Prior eye-tracking studies of spoken sentence comprehension have found that the presence of two potential referents, e.g., two frogs, can guide listeners toward a Modifier interpretation of "Put the frog on the napkin..." despite strong lexical biases associated with "Put" that support a Goal interpretation of the temporary ambiguity (Tanenhaus,…

The current studies used a syntactic priming paradigm with 3- and 4-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were asked to describe a series of drawings depicting transitive and dative relations to establish baseline production levels. In Experiment 2, an experimenter described a similar series of drawings using one of two syntactic forms…

This paper tests two claims about the thematic roles Agent and Patient: first, that they can be decomposed into more primitive features, as laid out in Dowty's (1991) Proto-Roles Hypothesis; and second, that these properties can be inferred directly from the grammatical roles subject and object. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants rated the…

Any person who has taught Spanish as a second language or who has interacted with a non-native speaker of Spanish can easily tell that mastering the correct use of the copulas "ser" and "estar" is very difficult in both spoken and written production. But L2 learners are not alone. The Spanish copulas also present difficulty and frustration for L2…

Processing language requires the retrieval of concepts from memory in response to an ongoing stream of information. This retrieval is facilitated if one can infer the gist of a sentence, conversation, or document and use that gist to predict related concepts and disambiguate words. This article analyzes the abstract computational problem…

Through recording the streaming x- and y-coordinates of computer-mouse movements, we report evidence that visual context provides an immediate constraint on the resolution of syntactic ambiguity in the visual-world paradigm. This finding converges with previous eye-tracking results that support a constraint-based account of sentence processing, in…

Although the role of the striatum in language processing is still largely unclear, a number of recent proposals have outlined its specific contribution. Different studies report evidence converging to a picture where the striatum may be involved in those aspects of rule-application requiring non-automatized behaviour. This is the main…

The purpose of this study was to use an age-appropriate version of the sentence-structure priming paradigm (e.g., K. Bock, 1990; K. Bock, H. Loebell, & R. Morey, 1992) to assess experimentally the syntactic processing abilities of children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS). Participants were 16 CWS and 16 CWNS between the…

This study investigated how normal subjects and Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics integrate thematic information incrementally using syntax, lexical-semantics, and pragmatics in a simple active declarative sentence. Three priming experiments were conducted using an auditory lexical decision task in which subjects made a lexical decision on a…

Four experiments support the hypothesis that syntactically relevant information about verbs is encoded in the lexicon in semantic event templates. A verb's event template represents the participants in an event described by the verb and the relations among the participants. The experiments show that lexical decision times are longer for verbs with…

Studied whether two-year olds use multiple syntactic frames to help determine meanings of novel verbs. The multiple frames tested were combinations of transitive and intransitive frames in two alternation patterns. As predicted, the Causative pattern was more predictive of actions involving physical causation, and the Omitted Object pattern was…

Reexamines data from Caplan and Hildebrandt (1988) with a new set of background assumptions and concludes a Government-Binding-based account is not supported. Instead, deficits observed in the process of infinitival complement constructions are attributed to patient inability to fully access the data structure required to support a proposed…

Describes how two conversants can jointly produce a single syntactic unit, such as a sentence, discussing the types of sentences achieved through joint production, the single utterance construction format, syntax for conversation, interactionally relevant features of talk, and the resources needed to complete an utterance-in-progress. (37…

Responds to previous studies on the relationship between event-related brain potential (ERP) responses to linguistic syntactic anomalies and domain-general unexpected events. After reviewing relevant data, this paper concludes that the ERP response to syntactic anomalies is at least partially distinct from the ERP response to unexpected anomalies…

Investigated four cases of English-speaking children with Williams Syndrome (WS), a neuro-developmental disorder characterized by an unusual fractionation of language abilities. Found that, despite low IQ, subjects performance on syntactic tasks and on regular inflection is not impaired, suggesting a distinction between a computation system and an…