Perception verbs and mental verbs have significant overlap in their syntax and semantics; both reference mental representations when taking embedded clauses, as in "I see that Maria was here" and "I think that Maria was here." Some have suggested that perception is more accessible for young children than mental states, raising…

This study examines the discourse basis for referent accessibility and its relation to the choice of referring expressions by children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and typically developing children. The aim is to delineate how the linguistic and extra-linguistic context affects referent accessibility to the speaker. The study also examines…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences (["la petite 'ferme'"] ["est très jolie"] "the small farm is very…

This dissertation focuses on when and how children learn about the meanings of the propositional attitude" verbs know" and "think". "Know" and "think" both express belief. But they differ in their veridicality: "think" is non-veridical and can report a false belief; but "know" can only…

This article provides a selective overview of recent event-related brain potential (ERP) studies in L2 morpho-syntax, demonstrating that the ERP evidence supporting the critical period hypothesis (CPH) may be less compelling than previously thought. The article starts with a general introduction to ERP methodology and language-related ERP profiles…

The development of language indicating the emergence of thinking about the thoughts of self and others has been scarcely studied in Spanish-speaking children. For this reason, we studied the development of mental state language and various indicators of language development in 25 Spanish-speaking children assessed at 3, 3 1/2, 4, 4 1/2, and 5…

Background: Figurative language, such as metaphor and metonymy, is very common in daily language use. Its underlying cognitive processes are sometimes viewed as lying at the interface of language and thought. Williams syndrome, which is a rare genetic developmental disorder, provides an opportunity to study this interface because individuals with…

Examination of the effect of two linguistic factors on kindergarten through fourth-grade students' understanding of idioms indicated that the younger subjects better understood syntactically frozen idioms than those presented in various syntactic forms, while older subjects comprehended both kinds. (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…

The present study employs event related potentials (ERPs) to verify the utility of using electrophysiological measures to study developmental questions within the field of language comprehension. Established ERP components (N400 and P600) that reflect semantic and syntactic processing were examined. Fifteen adults and 14 children (ages 8-13)…

Recent work in syntactic theory has revealed that word order is more constrained in subordinate clauses, particularly nonasserted clauses, than in main clauses (Ross, 1973; Hooper & Thompson, 1973). On the other hand, main clauses are restricted in the extent to which they allow pronominalization and verb phrase deletion (Lakoff, 1968). These…

Three experiments with small samples of elementary school students were conducted to: (1) investigate the impact of syntactic complexity on analytic assistance; (2) extend the research on analytic assistance to younger subjects; and (3) determine the relative importance of analytic assistance when compared to an example-only comparison group.…

The ability to produce and recognize paraphrases is necessary for a child's linguistic development. The purpose of this paper is to explain how three basic sentence types interact with age in determining the strategy a child uses in producing paraphrases. Three paraphrase strategies considered are lexical substitution, syntactic rearrangement, and…

The effects of age and intelligence levels upon word associations were studied in 96 intellectually retarded, normal, and superior children with IQ's of 65 to 80, 91 to 110, and 117 to 158 respectively. A word association and a word usage task (reliability coefficients of .91 and .98) called for homogeneous responses to six form classes--count…

This study compared sentence comprehension skills in typically developing children 5-17 years of age, children with language impairment (LI) and children with focal brain injuries (FL) acquired in the pre/perinatal period. Participants were asked to process sentences "on-line", choosing the agent in sentences that varied in syntactic complexity…