Grammatical description of the sentence generation for the particular language is usually split into special morphological and Syntactical modules applied autonomously: the variance of morphological forms posed into the enumeration of constructional augmentations produces the enormous list of possible expositions of structural complexity paying no…

The effects of syntactic and information structures on sentence processing load were investigated using two reading comprehension experiments in Japanese, a head-final SOV language. In the first experiment, we discovered the main effects of syntactic and information structures, as well as their interaction, showing that interaction of these two…

Since the inception of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993), there have been two notable, but preliminary, analyses of Spanish gender and word class within this framework: Harris (1999) and Kramer (2015). This dissertation fills in the gaps left by these partial analyses for nominals in particular. It presents a novel word class…

Previous developmental studies of conjunction have focused on the syntax of phrasal and sentential coordination (Lust, 1977; de Villiers, Tager-Flusberg & Hakuta, 1977; Bloom, Lahey, Hood, Lifter & Fiess, 1980, among others). The present study examined the flexibility of children's interpretation of conjunction. Specifically, when two…

Previous research on young children's knowledge of prosodic focus marking has revealed an apparent paradox, with comprehension appearing to lag behind production. Comprehension of prosodic focus is difficult to study experimentally due to its subtle and ambiguous contribution to pragmatic meaning. We designed a novel comprehension task, which…

The presentation of the cyber language as one of the variations of the language includes a discussion on its nature as an intermediate form between oral language and written language and the forces responsible for the linguistic changes. On the one hand, we have the popular usage that has given rise to the constant evolution of the language and,…

Theoretically speaking, semantic minimalism and semantic maximalism are two current dominant assumptions on the nature of meaning in the linguistic communication. The former lays more emphasis on the syntactic basis of sentence meaning, while the latter stresses much over the pragmatic properties of utterance meaning. This paper, grounded on the…

We argue that coherence relations (relations between propositions, such as "Concession" or "Purpose") are signalled more frequently and by more means than is generally believed. We examine how coherence relations in text are indicated by all possible textual signals, and whether every relation is signalled. To that end, we…

Writing native-like has always been a primary purpose for non-native writers of English and, accordingly, many language components have been investigated to develop writers' fluency. One of these language components is syntactic complexity (SC), which is often regarded as a reliable way to grade any texts from easy to difficult. This study aims to…

Among other things, learning to write entails learning how to use complex sentences effectively in discourse. Some research has therefore focused on relating measures of syntactic complexity to text quality. Apart from the fact that the existing research on this topic appears inconclusive, most of it has been conducted in English L1 contexts. This…

Working memory is necessary for a wide variety of cognitive abilities. Developmental work has shown that as working memory capacities increase, so does the ability to successfully perform other cognitive tasks, including language processing. The present work demonstrates the effects of working memory availability on children's language production.…

Preschoolers' earliest productions of sentential complement sentences have matrix clauses that are limited in form. Diessel proposed that matrix clauses in these early productions are propositionally empty fixed phrases that lack semantic and syntactic integration with the clausal complement. By 4 years of age, however, preschoolers produce…

Purpose: The nature of the relationship between memory and sentence comprehension in school-age children with developmental language disorder (DLD) has been unclear. We present a novel perspective that highlights the relational influences of fluid intelligence, controlled attention, working memory (WM), and long-term memory (LTM) on sentence…

Languages exhibit variation at all linguistic levels, from phonology, to the lexicon, to syntax. Importantly, that variation tends to be (at least partially) conditioned on some aspect of the social or linguistic context. When variation is unconditioned, language learners regularize it -- removing some or all variants, or conditioning variant use…

Background: Late secondary-level students (those in their final 2 years of secondary school) preparing for the demands of university and careers increasingly face texts written in academic language. Unfortunately, few intervention studies show how instruction can improve their reading achievement. Methods: The 152 student participants (16-17 years…