Argues that the fundamental word order of Mandarin Chinese is SVO (Subject-Verb-Object), and describes word order change from Old Chinese to Modern Chinese. (AM)

Examines constituent order in Haida sentences. (AM)

Replies to issues raised by Bouchard and Dubuisson (B&D) (1995) about American Sign Language (ASL), refuting B&D's assertion that visual-gestural languages are not bound by any universal constraints on word order and reaffirming that ASL is a highly configurational language with a basic underlying syntactic structure as well as an…

Examines the changes that French negative infinitives have undergone since the 15th century. Argues that, for main verbs, the change in word order reflects a change in the position of "pas," while the change in the position of modals and auxiliaries is due to these verbs assuming a position lower in the structure. (82 references) (MDM)

Demonstrates how syntactic constraints interact in the interpretation of Verb Phrase inversion. Specifically, it is shown that the auxiliary "be" is unique among auxiliary verbs in allowing VP inversion. (38 references) (VWL)

Contrasts symmetrical and asymmetrical features of word order in Mandarin and English, focusing on the preverbal and postverbal positional contrast, and revealing several cognitive sources for similarities between the two languages. (53 references) (CB)

Presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed…

Summarizes some of the syntactic differences between English and Japanese in such areas as word order, wh-movement, subject-auxiliary inversion, expletives, multiple subject constructions, scrambling, and modifiable pro-forms in Japanese. (26 references) (CB)

Suggests that the role of phonology may be more limited when reading text in Japanese relative to English, and that this difference is not due to variations in orthographic depth. Proposes key factors are the greater visual discriminability of kanji words under degraded conditions and the less important role of word order as a syntactic cue. (SR)

The study reported here was conducted in the Algonquian language of Odawa (a.k.a. Ottawa), with the goal of gaining new insight into the ways that conceptual accessibility affects human sentence production. The linguistic characteristics of Odawa are quite different from those found in the languages most often examined by psycholinguists. The data…

A number of studies have shown that structural factors play a much larger role than the linear order of words during the production of grammatical agreement. These findings have been used as evidence for a stage in the production process at which hierarchical relations between constituents have been established (a necessary precursor to…

Theorists of language acquisition have long debated the means by which children learn the argument structure of verbs (e.g. Bowerman, 1974, 1990; Pinker, 1984, 1989; Tomasello, 1992). Central to this controversy has been the possible role of verb semantics, especially in learning which verbs undergo dative-shift alternation in languages like…

Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm with the boundary placed after word n, the experiment manipulated preview of word n + 2 for fixations on word n. There was no preview benefit for 1st-pass reading on word n + 2, replicating the results of K. Rayner, B. J. Juhasz, and S. J. Brown (2007), but there was a preview benefit on the 3-letter…

This study was designed to determine a word problem difficulty classification in children with arithmetic learning disabilities (ALD; n = 104) in comparison with typically achieving students (n = 44). We tested variables such as (a) semantic structure (Change, Combine, Compare, and Equalize), (b) operation (subtraction and addition), and (c)…

Recent data (T. J. Perfect, C. J. A. Moulin, M. A. Conway, & E. Perry, 2002) have suggested that retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) depends on conceptual memory because the effect is not found in perceptually driven tasks. In 3 experiments, the authors aimed to show that the presence of RIF depends on whether the procedure induces appropriate…