Theories of spoken word production generally assume a distinction between at least two types of phonological processes and representations: lexical phonological processes that recover relatively arbitrary aspects of word forms from long-term memory and post-lexical phonological processes that specify the predictable aspects of phonological…

To what extent do bilinguals have a single, integrated representation of syntactic information? According to Hartsuiker et al. (2004) [Hartsuiker, R. J., Pickering, M. J., & Veltkamp, E. (2004). "Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish-English bilinguals." "Psychological Science," 15,…

An unresolved issue in the study of sentence comprehension is whether the process of gap-filling is mediated by the construction of empty categories (traces), or whether the parser relates fillers directly to the associated verb's argument structure. We conducted an event-related potentials (ERP) study that used the violation paradigm to examine…

For teachers of a second language (L2), the role of grammar instruction in the classroom has been a perennial subject of debate and has undergone many changes over the years. For example, the once well-respected traditional methods that relied on extensive drilling and memorization of grammar evoked a backlash in the 1970s, which resulted in new…

This paper attempts to address the issue of language development in hearing impaired children. It argues that interpreters, teachers or peers can provide deaf children with language exposure so that they can acquire their native languages more easily. It also argues that the provision of a developmentally appropriate print-rich environments is the…

A large-scale study of complex "wh"-questions with 1,000 subjects aged 4-9 years is reported. The subjects' dialects were Mainstream American English or African American English, and approximately one-third were language impaired. The study examined when children permit long distance "wh"-movement, and when they respect a variety of syntactic…

This article deals with current notions of idiomaticity. It argues that lack of adequate empirical study and scholarship has prompted some authors to apply research findings from first language (L1) to second language (L2) contexts without scrutinizing more closely the factors affecting L2 idiom understanding. As a result, certain propositions…

The role of morphology in reading aloud was examined measuring naming latencies to pseudowords and words composed of morphemes (roots and derivational suffixes) and corresponding simple pseudowords and words. Three groups of Italian children of different ages and reading abilities, including dyslexic children, as well as one group of adult readers…

The present study examined the general hypothesis that, as for nouns, stable representations of semantic knowledge relative to situations expressed by verbs are available and accessible in long term memory in normal people. Regular associations between verbs and past tenses in French adults allowed to abstract two superordinate semantic features…

Purpose: Previous findings from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) indicate that adults who stutter (AWS) exhibit processing differences for visually presented linguistic information. This study explores how neural activations for AWS may differ for a linguistic task that does not require preparation for overt articulation or engage the…

When people read temporarily ambiguous sentences, there is often an increased prevalence of regressive eye-movements launched from the word that resolves the ambiguity. Traditionally, such regressions have been interpreted at least in part as reflecting readers' efforts to re-read and reconfigure earlier material, as exemplified by the Selective…

Individuals with autism exhibit significant impairments in prosody production, yet there is a paucity of research on prosody comprehension in this population. The current study adapted a psycholinguistic paradigm to examine whether individuals with autism are able to use prosody to resolve syntactically ambiguous sentences. Participants were 21…

The quality of implicit morphological knowledge in adult Hebrew readers with developmental dyslexia was investigated. The priming paradigm was used to examine whether these adults extract and represent morphemic units similarly to normal readers during online word recognition. The group with dyslexia as a whole did not exhibit priming with visual…

Open-ended tasks are rarely used to investigate cognition in autism. No known studies have directly examined whether increased attention to the perceptual level of speech in autism might contribute to a reduced tendency to process language meaningfully. The present study investigated linguistic versus perceptual speech processing preferences.…

Perception of American Sign Language (ASL) handshape and place of articulation parameters was investigated in three groups of signers: deaf native signers, deaf non-native signers who acquired ASL between the ages of 10 and 18, and hearing non-native signers who acquired ASL as a second language between the ages of 10 and 26. Participants were…