We investigated toddlers' understanding of the hierarchical syntactic configurations that constrain the referential meanings of reflexives and pronouns. In particular, reflexives must co-refer with the c-commanding antecedent within the local domain (Principle A) (e.g., He[subscript i] washes himself[subscript i]. John[subscript i] knows that…

Verb-object idioms such as "kick the bucket" are very common in Spanish. This research set out to find what systematic differences exist between the literal and idiomatic interpretations of idioms of this kind from three different experimental perspectives: production, perception, and acceptability judgments focused on verbal aspect.…

The present study investigated the second language processing of grammatical mood in Spanish. Eye-movement data from a group of advanced proficiency second language users revealed nativelike processing with irregular verb stimuli but not with regular verb stimuli. A comparison group of native speakers showed the expected effect with both types of…

Purpose: The results of automatic machine scoring of the Index of Productive Syntax from the Computerized Language ANalysis (CLAN) tools of the Child Language Data Exchange System of TalkBank (MacWhinney, 2000) were compared to manual scoring to determine the accuracy of the machine-scored method. Method: Twenty transcripts of 10 children from…

This study examines the learning patterns of intermediate and advanced Korean learners in the acquisition of causative expressions according to their proficiency and the causative sentence type. We measured their grammatical knowledge using three types of grammaticality judgment tasks (GJTs) and self-paced reading tasks (SPRTs) differing in time…

In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds' real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to "SVO" or "OVS" sentences containing active…

The current study explores the effects of processing demands and proficiency on second language (L2) learners' acceptability judgment of wh-island sentences. A total of 65 adult Korean learners of English and ten native speakers (NSs) of English participated in an experiment that combined self-paced reading and acceptability judgment. They were…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to compare the outcomes of the manually coded Northwestern Narrative Language Analysis (NNLA) system, which was developed for characterizing agrammatic production patterns, and the automated Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN) system, which has recently been adopted to analyze speech samples of individuals…

The present study examines the production and intuition of Spanish clitics in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) structures among 26 Spanish heritage speakers (HSs) born and raised in Brazil. We tested clitic production and intuition in contexts in which Spanish clitics vary as a function of the semantic features of the object that they refer to.…

Two experiments tracked the encoding of relational information (actions at the level of the prelinguistic message and verbs at the level of the sentence) during formulation of transitive event descriptions (e.g., The tiger is scratching the photographer). At what point during message and sentence formulation do speakers encode actions and verbs?…

Recent research on the effects of processing instruction (PI) have incorporated online research methods in order to demonstrate that PI has effects on cognitive processing behaviors as well as on accuracy (e.g. Lee & Doherty, 2019a). The present study uses self-paced reading and a moving windows technique to examine the effects of PI on second…

The constructionist approach holds that an argument structure construction, a conventionalized form-meaning correspondence of a sentence, allows language users to efficiently access sentential information. This study investigated whether increased sensitivity to constructional information would enable second language learners to efficiently fuse…

It has been proposed that children differ from adults in that children license a conjunctive inference to disjunctive sentences that lack any licensing expression. The proposal is that children infer "A and B" from sentences of the form "A or B." Although children's conjunctive interpretations of disjunction have been reported…

Italian relative clauses like "Il bambino che bacia la mamma" 'the child that kisses the mom' are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigating the role of semantic…

Purpose: This study examines the contribution of number morphology to language comprehension abilities among children with specific language impairment (SLI) and age-matched controls. It addresses the question of whether number agreement facilitates the comprehension accuracy of object-initial declarative sentences. According to the predictions of…