Microelectrode recordings of human sensori-motor subthalamic neuronal activity during spoken sentence and syllable-repetition tasks provided an opportunity to evaluate the relationship between changes in neuronal activities and specific aspects of these vocal behaviors. Observed patterns of neuronal activity included a build up of activity in…

Children classified as hyperlexic learn to read words spontaneously before age five, are impaired in both reading and listening comprehension, and exhibit word recognition skills above their linguistic and cognitive abilities. Despite their strong word recognition skills, previous studies have shown that the phonemic awareness skills of hyperlexic…

In Study 1, English-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds heard a novel adjective used to label one of two objects and were asked for the referent of a different novel adjective. Children were more likely to select the unlabeled object if the two adjectives appeared prenominally (e.g., "a very DAXY dog") than as predicates (e.g., "a dog that is very DAXY").…

In academic writing, non-native speakers tend to misuse the phrase "on the contrary", confusing it with "on the other hand". Sources of guidance to usage in English almost invariably describe it as a phrase of contrast or contradiction. This may apply to how the phrase is normally used in dialogue, but an analysis of the phrase as usually…

In the current debate about the abstractness of children's early grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have suggested that children might first develop "weak" or "partial" representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts to characterize these structures by comparing the development of constructions around…

Many studies have observed phonetic and phonological differences between function words and content words. However, as many of the most commonly cited function words are also very high in frequency, it is unclear whether these differences are the result of syntactic category or word frequency. This study attempts to determine whether syntactically…

Two experiments showed that French native speakers rely on sublexical and lexical cues to allocate gender during word recognition. Sublexical cues were based on whether the word ending was typical for a particular gender rather than neutral with regard to gender. Lexical cues were based on whether the associated definite article was informative…

Using Korean, we investigated how syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors influence the representation of a sentence, in particular, the relative accessibility of different components of a sentence representation. In six experiments, participants performed a probe recognition task after reading each of a series of sentences. We manipulated the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the character identification strategies of Chinese children during their oral reading of a continuous text. Eighteen second graders' oral reading of a story, as well as an interview about their decoding strategies, were audiotaped and transcribed. The results generally converged with those of previous oral…

This article addresses the debate on the causes of variability in production of second language functional morphology. It reports a study on article production by first language (L1) Serbian/second language (L2) English learners and compares their behaviour to that of a Turkish learner of English, reported in Goad and White (2004). In particular,…

This paper stresses the concept of deaf students as visual learners. Educators are urged to think visually in order to help maximize opportunities for deaf students to use their visual learning skills in developing literacy skills, and in their general academic, social, and personal development. Examples are offered of structural/grammatical…

Children, ages 5 to 8 years (n=71), were required to listen and detect errors out of a partly wrong sequence of tape-recorded French number words from 1 to 100. Children (from several schools near Montpellier, France) were from preschool, grade 1, and grade 2. Results show that wrong syntactic rules were better detected than omissions, whereas…

The basic noun phrase of Koine Greek is examined, and an analysis consistent with current views on phrase structure within X-bar theory is proposed. The fact that the syntactic distribution of quantifiers, demonstratives, and descriptive adjectives is different leads to the proposal that these are distinct word classes in Greek, as in many other…

An analysis of the structure and functioning of Modern Greek gerundival constructions is presented. First, it is argued that there are clear differences between gerunds and participles. Issues concerning the temporal interpretation of gerunds are considered, and an account is given that postulates the existence of a covert temporal operator like…

A study of syntactic variation in Spanish spoken by native speakers in the United States examined patterns of variation in different areas of the country. High school students in larger Hispanic communities throughout the country were surveyed concerning their own and their parents' demographic characteristics and their Spanish speaking,…