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…

Primary objective: To determine if structural priming can be demonstrated in young children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Research design: A mixed-model design was used to compare children with SLI to two groups of typically developing (TD) children, and to compare priming conditions. Methods and procedures: Eighteen…

Infants of 18 and 24 months acquiring English were tested in a preferential looking task on their ability to detect ungrammaticalities caused by manipulating a single function word in sentences. Infants heard grammatical sentences in which the determiner "the" preceded a target noun, as well as three ungrammatical conditions in which "the" was…

Questions concerning the role of input in the growth of syntactic skills have generated substantial debate within psychology and linguistics. The authors address these questions by investigating the effects of experimentally manipulated input on children's skill with the passive voice. The study involved 72 four-year-olds who listened to stories…

Two types of sentence-level writing problems are often observed in student writing: (1) those that violate conventions of standard written English, such as subject-verb agreement errors and comma splices; and (2) those that involve a stylistic choice, such as beginning a sentence with an expletive structure like "There are" or using "if" rather…

Eighty-one seventh- and eighth-grade students (age 12-14) learning English in Japanese classrooms were tested on their knowledge of English case-marked pronouns in sentences like "He likes her," *"He likes she" and *"Him likes her." The aim of the study was to evaluate the predictions of three theories of second…

Using straightforward, easy-to-understand language, this handbook of English provides hundreds of examples to illustrate in specific detail what is proper in all areas of English grammar, style, and writing. The handbook provides learning exercises at the end of every chapter for a thorough review of the concepts covered in the chapter. The first…

Locative inversion, one aspect of word order in English discourse in which the positions of verb and noun phrase are inverted (e.g., "in front of the house is a tree"), is examined. It is argued that inversions after deictic adverbs and those after non-deictic, locative constituents are related, both representing devices: (1) expressing point of…

This book presents the final report on a study into the effects of grammar instruction upon aspects of the writing of nine-year-old students. After an introductory chapter, the second chapter expounds the theoretical background to the study. The third chapter of the book introduces the experimental programs, the dependent variables, and the…

This study views structure-dependence as a Universal Grammar (UG) principle and explores how and why children are able to attain the target grammar, in this case, the subject-auxiliary inversion rule. The hypothesis was tested that second language (L2) acquisition is guided by UG. In other words, L2 learners also adopt the structure-dependent…

Reflexives and reciprocals in Ixil, a Mayan language of Guatemala, appear to have features that distinguish them from reflexives surveyed in typological studies such as Faltz (1985) and Geniusiene (1987). Third person reflexives and reciprocals seem to have the form of a possessed noun optionally followed by a possessor NP. Moreover, reflexives…