Purpose: To investigate children's performance on a fast mapping task. Possible effects across age, dialect group, and clinical status were explored. Method: Participants between the ages of 4 and 9 saw a series of pictured events and heard novel verbs. The novel verbs were in intransitive, transitive, dative, and complement syntactic frames or…

This paper explores the interaction of tone and syntax in Rutooro, a Bantu language of Western Uganda. Rutooro has lost its lexical tone but retains a phrasally defined high pitch that appears on the penultimate syllable--the default position in Bantu. This high pitch can work grammatically and in fact distinguishes between the noun phrase vs.…

This paper investigates how readers process number ambiguous noun phrases in subject position. A speeded-grammaticality judgment experiment and two self-paced reading experiments were conducted involving number ambiguous subjects in German verb-end clauses. Number preferences for individual nouns were estimated by means of two questionnaire…

The standard view maintains that quantifier scope interpretation results from an interaction between different modules: the syntax, the semantics as well as the pragmatics. Thus, by examining the mechanism of quantifier scope interpretation, we will certainly gain some insight into how these different modules interact with one another. To observe…

Our sense of space is part of our experiential universals. However, the incorporation of space into words differs across languages. This paper argues that "space" is lexicalized in English but not in Indonesian. English encodes the sense of location and direction into "adverbial particles," producing language-specific…

A multiple-baseline design across subjects was used to investigate the effects of word prediction and text-to-speech alone and in combination on four narrative composition-writing skills (writing fluency, syntax, spelling accuracy, and overall organization) of six fifth-grade Hispanic boys with specific learning disabilities (SLD). Participants…

Research indicates that linguistic input from teachers may affect child vocabulary development in preschool and beyond (Dickinson & Tabors, 2001). Currently, there is little research on the relationship between specific teacher language use in individual interactions on child language outcomes for preschool children at risk for academic delays.…

This study looks at the relationship between L1 (Russian) attrition and L1 reading ability in Russian-English-speaking bilingual children. Ten Russian-English bilingual children and 10 adults participated in this study. Nine out of 10 children participants were born in the US and used L1 as their primary language of interaction within the family,…

Logic has been intertwined with the study of language and meaning since antiquity, and such connections persist in present day research in linguistic theory (formal semantics) and cognitive psychology (e.g., studies of human reasoning). However, few studies in cognitive neuroscience have addressed logical dimensions of sentence-level language…

Aim: The aim of this study was to compare spoken language production in children with permanent childhood hearing impairment (PCHI) whose PCHI was confirmed either early or late. Method: Audio-taped spoken narrative was assessed for syntax, phonology, morphology, and narrative in transcripts from a population-based sample of 89 children (49 males,…

Brief tonal stimuli and spoken sentences were utilized to examine whether adolescents (aged 14;3-18;1) with specific language impairments (SLI) exhibit atypical neural activity for rapid auditory processing of non-linguistic stimuli and linguistic processing of verb-agreement and semantic constraints. Further, we examined whether the behavioral…

Researchers have long debated the mechanisms underlying the learning of syntactic structure. Of significant interest has been the fact that passive constructions appear to be learned earlier in Sesotho than English. This paper provides a comprehensive, quantitative analysis of the passive input Sesotho-speaking children hear, how it differs from…

While L1 transfer and L2 learnability have been studied extensively in the domain of syntax and the syntax/semantics interface, purely semantic phenomena have received little attention in the L2 literature. This paper presents two experiments examining the relative scope assigned to disjunction and negation by English-speaking learners of Japanese…

This article reports the results of a study of potential sources of item nonequivalence between English and Chinese language versions of a cognitive development test for preschool-aged children. Items were flagged for potential nonequivalence through statistical and judgment-based procedures, and the relationship between flag status and item…

This paper addresses the issue of whether negative sentences containing auxiliary "do" in L1 and L2 English share the same underlying syntactic representation. To this end, I compare the negative sentences produced by 77 bilingual (Spanish/Basque) L2 learners of English with the corresponding data available for L1 acquirers reported on in Schutze…