This study examined how noun and verb processing in bilingual visual word recognition are affected by within and between-language overlap. We investigated how word class ambiguous noun and verb cognates are processed by bilinguals, to see if co-activation of overlapping word forms between languages benefits from additional overlap within a…

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…

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…

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…

Three experiments investigating the use of temporal information in a reduced relative clause to interpret verb tense of the main clause found that subjects rapidly assessed temporal information to resolve tense ambiguity, demonstrating an incremental approach to comprehension that uses previous discourse to continuously update comprehension and…

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)…

Results from an English acceptability-rating experiment are presented that demonstrate that people find doubly nested relative-clause structures just as acceptable when only two verb phrases are included instead of the grammatically required three. Three possible accounts of the results are considered. (Author/VWL)

Elicited acceptability ratings from native-English-speaking adults for regular and irregular past tense forms and their stems, in sentence contexts, analyzing them for frequency and phonological neighborhood effects. Results indicate that irregular past tenses are retrieved from associative memory, whereas regular past tenses are produced by a…

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…

When it comes to explaining English verbs' patterns of regular and irregular generalization, single-network theories have difficulty with the former, rule-only theories with the latter process. Linguistic and psycholinguistic evidence, based on observation during experiments and simulations in morphological pattern generation, independently call…

A potential problem for connectionist accounts of inflectional morphology is the need to learn a "default" inflection. This article demonstrates that given appropriate architectural assumptions, connectionist models are capable of learning a default category and generalizing as required, even in the absence of superior type frequency.…

Connectionist accounts of inflectional morphology have focused on domain of English past tense in which default process (add/ed) reflects process of suffixation adopted by majority of forms in the language. Arabic plural system is one where a minority default process operates. The study contrasts two types of default process that might lead to a…