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…

Purpose: The current study used an intervention design to test the hypothesis that parent input sentences with diverse lexical noun phrase (NP) subjects would accelerate growth in children's sentence diversity. Method: Child growth in third person sentence diversity was modeled from 21-30 months (n = 38) in conversational language samples obtained…

In order to study problems of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) with morphosyntax, we investigated twenty high-functioning Greek-speaking children (mean age: 6;11) and twenty age- and language-matched typically developing children on environments that allow or forbid object clitics or their corresponding noun phrase. Children with…

The study examined linguistic flexibility of Hebrew-speaking students from middle childhood to adolescence compared with adults on tasks requiring them to alternate between different versions of varied linguistic stimuli. Lexical flexibility was tested by constructing different words with a shared root and a shared prosodic template;…

Conference interpreters form a special case of language users because the simultaneous interpretation practice requires very specific lexical processing. Word comprehension and production in respective languages is performed under strict time constraints and requires constant activation of the involved languages. The present experiment aimed at…

An experiment was conducted to gain insight into the demarcative function of stress and intonation by testing the effectiveness of these features in resolving structural ambiguity. The responses of native speakers were analyzed both in the production and in the recognition of 68 pairs of potentially ambiguous sentences. Special care was taken to…

Discusses "end-weight," long, complex phrases that tend to come at the end of clauses. Corpus data on heavy noun phrase shift, the dative alternation, and particle movement indicate that there are several structural measures of weight highly correlated with constituent ordering. (38 references) (Author/CK)

Presents the results of a study that explored the management of subject-verb agreement in second -to seventh-grade children studying the French language. Examined whether agreement with imperfect tense may have a lesser cost than agreement with the present. Finds that imperfect tense is acquired more rapidly than present tense. (CMK)

We examine how attention to animacy information may contribute to children's developing knowledge of language. This research extends beyond prior research in that children were shown dynamic events with novel entities, and were asked not only to comprehend sentences but to use sentence structure to infer the meaning of a new word. In a 4 x 3…

In this analysis of cases and clauses in Vietnamese, an attempt is made to make use of tagmemics and a case grammar model called lexicase. Such an eclectic combination of the two theories is not new either in the field of general linguistics or in Vietnamese. This paper recognizes the hierarchical levels in syntax and the grammatical unit or…