Given that both spoken and written language are subject to corruption from speech errors, disfluencies, and environmental noise, successful language comprehension sometimes requires deriving a non-veridical understanding of the linguistic input. Recent work has demonstrated that these non-veridical understandings are not merely semantic, but that,…

Linguistic phenomena (e.g., words and syntactic structure) co-occur with a wide variety of meanings. These systematic correlations can help readers to interpret a text and create predictions about upcoming material. However, to what extent these correlations influence discourse processing is still unknown. We address this question by examining…

The study investigates whether comprehension of derived words in text context requires a complete understanding of word parts. It explores comprehension of derived words as a function of learner proficiency and contextual clues. Ninety English-as-a-foreign-language learners at three proficiency levels participated in three successive tests…

All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children's knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focusing on the passive, whether children's and adults' performance is additionally semantically constrained,…

The mechanisms underlying native (L1) and non-native (L2) sentence processing have been widely debated. One account of potential L1/L2 differences is that L2 sentence processing underuses syntactic information and relies heavily on semantic and surface cues. Recently, an alternative account has been proposed, which argues that the source of L1/L2…

Background and aims: Previous studies suggest that syntactic development in children with intellectual disabilities (ID) is positively correlated with verbal short-term memory (VSTM). This study investigated the characteristics of syntactic development and their relationships of VSTM in children with ID based on type. Methods: The participants…

Purpose: This study investigated the auditory comprehension of Japanese sentences including relative clauses (RCs) by 52 Japanese-speaking children with typical development (TD) and 16 children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: A picture-pointing task measured RC and main clause (MC) comprehension for object and subject relatives in…

Most current models of sentence comprehension assume that the human parsing mechanism (HPM) algorithmically computes detailed syntactic representations as basis for extracting sentence meaning. These models share the assumption that the representations computed by the HPM accurately reflect the linguistic input. This assumption has been challenged…

To explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization (e.g., "*£5 was cost by the book"), Pinker (1989) proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is…

Purpose: The purpose of this meta-analysis was to investigate the effects of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) interventions that included aided AAC input (e.g., aided AAC modeling, aided language modeling, aided language stimulation, augmented input) on communicative outcomes (both comprehension and expression) for individuals with…

This study investigated the contribution of linguistic comprehension to the decoding skills of struggling readers. Participants were 36 children aged between eight and 12 years, all below average in decoding but differing in linguistic comprehension. The children read passages from the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability and their first 25 miscues…

This dissertation investigates the contextual factors that affect the understanding and interpretation of one Japanese topicalized construction, NP[subscript 1] wa NP[subscript 2] da sentences, by native speakers of Japanese. The construction allows two possibilities in the relation between the NP[subscript 1] and the NP[subscript 2]. When the two…

We report three experiments investigating how people process anomalous sentences, in particular those in which the anomaly is associated with the verb. We contrast two accounts for the processing of such anomalous sentences: a syntactic account, in which the representations constructed for anomalous sentences are similar in nature to the ones…

In recent decades, a growing number of children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition characterized by social interaction deficits and language impairment. Yet the precise nature of the disorder's impact on language development is not well understood, in part because of the language variability among children across…

Whereas most previous studies on emotion in language have focussed on single words, we investigated the influence of the emotional valence of a word on the syntactic and semantic processes unfolding during sentence comprehension, by means of event-related brain potentials (ERP). Experiment 1 assessed how positive, negative, and neutral adjectives…