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…

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…

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…

Presents a fully incremental model that accounts for attachment preferences by the linear order of lexical heads in the surface structure and their thematic properties. Discusses the principle of "parameterised head attachment" and a serial variant on the basis of three online experiments on noun phrase and prepositional phrase…