We report four experiments that examined whether bilinguals' production of one language is affected by the syntactic properties of their other language. Greek-English and English-Greek highly proficient fluent bilinguals produced sentence completions following subject nouns whose translation had either the same or different number. We manipulated…

Three cued-recall experiments examined the effect of category typicality on the ordering of words in sentence production. Past research has found that typical items tend to be mentioned before atypical items in a phrase--a pattern usually associated with lexical variables (like word frequency), and yet typicality is a conceptual variable.…

What errors in English subject-to-verb agreement reveal about the syntactic nature of sentence subjects was investigated. Participants in 3 experiments included 104 undergraduates and 64 members of a university community. Results suggest the abstract syntactic relation of subject controls/mediates verb agreement, not notional properties and…

Five experiments were performed in which nursery school children were taught to identify persons, animals, or objects in pictures that took the nominative, objective, or locative case in sentences about the pictures. Inferences are made about categories in children's thinking including animate, and actor and agent. (CTM)

All languages rely to some extent on word order to signal relational information. Why? We address this question by exploring communicative and cognitive factors that could lead to a reliance on word order. In Study 1, adults were asked to describe scenes to another using their hands and not their mouths. The question was whether this home-made…