Nonword repetition tasks (NWRTs) are employed widely in various studies on language development and are often relied upon as diagnostic tools. However, the mechanisms that underlie children's performance in NWRTs are very little understood. In this paper we present NWRT data from typically developing 5- to 6-year-olds (5:4-6:8) and examine the…

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…

Two-year-olds assign appropriate interpretations to verbs presented in two English transitivity alternations, the causal and unspecified-object alternations (Naigles, 1996). Here we explored how they might do so. Causal and unspecified-object verbs are syntactically similar. They can be either transitive or intransitive, but differ in the semantic…

It is well known that languages differ in how they encode motion. Languages such as English use verbs that communicate the manner of motion (e.g., "slide", "skip"), while languages such as Greek regularly encode motion paths in verbs (e.g., "enter", "ascend"). Here we ask how such cross-linguistic encoding…

We investigate linguistic relativity effects by examining whether the grammatical count/mass distinction in English affects English speakers' semantic representations of noun referents, as compared with those of Japanese speakers, whose language does not grammatically distinguish nouns for countability. We used two tasks which are sensitive to…

The purpose of this paper is to examine cross-cultural differences in gesture frequency and the extent to which exposure to two cultures would affect the gesture frequency of bilinguals when speaking in both languages. The Chinese-speaking monolinguals from China, English-speaking monolinguals from America, and Chinese-English bilinguals from…

Using reading times and event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we investigated the processing of Japanese subject and object relative clauses (SRs/ORs). Previous research on English relative clauses shows that ORs take longer to read (King & Just, 1991) and elicit anterior negativity between fillers and gaps (King & Kutas, 1995), which is…

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…

Examines the dual mechanism hypothesis, which argues that the apparent contrast, in English inflectional morphology, between a rule-based default procedure, generating regular past-tense forms, and listed irregular forms stored in an associative net, reflects universal constraints on the properties of possible morphological systems. The study…

Reports two parallel experiments conducted in French and in English in which subject-verb agreement errors were induced to explore the role of syntactic structure during sentence production. Aims to understand how syntactic structure contributes to the occurrence of errors. (Author/VWL)

Examined whether the preferences of verbs for appearing in particular subcategory structures can influence parsing and whether this influence is graded according to the strength of the preferences. Findings suggest that the verb subcategory preferences do produce a graded influence on the parse, according to their strength. (28 references)…

A series of monitoring studies is reported, in replication of the cross-language research of Cutler, Mehler, Norris, and Segui, which found evidence of language-specific perceptual routines. It is suggested that factors outside the perceptual system may affect responses and that the case for language specificity in perceptual routines has not been…

Compared responses of English-French bilinguals performing semantic categorization and lexical decision tasks using translation-priming stimuli. Using the same stimuli, priming effects were significantly stronger in semantic categorization than in lexical decision, suggesting the translation-priming effect in the former is mediated by semantic…

A series of reading-time studies was conducted to examine the processing of co-reference in Chinese discourse. These studies were conducted to test the generality of studies of English that have shown that reduced referential expressions contribute more to discourse coherence than do unreduced expressions. (Author/VWL)

Reviews recent research on English place assimilation (e.g., "sweet" articulated as "sweep" in the environment "sweet boy"), evaluating an account of variation in terms of abstract, underspecified lexical form representations. A hybrid account is proposed where abstract lexical representations can be contacted directly by varying phonetic forms.…