The objective of this research is to build automated models that emulate VerbNet, a semantic resource for English verbs. VerbNet has been built and expanded by linguists, forming a hierarchical clustering of verbs with common semantic and syntactic expressions, and is useful in semantic tasks. A major drawback is the difficulty of extending a…

Purpose: Childhood stuttering is common but is often outgrown. Children whose stuttering persists experience significant life impacts, calling for a better understanding of what factors may underlie eventual recovery. In previous research, language ability has been shown to differentiate children who stutter (CWS) from children who do not stutter,…

Readers tend to skip words, particularly when they are short, frequent, or predictable. Angele and Rayner (2013) recently reported that readers are often unable to detect syntactic anomalies in parafoveal vision. In the present study, we manipulated target word predictability to assess whether contextual constraint modulates…

Speakers frequently make subject-verb number agreement errors in the presence of a local noun with a different number from the head of the subject phrase. A series of four experiments used a two-choice response time (RT) paradigm to investigate how the latency of correct agreement decisions is modulated by the presence of a number attractor, and…

When learning language, young children are faced with many seemingly formidable challenges, including discovering words embedded in a continuous stream of sounds and determining what role these words play in syntactic constructions. We suggest that knowledge of phoneme distributions may play a crucial part in helping children segment words and…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…