Purpose: According to the interpersonal synergy model of spoken dialogue, interlocutors modify their communicative behaviors to meet the contextual demands of a given conversation. Although a growing body of research supports this postulation for linguistic behaviors (e.g., semantics, syntax), little is understood about how this model applies to…

Purpose: Syntax has been called the structural foundation of language, as its development allows for more efficient and effective communication. Complex syntax production is known to lag in children and adolescents with language impairment. Conversation, narrative, and expository language sampling contexts are recommended tools for the…

Linguistic repetitions in children are conceptualized as negative in children with autism -- echolalia, without communicative purpose -- and positive in typically developing (TD) children -- linguistic alignment involved in shared engagement, common ground and language acquisition. To investigate this apparent contradiction we analyzed spontaneous…

Early-life abilities involved in perceiving, producing and engaging with music (musicality) may shape later (social) communication and language abilities. Here, we investigate phenotypic and genetic relationships linking musicality and communication abilities by studying information from preschool and school-aged children of the Avon Longitudinal…

Singular "they" is becoming increasingly common and accepted, but many people find it difficult to learn, instead making seemingly-counterintuitive errors like "she uses they/them pronouns." Existing pronoun production models argue that speakers select pronouns based on morphosyntactic information associated with a name, or…

The paper is focused on the study of the interconnection of context and evaluative utterances in French. The assessment of different aspects of the world is viewed as a considerable part of human cognitive activities. Considering this, in the paper evaluative utterances are analysed in relation to logical, semantic, pragmatic and communicative…

In many languages, declaratives and interrogatives differ in word order properties, and in syntactic organization more broadly. Thus, in order to learn the distinct syntactic properties of the two sentence types, learners must first be able to distinguish them using non-syntactic information. Prosodic information is often assumed to be a useful…

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder sometimes spontaneously repeat clinician models of morphemes targeted for treatment. We examine how spontaneous repeating of clinician models in the form of recasts associates with improved child production of those emerging morphemes. Method: Forty-seven preschool children with developmental…

This study examines the discourse basis for referent accessibility and its relation to the choice of referring expressions by children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and typically developing children. The aim is to delineate how the linguistic and extra-linguistic context affects referent accessibility to the speaker. The study also examines…

Conversation Analysis (CA) has established repair (Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks 1977; Schegloff 1979; Kitzinger 2013) as a conversational mechanism for managing contingencies of talk-in-interaction. In this dissertation, I look at a particular sort of "repair" termed TCU-continuations (or otherwise known increments in other…

This paper deals with autistic syntax and its expressions both in the fully fledged autistic structure and in the autistic zones of other personality structures. The musical notion of the organ point serves as a point of departure in an attempt to describe how autistic syntax transforms what was meant to constitute the substrate for linguistic…

Individuals with Asperger's Syndrome (AS) often have difficulties with social interactions and conversations. We investigated if these difficulties could be attributable to a deficit in the ability to linguistically converge with an interlocutor, which is posited to be important for successful communication. To that end, participants completed two…

Listeners are often capable of adjusting to the variability contained in individual talkers' (speakers') speech. The vast majority of findings on talker adaptation are concerned with learning the contingency between "phonological" characteristics and talker identity. In contrast, the present study investigates representations at a more abstract…

This dissertation presents an empirical analysis of Korean hedges in contemporary spoken discourse. The data analyzed was drawn from my corpus based on approximately 17 hours of unplanned, naturally occurring conversations. This study classified lexical and syntactic hedges in my corpus and investigated the frequency of individual hedge items. It…

Discusses the relationship between the pragmatic and the syntactic aspects of a message or, more specifically, the relationship between the status of the information in the message (that is, whether the information is shared or not shared by speaker and listener) and the grammatical structures used to reproduce the message. (CFM)