This study investigates preverbal structural and semantic processing in Japanese, a head-final language, using the maze task. Two sentence types were tested--simple scrambled sentences (Experiment 1) and control sentences (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that even for simple, mono-clausal Japanese sentences, (1) there are online processing…

The present study examines how second language learners (L2) assign the thematic roles of agent/patient in Spanish passive sentences with "ser" (often referred to as the true passive) when it is their initial exposure to this structure. The target sentences were preceded by a contextual sentence. After hearing the two sentences,…

Traditionally, it has been claimed that the non-canonical word order of passives makes them inherently more difficult to comprehend than their canonical active counterparts both in the first (L1) and second language (L2). However, growing evidence suggests that non-canonical word orders are not inherently more difficult to process than canonical…

Purpose: To assess strengths and weaknesses of the reading level (RL) match approach and its potential to generate insights regarding the cognitive foundations of reading ability and disability. Method: We applied RL-match design to a sample of 2nd-6th graders reading a consistent orthography, Russian, using an "extreme phenotype"…

We report two experiments investigating subject-verb and object-verb agreement in Basque. Participants repeated and completed preambles containing singular or plural subjects and objects in sentences with canonical subject-object-verb (SOV) or non-canonical object-subject-verb (OSV) order; in Experiment 2, they did so while remembering two…

Children and adults follow cues such as case marking and word order in their assignment of semantic roles in simple transitives (e.g., "the dog chased the cat"). It has been suggested that the same cues are used for the interpretation of complex sentences, such as transitive relative clauses (RCs) (e.g., "that's the dog that chased…

In Study 1 we analyzed Italian child-directed-speech (CDS) and selected the three most frequent active transitive sentence frames used with overt subjects. In Study 2 we experimentally investigated how Italian-speaking children aged 2;6, 3;6, and 4;6 comprehended these orders with novel verbs when the cues of animacy, gender, and subject-verb…

Word order is a core mechanism for conveying syntactic structure, yet interrogatives usually disrupt canonical word orders. For example, in English, polar interrogatives typically invert the subject and auxiliary verb and insert an utterance-initial "do" if no auxiliary is present. These word order patterns result from differences in the…

Event-related potential studies on second language processing reveal that L1/L2 differences are due either to proficiency, age of acquisition or grammatical differences between L1 and L2 (Kotz in "Brain Lang" 109(2-3):68-74, 2009). However, the relative impact of these and other factors in second language processing is still not well…

This dissertation investigates code-switching (CS), the concurrent use of more than one language in conversation, commonly observed in bilingual speech. Assuming that code-switching is subject to universal principles, just like monolingual grammar, the dissertation provides a principled account of code-switching, with particular emphasis on OV~VO…

This article reports on an experiment that examined the comprehension of transitive sentences in Czech children and its relationship to case marking, word order and information structure. A total of 107 Czech children aged 2;9-4;5 were tested for comprehension of noun-verb-noun sentences in which word order and given-new status of individual nouns…

The interpretation of floating quantifiers in Japanese requires knowledge of hierarchical phrase structure. However, the input to children is insufficient or even misleading, as our analysis indicates. This presents an intriguing question on learnability: do children interpret floating quantifiers based on a structure-dependent rule which is not…

This study investigated whether speakers strategically decide where to interrupt their speech once they need to stop. We conducted four naming experiments in which pictures of colored shapes occasionally changed in color or shape. Participants then merely had to stop (Experiment 1); or they had to stop and resume speech (Experiments 2-4). They…

This study uses eye-tracking to examine the processing of case-marking information in ambiguous subject- and object-first wh-questions in German. The position of the lexical verb was also manipulated via verb tense to investigate whether verb location influences how intermediate L2 learners process L2 sentences. Results show that intermediate L2…

This project investigates second language (L2) learners' processing of four types of Chinese relative clauses crossing extraction types and demonstrative-classifier (DCl) positions. Using a word order judgment task with a whole-sentence reading technique, the study also discusses how psycholinguistic theories bear explanatory power in L2 data. An…