A study explored the ability of 20 6-year olds with specific language impairments (SLI) to use cues to interpret novel verbs and the role of cues for novel verb interpretation and retention. Subjects demonstrated an ability to use cues to interpret verb meaning; however, they had lower scores on verb retention. (Author/CR)

Addressed whether hierarchical relations and word order can be separated in sentence production. Assessed in two experiments whether subject-verb agreement errors require linear proximity of a so-called "local" noun to the verb. Found evidence for a stage in language production in which a syntactic structure is built prior to stage in which words…

In this study, a sentence interpretation experiment based on Bates and MacWhinney's Competition Model was administered to second language learners of English and Chinese at three different stages of learning. Examined how transfer patterns at the sentence processing level change as a function of proficiency and investigates whether or how transfer…

Tests claims regarding "get"-passives in English via interrogation of a set of written and spoken corpora. The data suggest that "get"-passives are often associated with two types of pragmatic implicature. Finally, the corpus provides evidence of three types of variation with 'get'-passives: regional, stylistic, and diachronic.…

Discusses how students can thoroughly understand the process of revising a few sentences by discussing revisions with a partner, reading the revisions of the same sentences by other students, and reviewing the best revisions with the whole class. (RS)

Examines sentence comprehension in second language learners using event-related brain potentials. Japanese speakers who had learned German as a second language after puberty listened to German sentences that were either correct, semantically incorrect, syntactically incorrect or both semantically and syntactically incorrect, Brain responses were…

The authors report data from a longitudinal study that addresses the relations between working memory capacity and reading comprehension skills in children aged 8, 9, and 11 years. At each time point, the authors assessed children's reading ability, vocabulary and verbal skills, performance on 2 working memory assessments (sentence-span and digit…

This study examined the interaction between speech perception and sentential context among 13 poor readers and 49 good readers in grades one to three. Children's performance was examined on tasks assessing expressive and receptive vocabulary, reading skill, phonological awareness, pseudoword repetition, and phoneme identification. Good readers…

Adult learners of English as a second language who speak Chinese (n = 30), Japanese (n = 28) or Spanish (n = 46) as a first language (L1), and a comparison group of native speakers (n = 22) read sentences that contain: (a) ungrammatical "wh"-extractions that violate island constraints; and (b) grammatical long-distance Subject and Object…

This article focuses on word order - the order of constituents in the sentence - as one way in which languages establish the relationship between a verb and its arguments. The spoken languages of the world have been classified into three, major word-order types: SVO, VSO, and SOV. Greenberg' work (1963) on language typology has been a stimulus to…

Three French-speaking agrammatic aphasics and three French-speaking Conduction aphasics were tested for comprehension of Active, Passive, Cleft-Subject, Cleft-Object, and Cleft-Object sentences with Stylistic Inversion using an object manipulation test. The agrammatic patients consistently reversed thematic roles in the latter sentence type, and…

Five experiments, using a subject-verb agreement error elicitation procedure, investigated syntactic planning processes in production. The experiments examined the influence of semantic integration--the degree to which phrases are tightly linked at the conceptual level--and contrasted two accounts of planning: serial stack-based systems and…

A prevalent assumption in text comprehension research is that many aspects of text processing are automatic, with automaticity typically defined in terms of properties (e.g., speed and effort). The present research advocates conceptualization of automaticity in terms of underlying mechanisms and evaluates two such accounts, a…

A central question for psycholinguistics concerns the role of grammatical constraints in online sentence processing. Many current theories maintain that the language processing mechanism constructs a parse or parses that are grammatically consistent with the whole of the perceived input each time it processes a word. Several bottom-up, dynamical…

The effect of two linguistic factors in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia was examined using Dutch and English subjects. Three tasks were used to test (1) the comprehension and (2) the construction of sentences, where verbs (in Dutch) and verb arguments (in Dutch and English) are in canonical versus non-canonical position; (3) the production of…