When asked to judge as correct or incorrect three categories of sentences (those with errors similar to their own patterns, those with common "baby errors," and correct sentences), four-year-olds made significantly fewer corrections of errors similar to their own, suggesting that children learn their own errors. (MSE)

This article discusses a study by Segalowitz and Galang that reports results showing better mastery of patient-focus sentences than agent-focus sentences for Tagalog children. (CFM)

Teachers are encouraged to learn to codify student errors of selection and usage and to promote use of dictionaries and other lexical tools so students can achieve proper pronunciation and identify colloquialisms, misuse of idioms, and lack of grammatical logic in complex constructions. (MSE)

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)

Based on the assumptions that a universal grammar has a number of functional parameters and that in each language, some are not activated, a study was undertaken to investigate two hypotheses. They are (1) that in a grammatical situation where an adult's first language parameter is not activated in the second language, the learner will "lose" the…

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…

The effects of topical coherence on the comprehension of two groups of non-native (Finnish) users of English and a control group of English native speakers were observed, with reaction times from a visual word monitoring task as the dependent measure. The experiment examined the ability of intermediate and advanced second language students to…

The model of sentence perception proposed by Fodor, Bever and Garrett (1974) emphasizes the importance of grammatical cues signalling clause boundaries, and suggests that segmentation of a sentence into clauses precedes computation of the internal structure of those clauses. However, this model has nothing to say about the many sentences in which…

One factor that contributes to the difficulty that a reader may encounter when reading a text is the syntactic complexity of the constructions used in the text. Examples of altered text constructions include the transformations of subjects of subordinate clauses, making them either the subjects or the objects of main clauses. When the conditions…

In a verbal memory study of language development, third- through sixth-grade children read and orally recalled short, expository passages which were presented in three syntactic paraphrase forms: (1) complex sentences with preverbal elaboration such as complex subject nominalizations and relative clauses, (2) complex sentences with postverbal…

This is a description of the motivation and overall organization of the OWL language for knowledge representation. OWL consists of a linguistic memory system (LMS), a memory of concepts in terms of which all English phrases and all knowledge of an application domain are represented; a theory of English grammar which tells how to map English…

A comprehension model of simultaneous interpretation activity raises three types of problems: structure of semantic information stored in long-term memory, modalities of input processing and specific restrictions due to situation. A useful concept of semantic mnesic structures includes: (1) a componential-predicative lexicon; (2) a propositional…