This paper is about a writing and literary translation program called Poetry Inside Out (PIO). Students in the PIO program study poetic form and structure, figurative language, and the fundamentals of literary translation in an extended workshop format. During a typical Poetry Inside Out workshop, participants read, discuss, translate and recite…

This article reports the results of an eye-tracking experiment that investigated the effects of structural distance on readers' sensitivity to violations of Spanish gender agreement during online sentence comprehension. The study tracked the eye movements of native Spanish speakers and English-speaking learners of Spanish as they read sentences…

The research investigated how comprehenders use verb information during syntactic parsing. Two reading experiments investigated the relationship between verb-specific variables and reading time. These experiments were close replications of prior work; however, two statistical techniques were used, rather than one. These were item-by-item…

This article deals with the interlanguage of adult second language (L2) learners acquiring finiteness. Due to the inaccessibility of bound inflectional morphology, learners use free morphology to mark a syntactic relationship as well as person and number features separately from the thematic verb, expressed by a pattern like "the man is go".…

An overview of research topics and findings from an interdisciplinary, programmatic line of research on writing over the past 25 years is presented. The cross-sectional assessment studies (grades 1 to 9) showed which measures uniquely explained variance in handwriting, spelling, and composing and thus validated their use in assessment. These and…

Young children learning English are biased to attend to the shape of solid rigid objects when learning novel names. This study seeks further understanding of the processes that support this behavior by examining a previous finding that three-year-old children are also biased to generalize novel names for objects made from deformable materials by…

Despite the increasing number of neuroimaging studies of syntactic gender processing no model is currently available that includes data from visual and auditory language comprehension and language production. This paper provides a systematic review of the neural correlates of syntactic gender processing. Based on anatomical information from…

We examined whether university students who report a significant history of reading difficulties (RD; n=24) differed from university students with no history of reading difficulties (NRD; n=31) in how sentence context affects word recognition. Experiment 1 found no differences in how congruent sentence primes or syntactic manipulations of the…

We evaluate the predictions of two theories of syntactic processing complexity, dependency locality theory (DLT) and surprisal, against the Dundee Corpus, which contains the eye-tracking record of 10 participants reading 51,000 words of newspaper text. Our results show that DLT integration cost is not a significant predictor of reading times for…

During unscripted speech, speakers coordinate the formulation of pre-linguistic messages with the linguistic processes that implement those messages into speech. We examine the process of constructing a contextually appropriate message and interfacing that message with utterance planning in English ("the small butterfly") and Spanish ("la mariposa…

Researchers have suggested that there is a noun bias in children's early vocabularies brought about by features of adults' child-directed utterances, which may vary across languages (E. V. Bates et al., 1994; D. Gentner, 1982). In the present study, the authors explored noun bias in 60 Filipino-English bilingual children whose 2 languages differed…

In Experiment 1, monolingual native Spanish speakers (NSSs) had better kernel recall and longer end-of-clause (EOC) pauses than native English speakers (NESs) when reading texts that varied in syntactic complexity as a function of the number of nonessential clauses added to the kernel text. NSS familiarity with embedded clauses in Spanish seem to…

Variation set structure--partial overlap of successive utterances in child-directed speech--has been shown to correlate with progress in children's acquisition of syntax. We demonstrate the benefits of variation set structure directly: in miniature artificial languages, arranging a certain proportion of utterances in a training corpus in variation…

Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is "structural priming," a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced…

This paper presents three naming experiments designed to investigate whether the activation levels of syntactic features associated with lexical items, specifically part-of-speech information, can influence lexical processes. Naming preferences for orthographically ambiguous but phonologically distinct English nouns and verbs, such as "convict"…