The training procedure entailed presenting exemplars which expressed arbitrarily or logically sequenced events in alternating order so that discrepancies in interpretations might be detected and corrected by the preschool child. The procedure was effective. Results gave evidence of the use of interpretational strategies during acquisition. (RH)

Proposes a new view of count nouns and mass nouns in which the use of count-mass syntax is often systematically related to a conceptual distinction in the minds of speakers. Provides preliminary evidence suggesting other reasons for count-mass syntax use that are not predicted by the cognitive individuation hypothesis. (Author/VWL)

Reconsiders development and licensing of agreement as a syntactic projection and argues for a productive developmental relation between agreement and the category of focus. Suggests that focus projections are initially selected by a variety of functional heads with real semantic content, then, over time decays into a simple concord shell. Upon…

Investigates syntactic and prosodic features of speakers' speech at points where turn-taking and backchannels occur, focusing on an analysis of Japanese spontaneous dialogs. The study shows that in both turn-taking and backchannels, some instances of syntactic features make extremely strong contributions, and syntax has a stronger contribution…

Explores the theme of topicality, focusing on two books that contribute to the understanding of possessive construction and grammar.(Author/VWL)

Shows that in advanced information-retrieval applications capabilities for data aggregation, transitive computation and non-first normal-form relational computation are often necessary at the same time. Topics include complex objects; advanced data models; query languages; query formulation; knowledge representation; and query-language syntax.…

Studied the extent to which optional word mention was influenced by mechanisms that lead to more efficient word production or to utterances that are more easily understood. Results of 6 experiments involving 320 college students suggest that speakers choose syntactic structures to permit early mention of available material and not to circumvent…

Highlights the costly losses that scholars may incur in discussing questions of language evolution outside the framework of a shared, well-articulated linguistic ontology. (Author/VWL)

Little is known about language development in school-age children in Asian countries. This research reports on 3 measures of language development in 100 Cantonese-speaking children age 5 to 9 years. Word scores, structure scores, and the mean length of communication units (MLCU) were derived from a story-retelling task. The structure score was…

The spontaneous language sample forms an important part of the language evaluation protocol (M. Dunn, J. Flax, M. Sliwinski, & D. Aram, 1996; J. L. Evans & H. K. Craig, 1992; L. E. Evans & J. Miller, 1999) because of the limitations of standardized language tests and their unavailability in certain languages, such as Afrikaans. This study examined…

Discourse comprehension theories frequently assume that discourse comprehension involves a complete analysis of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse levels of processing. However, discourse psychologists have documented some conditions when a partial processing and underspecification of the resulting representations occurs. The articles in…

Overtensing (the use of an inflected form in place of a nonfinite form, e.g. *"didn't broke" for target "didn't break") is common in early syntax. In a ChiLDES-based study of 36 children acquiring English, I examine the effects of phonological and lexical factors. For irregulars, errors are more common with verbs of low frequency and when…

We investigated the relationship between the acquisition of singular-plural morpho-syntax and children's representation of the distinction between singular and plural sets. Experiment 1 tested 18-month-olds using the manual-search paradigm and found that, like 14-month-olds (Feigenson & Carey, 2005), they distinguished three objects from one but…

This article reports on some of the findings of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project that looks at the mark-making of children under three years old. The data were all collected in the children's homes, and multimodal transcription and analyses were used. The project focused on an investigation of the principles that…

Participant's eye-movements were recorded while they read locally ambiguous sentences. Evidence for processing difficulty was found when the interpretation of the initially preferred misanalysis clashed with that of the globally correct analysis, demonstrating the persistence of the earlier interpretation. Processing difficulty associated with the…