Comparison of the cue usage of English/Dutch and Dutch/English bilinguals with varying amounts of second language exposure to that of native speaker control groups reveals that, with increasing exposure, cue usage in the second language gradually shifts from that appropriate to the first language to that appropriate for the second. (Author/CB)

Study of the probabilistic nature of processing strategies in Dutch/English bilinguals indicated that sentence interpretation in English generally paralleled that in Dutch, with divergence toward similarity in performance by English monolinguals. (Author/CB)

Four experimental studies were designed to test, in Norwegian, the hypothesis that children's non-adultlike interpretations of pronouns may be partly attributable to a lexical factor interacting with the A-Chain Condition. (Author/VWL)

Effects of case inflections, gender agreement, noun animacy, and word position on decisions and reaction times were explored for agent-object assignments in Croatian, a case-marking language. Results support the view that there may be constraints on the particular combinations of cues that may converge to facilitate, or compete to inhibit,…

Focuses on the role of context on the processing of inflected nouns in Finnish. Identification of partitive plurals with the homonymic suffix -jA was studied by presenting the target nouns in a sentence context and by recording durations of readers' eye fixations and self-paced reading times for these targets. Results are discussed. (Author/VWL)

Native Spanish early and late acquirers of English and Vietnamese early and child acquirers of English made grammaticality judgments of sentences in their second language. Native acquirers of English were not distinguishable from native English speakers, whereas native Spanish late acquirers had difficulty with all aspects of the grammar tested…

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether a parser's on-line processes are affected by manipulation of case markings in Korean sentence processing, and to evaluate the usefulness of a Ranked Flagged Serial Parser model in predicting Korean ambiguity resolution processes. (Author/VWL)

Two competing hypotheses about speech processing were examined in two experiments. The hypotheses were that: (1) people rely on the configurational properties of sentences in relative clause (RC) processing; and (2) people rely on the grammatical roles of the noun phrases involved in relativization in RC processing. The first experiment used a…

A discussion of young children's production of English utterances with missing constituents focuses on the omission of subjects. The theory that young children have different grammars from those of adults is disputed, and it is suggested that, instead, subjects are omitted due to performance factors. Processing limitations in child language are…

Issues in syntactic processing, that aspect of the human sentence comprehension mechanism that recovers a syntactic structure for a given word string, are discussed. In particular, two structural ambiguities in Mandarin Chinese are examined and their successful parsing within the framework of minimal parsing models is discussed. Recent work…

Discusses that Serbo-Croation is a language with a dual system of relative clause formation and describes elicited production and comprehension experiments conducted with preschool children. Results are discussed in the context of the cross-linguistic typology of relative clauses and previous studies of the acquisition of relative clauses. (27…

Two studies are reported in which the following theory is tested: the agrammatic sentence form that is observed in the spontaneous speech of Broca's aphasics is attributable to the selection of elliptical syntactic structures in which the slots for many of the closed-class words that appear in complete sentences are lacking. (54 references)…

A cross-linguistic comparison of syntax acquisition patterns examined preferential subject omission in the naturally-occurring speech of three Japanese toddlers from the Tokyo area and compared the findings to data on English acquisition. Results indicate that acquisition patterns of Japanese do not mirror those of English with regard to this…

The proceedings include the following papers: "Why We Study Child Language"; "Children's Use of Information in Word Learning"; "An Examination of the Initial Mapping of Verb Meanings"; "Evidence for the VP Constituent from Child Korean"; "The Role of Stress, Position, and Intonation in the…

The collection of papers on linguistic experiments includes: "Discourse Functions of Pitch Range in Spontaneous and Read Speech" (Gayle M. Ayers); "When Is a Syllable Not a Syllable?" (Mary E. Beckman); "The Relationship between Syntactic and Semantic Processes in Sentence Comprehension" (Julie E. Boland); "The Influence of Orthography and…