Norwegian embedded clauses give children two options for subject placement: preceding or following negation (S-Neg/Neg-S). In the adult language, S-Neg is the 'default' and highly frequent option, and Neg-S is infrequent in children's input. However, Neg-S may be argued to be the structurally less complex. We investigate whether children are aware…

Much research in the functional linguistics literature suggests that the use of zero pronouns is driven by the degree of interclausal connection. Kim (1990, 1992) claims that in clause chain languages such as Korean and Japanese, zero pronouns are primarily used following an interclausal connective with a tight interclausal connection that…

This study aimed to design a task in an everyday context to support high school students' exploration of the truth values of propositional conditionals and to understand their difficulties. The results showed that students could identify that the truth value of a propositional conditional is determined by two variables (the truth values of the…

Background: Early intervention is recommended for pre-school children with low language. However, few robustly evaluated language interventions for young children exist. Furthermore, in many interventions the theoretical underpinnings are underspecified and the 'active ingredients' of the interventions not tested. This paper presents a…

This study examined and compared the comprehension of Mandarin ditransitive constructions in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children with autism spectrum disorder plus language impairment (ALI). Eighteen children with DLD, 17 children with ALI, and 27 age-matched typically developing (TDA) children, participated in a…

Background: Poor intelligibility is common in young children with developmental language disorders (DLDs). Relatedly, children with DLD and poor intelligibility, like children with DLD solely, have often also difficulties in other aspects of language abilities: such as making grammatical and cohesive sentences and telling narratives with an…

The purpose of this study was to analyze and compare the linguistic content of the Spanish HINT and the Spanish AzBio sentence tests. The results revealed that the Spanish AzBio is linguistically more complex as compared with the Spanish HINT in terms of sentence length, complexity, and grammatical structure.

Many bilinguals switch languages in daily-life conversations. Although this usually happens within sentence context and with another speaker, most research on the cognitive mechanisms underlying the production of language switches has studied individual words. Here, we examined how context influences both switching frequency and the temporal cost…

We consider the reference-based approach for Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) that involves scoring a textual constructed student answer comparing to a teacher-provided reference answer. The reference answer does not cover the variety of student answers as it contains only specific examples of correct answers. Considering other language…

In Lebanese Arabic, lexical subjects may occur before or after verbs, but only before non-verbal predicates. Analysis of spontaneous language samples from 19 two-year-old children shows that postverbal (VS) and preverbal (SV) subjects emerge simultaneously. The youngest children displayed no VS-SV difference in frequency. A slight preference for…

This article discusses the positioning of "wh" words in Modern Laos Sign Language. Research indicates that there are two common patterns for the position of "wh" words in spoken languages: the initial position and in situ (Dryer 2013). However, in some sign languages, it seems that "wh" word positioning is…

We examined the influence of the lexical and grammatical aspect of events on pronoun resolution in adults (18 to 23 years, N = 46), adolescents (13 to 14 years, N=66) and children (7 to 11 years, N=192). Participants were presented with 64 two-sentence stimuli: the first sentence described events with two same gender protagonists; the second began…

Background: Recent research has documented individual differences in the reading profiles of skilled native English readers using a behavioural marker of holistic visual word processing (orientation sensitivity). A more holistic word reading profile is associated with a weaker correlation with phonological decoding for word identification.…

A fundamental question in psycholinguistics concerns how grammatical structure contributes to real-time sentence parsing and understanding. While many argue that grammatical structure is only loosely related to on-line parsing, others hold the view that the two are tightly linked. Here, I use the incremental growth of grammatical structure in…

We investigated toddlers' understanding of the hierarchical syntactic configurations that constrain the referential meanings of reflexives and pronouns. In particular, reflexives must co-refer with the c-commanding antecedent within the local domain (Principle A) (e.g., He[subscript i] washes himself[subscript i]. John[subscript i] knows that…