The systems underlying incremental sentence comprehension are, in general, highly successful -- comprehenders typically understand sentences of their native language quickly and accurately. The occasional failure of the system to deliver an appropriate representation of a sentence is therefore potentially illuminating. There are many ways the…

A robust result in research on the production of grammatical agreement is that speakers are more likely to produce an erroneous verb with phrases such as "the key to the cabinets", with a singular noun followed by a plural one, than with phrases such as "the keys to the cabinet", where a plural noun is followed by a singular. These asymmetries are…

Discussion of the multilingual mind's organization proposes the Least Expansion Hypothesis, that knowledge of any language is organized in the same cognitive manner. A slot is created for knowledge of each level of language, storing knowledge of all languages pertaining to that level. A new knowledge unit is entered only when differing…

Sentences evoked from three- to five-year-olds (N=16), analyzed for errors (particularly copying-without-deletion), showed errors when: the subject noun phrase (NP) contained a relative clause, the relative clause had an object gap, and the relative clause was long. (Author/CB)

This study explores how children indicate that a new character or object is being introduced into a written text and how they tell their readers that a particular word refers to something which has appeared in the text before. In particular, the study focuses on information represented by noun phrases in written narrative texts. To investigate how…

Discusses the results of an error analysis of 100 English compositions written by university students in Iran. It is suggested that mistakes are not primarily due to interference from the native language, but to developmental errors, similar to errors made in first language acquisition. (Author/AMH)