Across most languages, verbs produced by agrammatic aphasic individuals are frequently marked by syntactically and semantically inappropriate inflectional affixes, such as "Last night, I walking home." As per language production models, verb inflection errors in English agrammatism could arise from three potential sources: encoding the verbs'…

Rappaport Hovav and Levin [Rappaport Hovav, M., Levin, B., 1998. "Building verb meanings." In: Butt, M., Geuder, W. (Eds.), "The Projection of Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors." CSLI Publications, Stanford, pp. 97-134] contend that result verbs disallow object deletion because of their lexical semantic properties. Their point is that…

This empirical study presented the description of two teaching methods called "deductive" and "inductive" approaches. The first involved providing a group of participants with rules and then examples directly and separately, but the second approach involves providing another group of participants with examples or content…

The aim of this study was to investigate whether a physiological measure of impaired use of context could be obtained in people with Asperger's Syndrome (AS). The experimental paradigm employed was the use of electroencephalography to measure the detection of semantic incongruity within written sentences, as indexed by an N400 event-related…

Although several theories of online syntactic processing assume the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, the continuous and non-ballistic properties of computer mouse movements are exploited, by recording their streaming x, y coordinates to procure…

Direct quotation can be a source of meaning in storybook texts for beginning readers. The author of this article sketches the linguistic complexity of direct quotation and offers instructional strategies. Three aspects of direct quotation are examined: the cluster of print features and syntactic characteristics that direct quotation involves, the…

On the ground that reading fluency entails appropriate phrasing or prosody as well as facile word recognition, we investigated the effectiveness of text-based and word-based repeated readings procedures for promoting fluency of reading aloud and comprehension in second-grade children. Repeated readings of text printed with spaces between phrases…

Eight experiments evaluated a core assumption of several theories of text processing, the shared resource assumption, which states that component text processes share limited processing resources. Short texts each contained two critical sentences that together warranted a causal inference. The syntactic structure of the second sentence was either…

Purpose: To compare morphosyntactic skills of preschoolers in different subgroups of language impairment. Method: Eighty-three children participated in this study. They represented 4 groups: (a) language impairment-only, (b) speech-language impairment with minimal or no final cluster reduction/consonant deletion, (c) speech-language impairment…

Many recent models of language comprehension have stressed the role of distributional frequencies in determining the relative accessibility or ease of processing associated with a particular lexical item or sentence structure. However, there exist relatively few comprehensive analyses of structural frequencies, and little consideration has been…

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…

The current study examines whether young and older adults have similar preferences for animate-subject and active sentences, and for using the order of activation of a verb's arguments to determine sentence structure. Ninety-six participants produced sentences in response to three-word stimuli that included a verb and two nouns differing in…

We report 3 experiments that examined younger and older adults' reliance on "good-enough" interpretations for garden-path sentences (e.g., "While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib") as indicated by their responding "Yes" to questions probing the initial, syntactically unlicensed interpretation (e.g., "Did Anna dress the baby?"). The…

This paper investigates how people resolve syntactic category ambiguities when comprehending sentences. It is proposed that people combine: (a) context-dependent syntactic expectations (top-down statistical information) and (b) context-independent lexical-category frequencies of words (bottom-up statistical information) in order to resolve…

In order to study the role of working memory in sentence formulation, we elicited errors of subject-verb agreement in spoken sentence completion, while speakers did or did not maintain an extrinsic memory load (a word list). We compared participants with low and high speaking spans (a measure of verbal working memory for sentence production). As…