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…

The syntactic bootstrapping mechanism of verb learning was evaluated against child-directed speech in Turkish, a language with rich morphology, nominal ellipsis and free word order. Machine-learning algorithms were run on transcribed caregiver speech directed to two Turkish learners (one hour every two weeks between 0;9 to 1;10) of different…

A series of experiments employing an agreement-error elicitation task allowed the examination of the effects of variations in notional, lexical, and morphophonological features on the implementation of agreement between subject and verb in English. Results show that lexical number seems to dominate verb agreement. (64 references) (CP)

Reports priming experiments that examined production of inflected forms. Participants produced words out of small sets in response to prompts. Results are interpreted in terms of a slot-and-filler model of word production in which inflectional frames on one hand and stems and affixes on the other are independently spelled out on the basis of an…

A study investigated patterns of neurological event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by morphosyntactic violations in 16 right-handed, English-speaking subjects. Manipulation of stimulus grammaticality and block probability led to ERP effects consistent with those in previous research on syntactic and semantic processing. Results also provide…

Presents model describing adult learning of morphosyntax in a novel language where frequency and regularity are factorially combined. Accuracy and latency data show frequency effects for both regular/irregular forms early in acquisition process; as learning progresses, frequency effect on regular items diminishes but remains for irregular items.…

Presents a model of high-dimensional context space, the Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL), with a series of simulations modelling human empirical results. Proposes that HAL's context space can be used to provide a basic categorization of semantic and grammatical concepts; model certain aspects of morphological ambiguity in verbs; and provide…

Argues that cross-morpheme and cross-word syllabification in the WEAVER model of speech production point to the need to deal with flexibility of syllable membership and pose difficulty to a memory-based approach but not to WEAVER. The study reviews empirical support for the form of syllabification in WEAVER and reports an experiment on…

Notes that in linguistic theory, phenomena previously handled by a separate grammatical component have been moved into the lexicon and that in some theories, the contrast between grammar and the lexicon has vanished. Concludes that the case for a modular distinction between grammar and the lexicon has been overstated and that the evidence to date…

Argues that the nature of mental representation contributes little to the specification of synchronic syntactic competence. Psycholinguists, syntacticians, and morphologists can benefit from a collaborative approach to the construction of an integrative model of language and mind, covering competence, representation, processing, and acquisition.…