A series of self-paced reading time experiments was performed to assess how characteristics of noun phrases (NPs) contribute to the difference in processing difficulty between object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Structural semantic characteristics of the NP in the embedded clause (definite vs. indefinite and definite vs. generic) did…

Two event-related potential (ERP) experiments were conducted to investigate spoken word recognition in Chinese and the effect of contextual constraints on this process. In Experiment 1, three kinds of incongruous words were formed by altering the first, second or both syllables of the congruous disyllabic terminal words in high constraint spoken…

Children as young as two use sentence structure to learn the meanings of verbs. We probed the generality of sensitivity to sentence structure by moving to a different semantic and syntactic domain, spatial prepositions. Twenty-six-month-olds used sentence structure to determine whether a new word was an object-category name ("This is a corp!") or…

Conceptual models of giftedness that cannot explain the full spectrum of depicted behaviors are incomplete. The same is true for frameworks that purport to analyze those behaviors. Within giftedness, extraordinary and rare talents afford us the opportunity to extend and modify models and frameworks. This article presents an analysis of the first 2…

Previous investigations employing electropalatography (EPG) have identified articulatory timing deficits in individuals with acquired dysarthria. However, this technology is yet to be applied to the articulatory timing disturbance present in Parkinson's disease (PD). As a result, the current investigation aimed to use EPG to comprehensively…

Two eye movement experiments examined whether skilled readers include vowels in the early phonological representations used in word recognition during silent reading. Target words were presented in sentences preceded by parafoveal previews in which the vowel phoneme was concordant or discordant with the vowel phoneme in the target word. In…

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences in which two noun phrases or two independent clauses were connected by the word or (NP-coordination and S-coordination, respectively). The word either could be present or absent earlier in the sentence. When either was present, the material immediately following or was read more quickly,…

A tool was devised to improve spoken syntax through manipulation of graphic symbols. The participant, a French-speaking 11-year-old girl with general learning disability, learned to produce subject-verb-object (SVOn) sentences and transform them into a subject-object-verb (SOpV) structure in which the object becomes pronominal in a preverbal…

This article introduces a modification of the sentence completion task that acquaints students with various types of informational text structures (e.g., cause-effect, compare-contrast) and challenges their higher order reading and writing skills. When the individual sentences comprising an expository paragraph are intermingled with unrelated…

This paper presents an alternative analysis of tough constructions for N. Chomsky's 1981 wh-movement analysis of tough constructions. To replace Chomsky's solution and to obviate the need for generalized transformations in Government-Binding (GB) theory, an alternative analysis is proposed in which the tough subject originates as an embedded…

The behavior of non-terms in Shaba Swahili is examined within the framework of relational grammar. Shaba Swahili is peculiar because it reflects a complex linguistic situation; its population consisted of people coming from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The behavior of Shaba Swahili non-terms is discussed with reference to several…

Recent work in language and text has explored such broad functional categories as evidentiality and affect, and has examined their cross-linguistic occurrences and manifestations. This paper focuses on a single construction, explores its variations, and describes and explains its pragmatic and textual functions. This rare construction, exemplified…

A study investigated the differences made in the meaning of a passage in English by placing adverbial clauses before (preposing) or after (postposing) the verb. Examples are: "When the wolf arrived, he was picking apples"; "He was picking apples when the wolf arrived"; "While he was picking apples, the wolf arrived"; and "The wolf arrived while he…

This study examined children's acquisition of language by means of correlating spoken words and observed objects and actions. The common sense view of word learning via observation applies easily to learning nouns for objects, but becomes problematic in the process of learning verbs. When they encounter novel verbs applied to observed situations,…

Second in a series of books designed to make learning to write and understanding the structure of language easy and fun, this book gives students the opportunity to see how each of the parts of speech functions in a sentence. The focus of the book is twofold: to help students learn to recognize and write complete sentences and to familiarize…