This study examines French-learning infants' sensitivity to grammatical non-adjacent dependencies involving subject-verb agreement (e.g., "le/les garcons lit/lisent" "the boy(s) read(s)") where number is audible on both the determiner of the subject DP and the agreeing verb, and the dependency is spanning across two syntactic phrases. A further…

A structural priming experiment investigated whether grammatical encoding in production consists of one or two stages and whether oral bilingual language production is shared at the functional or positional level [Bock, J. K., Levelt, W. (1994). Language production. Grammatical encoding. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), "Handbook of psycholinguistics"…

What does mass-count syntax contribute to the interpretation of noun phrases (NPs), and how much of NP meaning is contributed by lexical items alone? Many have argued that count syntax specifies reference to countable individuals (e.g., "cats") while mass syntax specifies reference to unindividuated entities (e.g., "water"). We evaluated this…

Embedded hierarchical structures, such as "the rat the cat ate was brown", constitute a core generative property of a natural language theory. Several recent studies have reported learning of hierarchical embeddings in artificial grammar learning (AGL) tasks, and described the functional specificity of Broca's area for processing such structures.…

Discusses a 1993 study by Frazier, d'Arcais, and Coolen intended to test Schreuder's (1990) Morphological Integration model concerning the processing of separable and inseparable verbs. Suggests that the logic of the experiment is flawed and that the data do not warrant the author's conclusions. (DR)

Discusses a 1993 study by Frazier, d'Arcais, and Coolen intended to test Schreuder's (1990) Morphological Integration model concerning the processing of separable and inseparable verbs, and attempts to refute Kempen's objections to their interpretation of the experimental results in this issue. (DR)

In two experiments, we explore how recent experience with particular syntactic constructions affects the strength of the structural priming observed for those constructions. The results suggest that (1) the strength of structural priming observed for double object and prepositional object constructions is affected by the relative frequency with…

A hypothesis for the aphasic syndrome of aggramatism--the omission of function words and inflectional morphemes--is presented. The author tests and illustrates the efficacy of closely observing substantive universals of grammatical structure in proposing accounts of linguistic defects. (Author/MV)

Kean (EJ 165 107) presented a linguistic model to account for the features of the syndrome of Broca's aphasia, especially their agrammatism. This paper critiques Kean's paper by describing and evaluating her five major arguments. It is concluded that Kean's phonological model cannot account for agrammatism as well as syntactic models can.…

Five experiments support the argument that symmetry predication a is property of lexical items and has no special syntax; structural positioning of noun phrases in symmetricals-containing sentences sets their status as figure and ground or variant and referent, even for nonsensical nouns; and symmetrical predicate behavior varies as a function of…

The author accepts some of the technical comments in Dresher and Hornstein's article on artificial intelligence (AI), (EJ 161 384, Cognition, December 1976), but disagrees with several other comments. Although Dresher and Hornstein unquestioningly adopt Noam Chomsky's paradigm for the study of language, their real point is that AI researchers are…

Demonstrates that an understanding of children's language-acquisition difficulties with a wide range of syntactic constructions should be derived from limitations on the child's ability to deal with processing load and formal representational complexity. Maintains this can be done only in the context of a view of syntactic representation…

Investigated the source of agrammatic aphasic patients' difficulty comprehending semantically reversible sentences. Found approximately equal distributions of three distinct patterns. Results conflict with explanations of comprehension failure which state that a single pattern of performance on sentence structures characterizes comprehension of…

Goodluck and Solan (EJ 205 641) presented alternative formulations about why errors predicted by basic operations fail to occur and suggested a refined hypothesis. Each aspect of their argument is addressed, and it is concluded that descriptive power, methodology and principles for restricting error predictions favor our original analysis. (RD)