Idioms entail a competition between bottom-up and top-down activations of literal and figurative meanings. The present study explored the involvement of cognitive control in processing Hebrew ambiguous idioms. Fifty subjects have completed a self-paced reading task and a response inhibition, stop-signal task (SST). Subjects read 26 matched pairs…

This study assessed the effect of adjectives and noun premodifiers on L2 noun phrase comprehension and error types among English Language Learners. We also examined the correlation between L2 noun phrase comprehension and L2 reading comprehension, as well as the contribution of L2 noun phrase comprehension to L2 reading comprehension. One hundred…

Reading efficiently in a second language (L2) is a crucial skill, but it is not universally achieved. Here we ask whether L2 reading efficiency is better captured as a language specific skill or whether it is mostly shared across L1 and L2, relying on general language abilities. To this end, we examined word frequency and predictability effects in…

Reports results of a longitudinal study testing the acquisition of restrictions of the use of pronouns in children, first as 9 year olds and later as 11 year olds. (AM)

Research supported by a U.S. Public Health Service Research Grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. (DD)

In clauses with future meaning in Biblical Hebrew, there are consistent functional differences between clauses with verb-initial word order and clauses with non-verb-initial word order. Verb-initial clauses are associated with future events involving cooperation between the speaker, listener, and God. (16 references) (Author/LB)

The first part of this paper provides a description and discussion of the major aspects of the process of relativization in Israeli Hebrew: (a) the use of a subordinating relative particle which in most cases can neither be deleted nor replaced and which is prefixed to the first constituent of the embedded S; (b) the obligatory pronominalization…

The distribution of a small number of syntactic structures in the speech output of 102 Israeli preschoolers was examined. Findings are reported on the proportion of grammatically analyzable clauses, the patterning of word order in Hebrew child language, and the emergence of syntactic connectedness through coordination and subordination of clauses.…

Research on the grammatical cues that guide comprehension of a language and that children are most sensitive to, particularly in Hebrew, is reviewed as an introduction to the first phase of a study conducted with 20 native Hebrew-speaking children aged 4 to 9 in southern California and a group of adults to provide comparative data. The study…

These papers deal with a variety of topics bearing on modality in a variety of languages and language families. While all languages have ways of expressing modality, that is, such notions as possibility, necessity, and contingency, this phenomenon has been the object of little systematic linguistic analysis. These papers are presented with the…

Monolingual Hebrew-speaking subjects aged 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 11 years, as well as college students, were asked to interpret utterances consisting of two nouns and a verb in order to determine whether Hebrew speakers can rely on a word order strategy to assign sentence relation. (MP)

Identified the acoustic features of the vowels produced by Hebrew speakers differing in age and sex. Ninety speakers were recorded. Vowels were presented in a nonword context that was placed in a meaningful Hebrew sentence. Results are discussed. (Author/VWL)

The ability of the computer to generate output not included in the input may be used for linguistic as well as for computational input. The ability to accept linguistic data and process it according to a certain program seems to be a promising field for investigation. Progress in this field may strengthen the assumption that the computer can be…

The final part of a four-part report of research on the development of a computerized, phrase-structure grammar of modern Hebrew describes the computerized algorithm for analyzing the sentences generated based on a complex-constituent-phrase structure grammar. The first section here discusses a structural model for modern Hebrew; the second…