Investigates whether concreteness was related to a key characteristic of written composition--the cumulative sentence with a final modifier--which has been consistently associated with higher quality writing. Supports the conceptual-peg hypothesis of dual coding theory, with concrete verbs providing the pegs on which cumulative sentences are…

Results from an English acceptability-rating experiment are presented that demonstrate that people find doubly nested relative-clause structures just as acceptable when only two verb phrases are included instead of the grammatically required three. Three possible accounts of the results are considered. (Author/VWL)

Examined the extent to which cross-linguistic differences in sentence interpretation would generalize to complex sentences with an embedded clause. College students who were native speakers of English or Italian completed four experiments. Results indicated that cross-linguistic differences were maintained when students interpreted complex…

Investigated the acquisition of verb placement by bilingual young children learning both German and English. Researchers recorded their speech monthly for three years and analyzed word order in the verb phrase. The children were actively involved in the process of determining structure in each language. Development of language output did not…

Presents the case for a mapping theory of developmental language impairment, which branches into a theory that specific language impairment arises from impaired phonological processing and the consequent disruption of the mapping process through which the words and sentence structure of language are established. (Author/VWL)

Examined whether the sentence "Who saw everything?" is ambiguous for Korean learners of English. Results show that it is not, but that the sentence "what did everyone see?" is ambiguous for them. (Author/VWL)

Background: Language intervention procedures often involve the speech-language pathologist highlighting or making more salient forms that are problematic for the child with a language impairment. According to limited processing accounts of specific language impairment (SLI), one way to increase the saliency of a form is to manipulate its sentence…

In two experiments, we tested for lingering effects of "verb replacement" disfluencies on the processing of garden path sentences that exhibit the main verb/reduced relative (MV/RR) ambiguity. Participants heard sentences with revisions like "The little girl chosen, uh, selected for the role celebrated with her parents and friends". We found that…

An English teacher provides some sentence comparison activities that enlarge students' linguistic resources for writing. He believes that students can learn to revise for style if they recognize the stylistic choices writers make.

Dynamical, self-organizing models of sentence processing predict "digging-in" effects: The more committed the parser becomes to a wrong syntactic choice, the harder it is to reanalyze. Experiment 1 replicates previous grammaticality judgment studies (F. Ferreira & J. M. Henderson, 1991b, 1993), revealing a deleterious effect of lengthening the…

This is an extended summary of a pedagogic essay by Mikhail M. Bakhtin on writing style, titled "Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics as Part of Russian Language Instruction in Secondary School." In this essay, written in spring 1945 while Bakhtin was a secondary school teacher of Russian language arts, he argues that every…

Processing time and memory for sentences were examined as a function of the degree of semantic and causal relatedness between sentences in short narratives. In Experiments 1-2B, semantic and causal relatedness between sentence pairs was independently manipulated. Causal relatedness was assessed through pretesting and semantic relatedness was…

Four experiments are presented in which adults learned to comprehend a new syntactic construction in their native language. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults quickly learn to comprehend the new construction and generalize it to new verbs. Experiment 3 shows that experience with the novel construction affects the processing of a…

Three experiments investigated whether speakers use constituent ordering as a mechanism for avoiding ambiguities. In utterances like ''Jane showed the letter to Mary to her mother,'' alternate orders would avoid the temporary PP-attachment ambiguity (''Jane showed her mother the letter to Mary,'' or ''Jane showed to her mother the letter to…

This study presents results from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgement tasks with seven German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and seven age-matched control subjects examining verb finiteness marking and verb-second (V2) placement. The patients were found to be selectively impaired in tense marking in the face of preserved mood and…