The current study explores the effects of processing demands and proficiency on second language (L2) learners' acceptability judgment of wh-island sentences. A total of 65 adult Korean learners of English and ten native speakers (NSs) of English participated in an experiment that combined self-paced reading and acceptability judgment. They were…

We assessed whether and under what conditions noncanonical agreement patterns occur in Russian, with the goal of understanding the factors involved in normal agreement. Russian is a morphosyntactically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, gender, and case. If consistent, overt specification of number and gender agreement…

Closed-class word selection was investigated by focusing on determiner production. Native speakers from three different languages named pictures of objects using determiner plus noun phrases (e.g., in French "la table" (the [subscript feminine] table), while ignoring distractor determiners printed on the pictures (e.g., "le"…

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…

In this study, we investigate children's and adults' relative clause attachment preferences in sentences such as "The student photographed the fan of the actress who was looking happy." Twenty-nine 6- to 7-year-old monolingual English children and 37 adult native speakers of English participated both in an auditory questionnaire study and in an…

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,…

This paper addresses itself to the way in which K'ekchi speakers identify the subject and the object in simple sentences. An attempt is made to determine: (1) whether K'ekchi has a basic word order, (2) the possible functions of any derived word order, and (3) whether there are any constraints on the logically possible word orders in K'ekchi. A…

Presents a fully incremental model that accounts for attachment preferences by the linear order of lexical heads in the surface structure and their thematic properties. Discusses the principle of "parameterised head attachment" and a serial variant on the basis of three online experiments on noun phrase and prepositional phrase…