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…

We report three experiments on reference resolution in Dutch. The results of two off-line experiments and an eye-tracking study suggest that the interpretation of different referential forms--in particular, "emphatic" strong pronouns, weak pronouns, and demonstrative pronouns--cannot be satisfactorily explained in terms of a single…

Semantic roles are a critical aspect of linguistic knowledge because they indicate the relations of the participants in an event to the main predicate. Experimental studies on children and adults show that both groups use associations between general semantic roles such as Agent and Theme, and grammatical positions such as Subject and Object, even…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

Recent evidence from adult pronoun comprehension suggests that semantic factors such as verb transitivity affect referent salience and thereby anaphora resolution. We tested whether the same semantic factors influence pronoun comprehension in young children. In a visual world study, 3-year-olds heard stories that began with a sentence containing…

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…

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…

Stewart, Pickering, and Sanford (1998) reported a new type of semantic inference, implicit consequentiality, which they suggest is comparable to, although not directly related to, the well-documented phenomenon of implicit causality. It is our contention that there is a direct relation between these two semantic phenomena but that this relation…

Examined whether context marked for grammatical gender can constrain the processing of homphone words in French. Homophones whose different meaning are associated with words of different genders were used in two cross-modal semantic priming experiments. (Author/VWL)

In three experiments we investigated the locus of the frequency effect in lexical access and the mechanism of gender feature selection. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to produce gender-marked verb plus pronominal clitic utterances in Italian (e.g., "portalo" (bring it [masculine]) in response to a written verb and pictured object. We…

Investigated the relationship between syntactic and semantic processing using a word-by-word reading paradigm and a cross-modal integration paradigm. The study evaluated the experimental results with regard to serial autonomous models, strongly and weakly interactive models, and a hybrid model proposed here. (92 references) (Author/CK)

Discusses "cued shadowing," during which subjects listen to pairs of words or sentences and repeat a target word signalled by a cue. Rapid semantic and grammatical priming effects have been observed with this technique, both with word and sentence contexts and at different positions within sentence contexts, in normal children and adults, and in…

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…

Notes that in linguistic theory, phenomena previously handled by a separate grammatical component have been moved into the lexicon and that in some theories, the contrast between grammar and the lexicon has vanished. Concludes that the case for a modular distinction between grammar and the lexicon has been overstated and that the evidence to date…

Presents the results of three experiments investigating the time course of grammaticality judgement. The high correlations among the experiments suggest that the incremental tasks assigned were tapping into the same decision-making process as is found online. The article discusses the findings' implications for the error types that do and do not…