The current study examined preschool children's ability to evaluate the entailment patterns yielded by sentences containing two downward entailing (DE) operators, "every" and "no." When "no" precedes "every," the entailment pattern typically licensed by "every" changes, but only if "no"…

We introduce a set of biologically and computationally motivated design choices for modeling the learning of language, or of other types of sequential, hierarchically structured experience and behavior, and describe an implemented system that conforms to these choices and is capable of unsupervised learning from raw natural-language corpora. Given…

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…

In the current study, idiom understanding was analyzed in relation to the ability to process the linguistic context in which the idiom is embedded with the hypothesis that there is a strong relationship between text and idiom comprehension. This hypothesis was derived from the global elaboration model. Nonfamiliar idioms, both transparent and…

The relation between text and idiom comprehension in children with poor text comprehension skills was investigated longitudinally. In the first phase of the study, six-year-old first graders with different levels of text comprehension were compared in an idiom and sentence comprehension task. Text comprehension was shown to be more closely related…

Inspired by adult models of language production and comprehension, we investigate whether children's nonadult interpretation of ambiguous negative quantified sentences reflects their sensitivity to distributional patterns of language use. Studies 1 and 2 show that ambiguous negative quantified sentences of the sort typically used in acquisition…

Using a particular sentence type--an exclamative construction referred to as "Nominal Extraposition" (NE)--this article outlines a formal model in which grammatical description includes the description of use conditions on form-meaning pairs. The article suggests that the relationship between NE and like exclamatives can be represented in an…

The third person singular pronouns are either neuter or sex linked even in situations where they should be neutral. When the sex is unknown then a substitute, for example "heesh" should be used. The present paper examines several of these awkward words and makes recommendations for substitutes. (Author)

Proposes that unbounded dependency constructions in English instantiate a surface subject-predicate structure in which the predicate is typically discontinuous. Evidence supports this discontinuous analysis over the operator-variable structure conventionally assigned to unbounded dependencies. A model of phrase structure is outlined. (85…

Native users of American Sign Language manipulated sentences in four ways: sign them at slow rate, parse them, make relatedness judgments of pairs of signs taken from each sentence, and recall the sentences. Hierarchical performance structures for each of the sentences were highly similar across tasks. (Author/RD)

The linguistic literature contains many studies of the structure of the noun phrase. Syntactic structures that occupy NP position but which don't have the internal characteristics of a substantive (infinitives and THAT clauses, for example) are distinguished from lexical structures that occupy NP position and do have the internal characteristics…

Use of Robert Gagne's model of instructional design for teaching English as a Second Language is illustrated in a unit intended for community college students of varying linguistic and educational backgrounds. Students must be literate in English, have a prescribed level of listening comprehension, and be familiar with certain English vocabulary…

Reviews the comments of Goldsmith on Firthian Prosodic Analysis (FPA) and its relationship with Autosegmental Phonology (AP). It is argued that AP has maintained the insights of FP while providing additional analytic possibilities. The authors examine Goldsmith's misinterpretations and clarifies the characteristics of FPA. (94 references) (CK)

Analyzes the language of five popular children's shows on public television. Suggests that the public television shows provide a superior language model than that of commercial television. (HOD)