Level ordering has proven inadequate as a morphological theory, leaving unexplained the experimental results taken to support it as a component of innate grammar-young children's acceptance of irregular plurals in English compounds. The present study demonstrates that these results can be explained by slower access to the grammatically preferred…

In the present study we have investigated the acquisition of the past participle of Italian verbs of the second (including mostly irregular verbs) and third (including mostly regular verbs) conjugations in school age children, and with simulations with an artificial neural network. We aimed to verify the extent to which children are sensitive to…

The experiment reported here investigated the sensitivity of concreteness effects to orthographic neighborhood density and frequency in the visual lexical decision task. The concreteness effect was replicated with a sample of concrete and abstract words that were not matched for orthographic neighborhood features and in which concrete words turned…

Three experiments investigated whether the similarity of relational structures influences the interpretation of spatial representations. Adults were shown diagrams of hand gestures paired with simple statements and asked to judge the meaning of new gestures. In Experiment 1 the gestures were paired with active declarative statements. In Experiment…

In order to investigate whether addressees can make immediate use of speaker-based constraints during reference resolution, participant addressees' eye movements were monitored as they helped a confederate cook follow a recipe. Objects were located in the helper's area, which the cook could not reach, and the cook's area, which both could reach.…

I show how a conversational process that takes simple, intuitively meaningful steps may be understood as a sophisticated computation that derives the richly detailed, complex representations implicit in our knowledge of language. To develop the account, I argue that natural language is structured in a way that lets us formalize grammatical…

Emerging evidence suggests that a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in childhood may disrupt the ability to abstract the central meaning or gist-based memory from connected language (discourse). The current study adopts a novel approach to elucidate the role of immediate and working memory processes in producing a cohesive and coherent gist-based text…

An eye movement study of temporarily ambiguous closure sentences confirmed that the early closure penalty in a sentence like "While John hunted the frightened deer escaped" is larger for a simple past verb ("hunted") than for a past progressive verb ("was hunting"). The results can be explained by the observation that simple past tense verbs…

In this longitudinal study, quantitative and qualitative changes in responses of people with aphasia were examined on a phonemic fluency task. Eighteen patients were tested at 3-month intervals on the letters F-A-S while they received comprehensive, intensive treatment from 3 to 12 months post-stroke. They returned for a follow-up evaluation at an…

Chinese inflection differs from that of European languages in that it is fully parsable in the orthography, which raises the possibility that Chinese inflected forms may not show the surface frequency effects found in other languages. Five lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine this issue. They showed that surface frequency did…

In a recent "Cognition" paper ("Cognition" 85 (2002) B21), Bornkessel, Schlesewsky, and Friederici report ERP data that they claim "show that online processing difficulties induced by word order variations in German cannot be attributed to the relative infrequency of the constructions in question, but rather appear to reflect the application of…

Research on language comprehension has focused on the resolution of syntactic ambiguities, and most studies have employed garden-path sentences to determine the system's preferences and to assess its use of nonsyntactic sources information. A topic that has been neglected is how syntactically challenging but essentially unambiguous sentences are…

The aim of this study was to determine whether Hebrew readers reference phonological information for the silent processing of unpointed Hebrew nouns. A research paradigm in which participants were required to perform consecutive same/different judgments regarding the identicalness of members of stimulus pairs was used for answering this question.…

Meaning activation was estimated during (standard naming) and after (delayed naming) target presentation to chart the time course of priming effects during reading comprehension. Using sentences biasing homographs toward their dominant and subordinate meanings, two experiments evaluated context effects across three naming-cue delays: immediate,…

The simultaneous presence in a learner's grammar of two features that should be mutually exclusive (optionality) typifies second language acquisition. But generative approaches have no good means of accommodating the phenomenon. The paper proposes one approach, based on Truscott and Sharwood Smith's (2004) MOGUL framework. In this framework,…