It remains an open question whether second language (L2) learners can process linguistic properties at the syntax-discourse interface. This study examines this issue in the context of the L2 processing of Korean dative sentences under different information structure requirements. Given that discourse constraints associated with information…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine the effects of code-switching on bilingual children's online processing and offline comprehension of sentences in the presence of noise. In addition, the study examined individual differences in language ability and cognitive control skills as moderators of children's ability to process…

Short term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) performance consistently predict language abilities in children with developmental language disorders. However, causality is not fully established. Moreover, evidence from the fine-grained analysis of STM/WM tasks and comprehension of complex sentences, suggests that long term memory (LTM)…

Purpose: General language abilities of children with cochlear implants have been thoroughly investigated, especially at young ages, but far less is known about how well they process language in real-world settings, especially in higher grades. This study addressed this gap in knowledge by examining recognition of sentences with complex syntactic…

Linguistic contexts provide useful information about verb meanings by narrowing the space of candidate concepts. Intuitively, the more information, the better. For example, "the tall girl is 'fezzing,'" as compared to "the girl is fezzing," provides more information about which event, out of multiple candidate events, is being…

This study investigated the processes reflected in the widely observed N400 and P600 event-related potential (ERP) effects and tested the hypothesis that the N400 and P600 effects are functionally linked in a tradeoff relationship, constrained in part by individual differences in cognitive ability. Sixty participants read sentences, and ERP…

The authors assessed 4,865 middle and high school students for the ability to recognize and understand written and spoken morphologically simple words, morphologically complex words, and the syntactic structure of sentences and for the ability to answer questions about facts presented in a written passage and to make inferences based on those…

Sentence repetition tasks are widely used in the diagnosis and assessment of children with language difficulties. This paper seeks to clarify the nature of sentence repetition tasks and their relationship to other language skills. We present the results from a 2-year longitudinal study of 216 children. Children were assessed on measures of…

Evidentiality in language marks how information contained in a sentence was acquired. For instance, Turkish has two past-tense morphemes that mark whether access to information was direct (typically, perception) or indirect (hearsay/inference). Full acquisition of evidential systems appears to be a late achievement cross-linguistically. Currently,…

Extensive knowledge of collocations is a key factor that distinguishes learners from fluent native speakers. Such knowledge is difficult to acquire simply because there is so much of it. This paper describes a system that exploits the facilities offered by digital libraries to provide a rich collocation-learning environment. The design is based on…

Background: Children with poor language abilities tend to perform poorly on verbal working memory tasks. This result has been interpreted as evidence that limitations in working memory capacity may interfere with the development of a mature linguistic system. However, it is possible that language abilities, such as the efficiency of sentence…

Purpose: This study explores the hypothesis that vocabulary growth can have 2 types of effects in morphosyntactic development. One is a general effect, where vocabulary growth globally determines utterance complexity, defined in terms of sentence length and rates of subordination. There are also specific effects, where vocabulary size has a…

Several studies have demonstrated that people with ASD and intact language skills still have problems processing linguistic information in context. Given this evidence for reduced sensitivity to linguistic context, the question arises how contextual information is actually processed by people with ASD. In this study, we used event-related brain…

It is widely argued that people with autism have difficulty processing ambiguous linguistic information in context. To investigate this claim, we recorded the eye-movements of 24 adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and 24 language-matched peers as they monitored spoken sentences for words corresponding to objects on a computer display.…

Difficulties with pragmatic aspects of communication are universal across individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Here we focused on an aspect of pragmatic language comprehension that is relevant to social interaction in daily life: the integration of speaker characteristics inferred from the voice with the content of a message. Using…