Two-year-olds assign appropriate interpretations to verbs presented in two English transitivity alternations, the causal and unspecified-object alternations (Naigles, 1996). Here we explored how they might do so. Causal and unspecified-object verbs are syntactically similar. They can be either transitive or intransitive, but differ in the semantic…

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…

Proposes an alternative account of the child's learning of nouns and adjectives that relies on properties of the semantic categories to be learned and of the word-learning task itself. In five experiments, a simple connectionist network was trained to label input objects in particular contexts; the network learned categories resembling nouns…

Discusses the importance, validity, and implications of the identity thesis that the P600 component of the scalp-recorded event-related potential is identical with the P3b, a domain-general component elicited by improbable task-related events. Explores epistemological complexities of the issue and discusses what the identity thesis does and does…

This paper presents a discussion of the constraints imposed on lexicalisation during production by language-specific patterns, such as whether words exist in a language to describe a given event and whether language-specific syntactic and phonological information correlates with semantic properties. First, we introduce in broad strokes relevant…

Compared responses of English-French bilinguals performing semantic categorization and lexical decision tasks using translation-priming stimuli. Using the same stimuli, priming effects were significantly stronger in semantic categorization than in lexical decision, suggesting the translation-priming effect in the former is mediated by semantic…

A study investigated patterns of neurological event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by morphosyntactic violations in 16 right-handed, English-speaking subjects. Manipulation of stimulus grammaticality and block probability led to ERP effects consistent with those in previous research on syntactic and semantic processing. Results also provide…

Presents model describing adult learning of morphosyntax in a novel language where frequency and regularity are factorially combined. Accuracy and latency data show frequency effects for both regular/irregular forms early in acquisition process; as learning progresses, frequency effect on regular items diminishes but remains for irregular items.…

Shows that incorporation of units for syllable CV structures in a connectionist model of phonological encoding enables explanation of empirical patterns of speech errors. The model accounts for the finding of a bias toward additions of segments. Corpus analysis in Dutch and Spanish showed an addition bias in both languages. Showed that in…

A study investigated whether the phonological properties of visually represented words routinely influenced the process of lexical access. Subjects were 40 college students and 40 fourth graders. Results provide little support for the claim that the phonological attributes of words are used standardly to achieve lexical access. (Author/MSE)

Compares speech-related (coverbal) gestures in brain-damaged patients (aphasics and visuo-spatial deficits) and in matched controls. Results suggest ideational gestures probably facilitate word retrieval and reflect transfer of information between propositional and non-propositional representations during message construction, and that conceptual…

Children with specific language impairments (eight learning Italian, eight learning English as a first language) were studied for grammatical deficits. Italian-speakers used noun inflections, verb inflections, copula forms more than English-speaking counterparts, matched by utterance length. Articles were used similarly. Results were consistent…