted in Spanish, Casado, Martin-Loeches, Munoz, and Fernandez-Frias (2005) had participants read Spanish transitive sentences with either an SVO (subject-verb-object) or an OVS order. The word order of a…

Eye fixation durations during normal reading correlate with processing difficulty, but the specific cognitive mechanisms reflected in these measures are not well understood. This study finds support in German readers' eye fixations for two distinct difficulty metrics: surprisal, which reflects the change in probabilities across syntactic analyses…

Semantic roles are a critical aspect of linguistic knowledge because they indicate the relations of the participants in an event to the main predicate. Experimental studies on children and adults show that both groups use associations between general semantic roles such as Agent and Theme, and grammatical positions such as Subject and Object, even…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

This study investigated whether the semantic similarity and grammatical class of distracter words affects the naming of pictured actions (verbs) in Japanese. Three experiments used the picture-word interference paradigm with participants naming picturable actions while ignoring distracters. In all three experiments, we manipulated the semantic…

Sentence processing in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated as a function of age of first language acquisition with a timed grammatical judgement task. Participants were 30 adults who were born deaf and first exposed to a fully perceptible language between the ages of birth and 13 years. Stimuli were grammatical and ungrammatical examples…

Considers the fact that prosody is a grammatical (phonological) structure that must be parsed. The article describes prosodic categories marked by intonational pattern for English and Japanese, concentrates on "pitch accent" and tonally marked "phrases," and discusses potential ambiguities in parsing these categories. (60…

Focuses on the brain's response to one aspect of syntactic processing--the processing of sentences that violate constraints on constituent movement. Findings indicate that movement constraints can be applied during the earliest stages of sentence processing, perhaps in conjunction with the creation of phrase structure. (46 references) (Author/CK)

Investigated the relationship between syntactic and semantic processing using a word-by-word reading paradigm and a cross-modal integration paradigm. The study evaluated the experimental results with regard to serial autonomous models, strongly and weakly interactive models, and a hybrid model proposed here. (92 references) (Author/CK)

This study compared the production of complex syntax by 16 older adults diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's disease and 25 age-matched control subjects. It found that although individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease did not produce frank lexical or grammatical errors, they did find it difficult to access the "best fit" between meaning and…

Demonstrates how the definition of "simple attachment" and "tree lowering," operations related to the grammatical composition operations of "substitution" and "adjunction" in the Tree Adjoining Grammar formalism, yields a parser more constrained than previous description theory based models. The article…