With the proliferation of corpora, various syntactic analysis methodologies have been developed. However, syntactic analysis of Chinese sentences demands a theory that focuses more on word order and the interaction between content and function words, which is satisfied by pattern grammar theory. This study investigates the effectiveness of pattern…

The purpose of this study was to analyze and compare the linguistic content of the Spanish HINT and the Spanish AzBio sentence tests. The results revealed that the Spanish AzBio is linguistically more complex as compared with the Spanish HINT in terms of sentence length, complexity, and grammatical structure.

What makes some sentences more difficult to process, and why? Memory- and expectation-based theories both attempt to explain sentence processing difficulties, and decades of sentence processing literature have found evidence in support of both theories. This dissertation further investigates these theories of sentence processing by exploring…

Given its complexity, abstractness, and central role in many logics, negation might be a conceptual accomplishment. Therefore, young children's gradual acquisition of negation words might be due to their undergoing a conceptual change that is necessary to represent logical meanings. However, it's also possible that expressing negation takes time…

Subject-verb agreement errors are common in sentence production. Many studies have used experimental paradigms targeting the production of subject-verb agreement from a sentence preamble ("The key to the cabinets") and eliciting verb errors (… "*were shiny"). Through reanalysis of previous data (50 experiments; 102,369…

Syntactic movement is central to mainstream generative theories of syntax (Chomsky, 1957; 1981; 1995; 2001). Under this view, sentences contain words that have moved and words that have not. Children only ever hear words in their moved positions so it is unclear how they could determine the ways these constituents must be merged and moved from…

Agreement attraction is a cross-linguistic phenomenon where a verb occasionally agrees not with its subject, as required by grammar, but instead with an unrelated noun ("The key to the cabinets were…"). Despite the clear violation of grammatical rules, comprehenders often rate these sentences as acceptable. Contenders for explaining…

Eventualities have been recognized as psychologically and linguistically relevant for more than 50 years. Psychologically, eventualities are complex bundles of information derived from our perceptions of the world. The question for linguists is how much of this complexity is reflected in our eventuality-denoting lexical entries and the…

In a seminal study, Cameron-Faulkner et al. made two important observations about utterance-level constructions in English child-directed speech (CDS). First, they observed that canonical in/transitive sentences are surprisingly infrequent in child-direct speech (given that SVO word order is often thought to play a key role in the acquisition of…

Research in first-language (L1) sentence processing has found evidence that language comprehenders use binding condition A as a filter to rule out noun phrases that are binding-inaccessible before proceeding with the task of finding the correct antecedent. Sturt (2013) notes that this strategy does not appear to apply to advanced speakers of…

Much research in the functional linguistics literature suggests that the use of zero pronouns is driven by the degree of interclausal connection. Kim (1990, 1992) claims that in clause chain languages such as Korean and Japanese, zero pronouns are primarily used following an interclausal connective with a tight interclausal connection that…

Purpose: This review article summarizes programmatic research on sentence diversity in toddlers developing language typically and explores developmental patterns of sentence diversity in toddlers at risk for specific language impairment. Method: The first half of this review article presents a sentence-focused approach to language assessment and…

Subject-verb (SV) agreement helps listeners interpret the number condition of ambiguous nouns ("The sheep is/are fat"), yet it remains unclear whether young children use agreement to comprehend newly encountered nouns. Preschoolers and adults completed a forced choice task where sentences contained singular vs. plural copulas…

All communication systems rely on sets of rules that must generally be followed for successful communication to be possible; in the case of human language, these rules are given by the grammar. However, despite these rules, there is considerable variation that has been noted across the grammar. In this dissertation, I explore one understudied…

Can brief training on novel grammatical morphemes influence visual processing of nonlinguistic stimuli? If so, how deep is this effect? Here, an experimental group learned two novel morphemes highlighting the familiar concept of transitivity in sentences; a control group was exposed to the same input but with the novel morphemes used…