Using a habituation paradigm with a three-switch design, the present study investigated whether 20-month-old French-learning infants use noun and verb morphosyntactic cues to learn novel words in dynamic events differentially when both the agent and the action interpretations are possible. Of particular interest was whether infants' initial…

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…

It is a common finding across languages that young children have problems in understanding patient-initial sentences. We used Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a reliable voice-marking system and highly frequent patient voice constructions, to test the predictions of several accounts that have been proposed to explain this difficulty: the…

The present study investigated whether the recognition of spoken words is influenced by how predictable they are given their syntactic context and whether listeners assign more weight to syntactic predictability when acoustic-phonetic information is less reliable. Syntactic predictability was manipulated by varying the word order of past…

Previous research has found that the single argument of unaccusative verbs (such as "fall") is reactivated during sentence processing, but the argument of agentive verbs (such as "jump") is not ( and ). An open question so far was whether this difference in processing is caused by a difference in thematic roles the verbs assign, or a difference in…

Allen [Allen, M. D. (2005). The preservation of verb subcategory knowledge in a spoken language comprehension deficit. "Brain and Language, "95, 255-264] presents evidence from a single patient, WBN, to motivate a theory of lexical processing and representation in which syntactic information may be encoded and retrieved independently of semantic…

Two visual-world eye-movement experiments investigated the nature of syntactic priming during comprehension--specifically, whether the priming effects in ditransitive prepositional object (PO) and double object (DO) structures (e.g., "The wizard will send the poison to the prince/the prince the poison") are due to anticipation of structural…

An experiment was undertaken with young children to look at the relative contribution of discourse constraints, subject anaphors, and the semantics of verbs to the integration of an utterance into its discourse representation. Children aged 5, 7, and 10 years heard a series of short stories, each consisting of three sentences and an incomplete…

Two striking contrasts currently exist in the sentence processing literature. First, whereas adult readers rely heavily on lexical information in the generation of syntactic alternatives, adult listeners in world-situated eye-gaze studies appear to allow referential evidence to override strong countervailing lexical biases (Tanenhaus,…

Cites errors commonly made in German by foreigners. (DS)

The monograph contains two papers. The first presents a generative grammar for verbal forms in French. It consists of an ordered set of rewrite rules and a set of tables. It generates all existing verbal forms without generating any non-existing ones. The departure from an ordinary generative grammar lies in the use of a tabular form for…

Human beings who have been forced to acquire language through non-auditory modalities characteristically display an impoverished syntactic system. I.M. Schlessinger (1970) has shown, for example, that users of sign language have difficulty in communicating syntactic relations such as "subject of main verb,""object of the verb," and "indirect…

Three empirical studies were conducted to investigate the hypothesis that the "easy to see" construction (such as in the sentence "children are hard to understand") is acquired at a younger age than the 7-9 year range reported by previous studies (Cambon and Sinclair, 1974; Chomsky, 1969; 1972; Cromer, 1970; Kessel, 1970).…

Presents a replication of experiments which found that input practice is better than output practice for comprehension skills, and no worse than output practice for production skills in a second language (Spanish). Findings reveal that these patterns are obscured when the testing time and the morphosyntactic nature of the structure in question…