In the 1950s, the assessment and management of children with language impairments emphasized their auditory and visual processing deficits and relied heavily on classifications of adult language disorders. Many compelling theoretical insights were offered, but research in language acquisition was in its infancy. It was not until the 1960s and…

It is well known that sentences containing object-extracted relative clauses (e.g., "The reporter that the senator attacked admitted the error") are more difficult to comprehend than sentences containing subject-extracted relative clauses (e.g., "The reporter that attacked the senator admitted the error"). Two major accounts of this phenomenon…

The process of word segmentation is flexible, with many strategies potentially available to learners. This experiment explores how segmentation cues interact, and whether successful resolution of cue competition is related to general executive functioning. Participants listened to artificial speech streams that contained both statistical and…

This study examines L1-L2 interaction in semantic categorization in early and late L2 learners. Word categories that overlapped but were not identical in Arabic and English were tested. Words always showed a "wider" range of application in one language, "narrower" in the other. Three types of categories--"classical", "radial", and…

Statistical learning mechanisms play an important role in theories of language acquisition and processing. Recurrent neural network models have provided important insights into how these mechanisms might operate. We examined whether such networks capture two key findings in human statistical learning. In Simulation 1, a simple recurrent network…

This article offers a DE SE THEORY of person indexicals, wherein first- and second-person indexical pronouns indicate REFERENCE DE SE (also called SELF-ASCRIPTION). Long observed for first-person pronouns (Castaneda 1977, Kaplan 1977, Perry 1979, inter alia), self-ascription is extended here to second person as well. The person feature of a…

Event-related brain potentials were recorded during RSVP reading to test the hypothesis that quantifier expressions are incrementally interpreted fully and immediately. In sentences tapping general knowledge ("Farmers grow crops/worms as their primary source of income"), Experiment 1 found larger N400s for atypical ("worms") than typical objects…

Nine early non-demented bilingual (L1--Friulian, L2--Italian) patients with Parkinson's disease and nine normal controls matched for age, sex and years of education were studied on a spontaneous language production task. All subjects had acquired L1 from birth in a home environment and L2 at the age of six at school formally. Patients with PD…

Purpose: Delayed auditory feedback is a technique that can improve fluency in stutterers, while disrupting fluency in many nonstuttering individuals. The aim of this study was to determine the neural basis for the detection of and compensation for such a delay, and the effects of increases in the delay duration. Method: Positron emission…

Previous research indicates severe disabilities in processing figurative language in people diagnosed on the autism spectrum disorders. However, this aspect of language comprehension in Asperger syndrome (AS) specifically has rarely been the subject of formal study. The present study aimed to examine the possibility that in addition to their…

We used eyetracking to examine how tonal versus segmental information influence spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese. Participants heard an auditory word and were required to identify its corresponding picture from an array that included the target item ("chuang2" "bed"), a phonological competitor (segmental: chuang1 "window"; cohort:…

In her Keynote Article, Paradis reviews evidence from bilingual language development to assess the claims of two opposing theoretical views of language disorders. Specifically, she examines the evidence for similarities in language profiles of typically developing (TD) sequential bilingual (second language [L2]) children and monolingual children…

In the Keynote Article, "The Interface Between Bilingual Development and Specific Language Impairment," Johanne Paradis considers issues and evidence at the intersection of children learning two languages and primary or specific language impairment (SLI). The review focuses on morphosyntactic evidence and the fit of this evidence with maturational…

How does prior context influence lexical and discourse-level processing during real-time language comprehension? Experiment 1 examined whether the referential ambiguity introduced by a repeated, anaphoric expression had an immediate or delayed effect on lexical and discourse processing, using an eye-tracking-while-reading task. Eye movements…

In some theories of sentence comprehension, linguistically relevant lexical knowledge, such as selectional restrictions, is privileged in terms of the time-course of its access and influence. We examined whether event knowledge computed by combining multiple concepts can rapidly influence language understanding even in the absence of selectional…