Case marking is the major cue to sentence interpretation in Japanese, whereas animacy and word order are much weaker. However, when subjects and their cases markers are omitted, Japanese honorific and humble verbs can provide information that compensates for the missing case role markers. This study examined the usage of honorific and humble verbs…

Investigates the determinants of adult usage of various syntactic and semantic cues in sentence interpretation. Native French speakers and advanced English/French bilinguals were tested for the strength of usage of word order, clitic pronoun agreement, verb agreement, and noun animacy cues in the assignment of the role in French sentences. (46…

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)

Samples of the communicative behavior of a group of mildly mentally retarded adults were examined for indications of mature linguistic competence (specifically, grammatical morpheme and complex sentence use).Findings confirmed the expectation that the eventual mastery of these aspects of linguistic competence in higher-level retarded individuals…