This study investigates the interpretation of object-initial sentences in German-speaking children. We addressed the following questions: (1) Which morphosyntactic cues do children deploy to process object-initial sentences? (2) Which executive function (EF) abilities support them during this task? This study examined the effect of case and number…

The current research investigates interactions between lexical and structural processing in the construction and interpretation of transitive and dative sentence structures, and relates speakers' choice of structure in sentence production to STM processes and recent/long-term language experience conditioned on lexical information. Study 1…

We investigated age-related differences in syntactic comprehension in young and older adults. Most previous research found no evidence of age-related decline in syntactic processing. We investigated elementary syntactic comprehension of minimal sentences (e.g., I cook), minimizing the influence of working memory. We also investigated the…

Purpose: Expressive syntax is a particular area of difficulty for individuals with Down syndrome (DS). In order to better understand the basis for sentence formulation deficits often observed in children and adults with DS, the authors explored the use and comprehension of verbs differing in argument structure. Method: The authors examined verb…

This study investigated the relationship between syntactic comprehension at the sentence level and text-level comprehension. The study isolated the specific contribution of syntax by asking whether sentence comprehension efficiency of difficult syntactic constructions explained variance in text comprehension after controlling for sentence…

Eye tracking was used to investigate how younger and older (60 or more years) adults use syntactic and semantic information to disambiguate noun/verb (NV) homographs (e.g., "park"). In event-related potential (ERP) work using the same materials, Lee and Federmeier (2009, 2011) found that young adults elicited a sustained frontal…

This paper reports the results of a dual-task experiment which investigates the nature of working memory resources used in sentence comprehension. Participants read sentences of varying syntactic complexity (containing subject-and object-extracted relative clauses) while remembering one or three nouns (similar to or dissimilar from the…