Purpose: Spontaneous speech tasks are critically important for characterizing spoken language production deficits in aphasia and for assessing the impact of therapy. The utility of such tasks arises from the complex interaction of linguistic demands (word retrieval, sentence formulation, articulation). However, this complexity also makes…

This paper investigates the difference between the production of grammatical determiners and lexical determiners in the production of adjective-noun phrases (NPs) in Danish. Models of sentence processing (Garrett in "Psychology of learning and motivation," Academic press, New York, pp 133-177, 1975; Bock in "J Mem Lang"…

Mental representations have continuous as well as discrete, combinatorial properties. For example, while predominantly discrete, phonological representations also vary continuously; this is reflected by gradient effects in instrumental studies of speech production. Can an integrated theoretical framework address both aspects of structure? The…

Purpose: Grammatical encoding (GE) is impaired in agrammatic aphasia; however, the nature of such deficits remains unclear. We examined grammatical planning units during real-time sentence production in speakers with agrammatic aphasia and control speakers, testing two competing models of GE. We queried whether speakers with agrammatic aphasia…

Morphological and phonological processes are tightly interrelated in spoken production. During processing, morphological processes must combine the phonological content of individual morphemes to produce a phonological representation that is suitable for driving phonological processing. Further, morpheme assembly frequently causes changes in a…

One important mechanism suggested to underlie the acquisition of grammar is rule learning. Indeed, infants aged 0 ; 7 are able to learn rules based on simple identity relations (adjacent repetitions, ABB: "wo fe fe" and non-adjacent repetitions, ABA: "wo fe wo", respectively; Marcus et al., 1999). One unexplored issue is…

This study considers code-switching (CS) and pausing in two sociolinguistically distinct groups in London and Cyprus, bilingual in Greek-Cypriot Dialect (GCD) and English. The characteristics of their speech are examined both in monolingual and bilingual modes (Grosjean, 2001). It was hypothesised that in London Greek-Cypriots, where CS is a…

This dissertation presents experimental research on speech errors in Tunisian Arabic. The nonconcatenative morphology of Arabic shows interesting interactions of phrasal and lexical constraints with morphological structure during language production. The central empirical questions revolve around properties of "exchange errors". These…

Spoken language comprehension is known to involve a large left-dominant network of fronto-temporal brain regions, but there is still little consensus about how the syntactic and semantic aspects of language are processed within this network. In an fMRI study, volunteers heard spoken sentences that contained either syntactic or semantic ambiguities…

In 3 picture-word experiments, the authors explored the activation of 2 grammatical features in Czech during lexical access: declensional class of nouns and conjugational class of verbs. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated congruency effects of declensional and conjugational class, respectively. Picture naming times were reliably longer if the…

The Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) has been discussed in various studies that show that children around age 5 seem to violate Principle B of Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981, and related works), when the antecedent of the pronoun is a name, but not when the antecedent is a quantifier. The analysis we propose can explain the DPBE in languages of…

The study reported here compares two linguistically informed hypotheses on agrammatic sentence production, the TPH [Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). "Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree." "Brain and Language," 56, 397-425.] and the DOP [Bastiaanse, R., & van Zonneveld, R. (2005). "Sentence production…

This article presents a selective overview of studies that have investigated auditory language processing in children and late second-language (L2) learners using online methods such as event-related potentials (ERPs), eye-movement monitoring, or the cross-modal priming paradigm. Two grammatical phenomena are examined in detail, children's and…

Are the phonological representations of printed and spoken words isomorphic? This question is addressed by investigating the restrictions on onsets. Cross-linguistic research suggests that onsets of rising sonority are preferred to sonority plateaus, which, in turn, are preferred to sonority falls (e.g., bnif, bdif, lbif). Of interest is whether…

This study investigates the presence and latency of the P600 component in response to subject-verb agreement violations in spoken language in people with and without developmental dyslexia. The two groups performed at-ceiling level on judging the sentences on their grammaticality, but the ERP data revealed subtle differences between them. The P600…