The double dissociation between noun and verb processing, well documented in the neuropsychological literature, has not been supported in imaging studies. Recent imaging studies, in fact, suggest that once confounding with semantics is eliminated, grammatical class effects only emerge as a consequence of building frames. Here we assess this…

This dissertation uses the generative framework to study the syntax and pragmatics of word order variation in the Andean Spanish of Bolivia and Ecuador. While Standard Spanish has basic order SVO, in Andean Spanish the object frequently appears in preverbal position, resulting in alternative orders (e.g. OVS). Previous studies have attributed this…

This paper discusses the use of a web-based concordancing program using an interface design similar to the one used at the MICASE concordancing site to help students appropriately choose reporting verbs. Appropriate reporting verbs are important for asserting credible claims in academic papers. An interface was created that asked the students to…

Research suggests that characteristics of EFL input cause morphosyntactic features to be acquired in an order dissimilar to that found in ESL contexts. To determine whether acquisition order for Korean learners could be explained by characteristics of their EFL input, a Korean elementary school curriculum was analyzed. Morphosyntactic features…

Despite the increased comprehension of the role of the basal ganglia in cognitive functions such as learning, attention, and executive functions, the exact implication of these structures in language remains unclear. A specific role of basal ganglia in language has been proposed. Nonetheless, a recent hypothesis gives the basal ganglia a…

Hartshorne and Ullman (2006 ) presented naturalistic language data from 25 children (15 boys, 10 girls) and showed that girls produced more past tense overregularization errors than did boys. In particular, girls were more likely to overregularize irregular verbs whose stems share phonological similarities with regular verbs. It was argued that…

Using a preferential looking methodology with novel verbs, Gertner, Fisher and Eisengart (2006 ) found that 21-month-old English children seemed to understand the syntactic marking of transitive word order in an abstract, verb-general way. In the current study we tested whether young German children of this same age have this same understanding.…

The present study examined the general hypothesis that, as for nouns, stable representations of semantic knowledge relative to situations expressed by verbs are available and accessible in long term memory in normal people. Regular associations between verbs and past tenses in French adults allowed to abstract two superordinate semantic features…

Purpose: Previous findings from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) indicate that adults who stutter (AWS) exhibit processing differences for visually presented linguistic information. This study explores how neural activations for AWS may differ for a linguistic task that does not require preparation for overt articulation or engage the…

Dutch speakers with agrammatic Broca's aphasia are known to have problems with the production of finite verbs in main clauses. This performance pattern has been accounted for in terms of the specific syntactic complexity of the Dutch main clause structure, which requires an extra syntactic operation (Verb Second), relative to the basic…

This article investigates the information structure of verb-second (V2) declaratives in Swedish, German, and nonnative German. Even though almost any type of element can occur in the so-called prefield, the clause-initial preverbal position of V2 declaratives, we have found language-specific patterns in native-speaker corpora: The frequencies of…

Although corpora have been used in language teaching for some time, few empirical studies explore their impact on learning outcomes. We provide a microgenetic account of learners' responses to corpus-driven instructional units for German modal particles and pronominal "da"-compounds. The units are based on developmental corpus data produced by…

Previous studies have examined cross-serial and embedded complement clauses in West Germanic in order to distinguish between different types of working memory models of human sentence processing, as well as different formal language models. Here, adult plasticity in the use of these constructions is investigated by examining the response of…

This article examines the acquisition of Korean imperfective markers, the progressive "-ko iss-" and the resultative "-a iss-," with a view to understanding how tense/aspect morphology expands beyond prototype associations with inherent aspects of the verbs. We hypothesized that "-a iss-" will develop later than "-ko iss-," but that the…

Assessing whether domain-general mechanisms could account for language acquisition requires determining whether statistical regularities among surface cues in child directed speech (CDS) are sufficient for inducing deep syntactic and semantic structure. This paper reports a case study on the relation between pronoun usage in CDS, on the one hand,…