According to the Gricean Maxim of Quantity, speakers provide the amount of information listeners require to correctly interpret an utterance, and no more (Grice in Logic and conversation, 1975). However, speakers do tend to violate the Maxim of Quantity often, especially when the redundant information improves reference precision (Degen et al. in…

The subject at hand of this paper is intransitive prepositions, which E. Klima (1965) defined as prepositions that do not select syntactic objects. This word group comprises those linguistic units which traditional grammar used to consider as bicategorical, sometimes as adverbs, and in other instances as prepositions created through conversion.…

The definition of function varies from textbook to textbook at the introductory level. Though the definitions are often mathematically equivalent, there are linguistic features that may make some definitions more accessible to beginning learners. In particular, students who see functions as actions or processes rather than objects may be better…

Support (one object preventing another from falling) is linguistically encoded by adults and children in a highly structured and differentiated way, with basic locative expressions or Light verbs (e.g., in English, the block is "on/put" on the box) encoding Support-from-Below, and lexical verbs (e.g., she "stuck" the block on…

Establishing dependencies during language comprehension requires access to previously encoded information. In the current study, we investigate the speed and accuracy of processing dependencies containing subject-verb agreement. Three speed-accuracy tradeoff experiments investigate the accessibility of number information across different amounts…

There is extensive evidence that people are sensitive to the statistical patterns of linguistic elements at the phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels. However, much less is known about how people classify referential events and whether they adapt to the most frequent types of references. Reference is particularly complex because referential…

Examination questions need to be sufficiently novel if they are to be effective as measurement instruments. Novelty, however, presupposes creativity, suggesting that question writing is, or should be, a creative process. To explore the boundaries of creativity in question writing, this study made use of two data sources: two corpora of examination…

Background & Aims: Narratives are regularly elicited as part of standardized assessments for autism spectrum conditions (ASC) such as the ADOS, but have rarely been utilized as linguistic data in their own right. We here aimed for a specific and comprehensive quantitative linguistic profile of such narratives across nominal, verbal, and…

Visual manifestations of an object that moves from one place to another are common in sign languages. Here, we offer an overview of techniques for conveying motion of an entity based on an examination of storytelling and poetry in seven sign languages. The signer can use embodiment and/or classifiers to show translocating movement of an object, or…

Background: Narrative discourse is central to effective participation in conversations. When discourse is assessed in people with communication disability, structured tasks (e.g., picture descriptions) provide experimental control, while unstructured tasks (e.g., personal narratives) represent more natural communication. Immersive virtual reality…

In Spanish, the plural form in plural dominant frequency pairs, like "diente/dientes" [tooth/teeth], occurs more frequently than the corresponding singular form. On the other hand, for the singular dominant frequency pairs such as "cometa/cometas" [kite/kites], the singular form is more common than the plural. The recognition…

Previous masked translation priming studies, especially those with different-script bilinguals, have shown that cognates provide more priming than noncognates, a difference attributed to cognates' phonological similarity. In our experiments employing a word naming task, we examined this issue for Chinese-Japanese bilinguals in a slightly different…

As written language contains more complex syntax than spoken language, exposure to written language provides opportunities for children to experience language input different from everyday speech. We investigated the distribution and nature of relative clauses in three large developmental corpora: one of child-directed speech (targeted at…

The acquisition of quantifiers is a central topic in cognitive science. The present study investigated the emergence, frequency, and non-target-like production of the universal quantifiers "all," "every," and "each" in child English from a linguistic perspective, based on the data from longitudinal naturalistic…

Language forecasting, i.e., predicting the future state of a language, has long been regarded with a fair amount of skepticism. This is partly due to language change often being considered sudden, random, unpredictable, and viewed as the result of complex interacting factors that are not well understood (e.g., Keller 1994:72; Bauer 1994:25; Labov…