This study explored the sensitivity of 20 10- to 11-month-old infants to the phonological characteristics of their native language. Tone-probe event-related potentials were obtained for subjects listening to a story, either with normal English function morphemes or modified with atypical function morphemes. Results suggest that the 11-month-olds,…

Describes Glean, a system which is based on the idea that coherent text contains significant latent information, such as syntactic structure and patterns of language use, which can be used to enhance the performance of information retrieval systems. Proposes an approach to increase the precision of information-retrieval using a supertagger.…

The disadvantage in producing the past tense of regular relative to irregular verbs shown by some patients with non-fluent aphasia has been alternatively attributed (a) to the failure of a specific rule-based morphological mechanism, or (b) to a more generalised phonological impairment that penalises regular verbs more than irregular owing to the…

In a series of production and grammaticality judgment experiments, I investigated the status of children's non-adult questions with 2 auxiliary verbs, such as "What did the smurf didn't buy." Previous studies showed that these questions were produced primarily in negative contexts. In the first part of the study, I tested whether children produce…

We know that children are active participants in their acquisition of language. Their language patterns are learned in social contexts while they are interacting with other children and adults. Studies continue to confirm that the development of vocabulary and syntactic complexity in language are more advanced in children who are frequently…

Most previous studies on topic prominence in second language (L2) acquisition have investigated interlanguage from the direction either of topic prominence to subject prominence or subject prominence to subject prominence. The role of topic/subject prominence typology in L2 acquisition cannot be fully explained until additional studies are…

Speeded visual word naming and lexical decision performance are reported for 2,428 words for young adults and healthy older adults. Hierarchical regression techniques were used to investigate the unique predictive variance of phonological features in the onsets, lexical variables (e.g., measures of consistency, frequency, familiarity, neighborhood…

The current study examines how patients with aphasia access the meanings of idioms during spoken sentence comprehension. In our experiment, we had 4 subjects whose native language is German: 2 left-hemisphere damaged patients (Wernicke's and global aphasia); 1 right-hemisphere damaged patient; and 1 age-matched healthy speaker. Ambiguous…

Theories of English phonology regard syllable onset patterns as irrelevant to the assignment of lexical stress. This paper describes three studies that challenge this position. Study 1 tested whether stress patterns on a large sample of disyllabic English words varied as a function of word onset. The incidence of trochaic stress increased…

Rhetorical grammar analysis encourages students to view writing as a material social practice in which meaning is actively made, rather than passively relayed or effortlessly produced. The study of rhetorical grammar can demonstrate to students that language does purposeful, consequential work in the world--work that can be learned and applied.

This study investigates recognition of spoken idioms occurring in neutral contexts. Experiment 1 showed that both predictable and non-predictable idiom meanings are available at string offset. Yet, only predictable idiom meanings are active halfway through a string and remain active after the string's literal conclusion. Experiment 2 showed that…

English titles of medical research articles (RAs) are of great importance, the quality of which can, to a certain degree, affect impact factors of the articles, because many readers will make a decision as to whether to read on after reading titles. However, the special genre has not been extensively studied to date. This paper is designed to…

This article describes how English and Japanese children interpret empty categories in Verb Phrase Ellipsis contexts as in (1):(1) The penguin [sat on his chair] and the robot did [delta], too. To obtain an adultlike interpretation of (1), English children have to do two things. First, they need to find a suitable antecedent for the empty verb…

This paper focuses on the temporal and modal meanings associated with root infinitives (RIs) and other non-finite clauses in several typologically diverse languages--English, Russian, Greek and Dutch. I discuss the role that event structure, aspect, and modality play in the interpretation of these clauses. The basic hypothesis is that in the…

Phonotactic patterns of seven 11-15-year-old Kannada speaking children with Down syndrome (DS), mental age matched children with mental retardation (MR) without DS and six 4-5-year-old typically developing (TD) children were investigated. Conversational speech analyses and target analyses of conversational speech were carried out in all three…