Scanpaths have played an important role in classic research on reading behavior. Nevertheless, they have largely been neglected in later research perhaps due to a lack of suitable analytical tools. Recently, von der Malsburg and Vasishth (2011) proposed a new measure for quantifying differences between scanpaths and demonstrated that this measure…

Structural priming paradigms have been influential in shaping theories of adult sentence processing and theories of syntactic development. However, until recently there have been few attempts to provide an integrated account that explains both adult and developmental data. The aim of the present paper was to begin the process of integration by…

An auditory sentence comprehension task investigated the extent to which the integration of contextual and structural cues was mediated by verbal memory span with 32 English-speaking six- to eight-year-old children. Spoken relative clause sentences were accompanied by visual context pictures which fully (depicting the actions described within the…

Using an elicited imitation paradigm, we investigated whether young children imitate the communicative intentions behind speech. Previous research using elicited imitation has shown that children tend to correct ungrammatical sentences. This finding is usually interpreted as evidence that children, like adults, remember and reproduce the gist of…

We examined free recall and metacognitive judgments of ambiguous sentences studied with and without clues to facilitate their comprehension. Sentences were either studied without clues, with clues meaningfully embedded, or with clues following a 10-s interval delay. After presentation, subjects made judgments of comprehension (JCOMPs) or judgments…

Clahsen and Felser (CF) analyze the performance of monolingual children and adult second language (L2) learners in off-line and on-line tasks and compare their performance with that of adult monolinguals. They conclude that child first language (L1) processing is basically the same as adult L1 processing (the contiguity assumption), with…

Compared two-month old's abilities to detect changes in word order for sequences spoken as a well-formed sentence versus two unrelated, but well-formed, sentence fragments. Results suggest that infants are able to remember the order of spoken words when they are embedded within the coherent prosodic structure of a single well-formed sentence. (HTH)

In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigate adults' and children's on-line processing of referentially ambiguous English pronouns. Sixteen adults and 16 four-to-seven-year-olds listened to sentences with either an unambiguous reflexive ("himself") or an ambiguous pronoun ("him") and chose a picture with two characters that corresponded to…

Used head-mounted eye-tracking system to study kindergartners' and adults' moment-by-moment language processing ability as they responded to spoken instructions. Found that 5-year-olds did not take into account relevant discourse/pragmatic principles when resolving temporary syntactic ambiguities and showed little/no ability to revise initial…

This paper investigates the development of negative Wh-questions in a four year old subject acquiring English as her L1. Spontaneous and elicited speech samples were collected over a period of 6 months. During the course of the study, the subject began to invert subject and auxiliary, and by the end of the study she was inverting correctly in 38%…

This paper proposes a broad outline of a variable model of language development and explores several particulars of such a model in the language behavior of four two-year-old children. The process by which information about language is progressively transformed and integrated rather than merely being added together can be seen in the shifting…