Previous research suggests that English-speaking children comprehend agent-patient verb passives earlier than experiencer-theme verb passives (Maratsos, Fox, Becker, & Chalkley, 1985). We report three experiments examining whether such effects reflect delayed acquisition of the passive syntax or instead are an artifact of the experimental task,…

Three experiments tested theories of syntactic representation by assessing "stem-exchange" errors ("hates the record"[right arrow]"records the hate"). Previous research has shown that in stem exchanges, speakers pronounce intended nouns ("REcord") as verbs ("reCORD"), yielding syntactically well-formed utterances. By "lexically based" theories,…

The research presented here uses theoretical constructs of formal syntax to account for performance data in agreement production. The phenomenon examined is object interference in French, i.e., incorrect agreement of the verb with the object. In the first experiment, interference is shown to occur in object relative clauses despite the absence of…

Bilinguals appear to have shared syntactic representations for similar constructions between languages but retain distinct representations for noncognate translation-equivalents (Schoonbaert, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2007). We inquire whether bilinguals have more integrated representations of cognate translation-equivalents. To investigate…

Speakers frequently make subject-verb number agreement errors in the presence of a local noun with a different number from the head of the subject phrase. A series of four experiments used a two-choice response time (RT) paradigm to investigate how the latency of correct agreement decisions is modulated by the presence of a number attractor, and…

This article examined whether semantic indeterminacy plays a role in comprehension of complex structures such as object relative clauses. Study 1 used a gated sentence completion task to assess which alternative interpretations are dominant as the relative clause unfolds; Study 2 compared reading times in object relative clauses containing…

This paper investigates how readers process number ambiguous noun phrases in subject position. A speeded-grammaticality judgment experiment and two self-paced reading experiments were conducted involving number ambiguous subjects in German verb-end clauses. Number preferences for individual nouns were estimated by means of two questionnaire…

We report two sets of experiments that demonstrate syntactic priming from comprehension to comprehension in young children. Children acted out double-object and prepositional-object dative sentences while we monitored their eye movements. We measured whether hearing one type of dative as a prime influenced children's online interpretation of…

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,…

Two rating studies demonstrate that English speakers willingly produce reduced relatives with internal cause verbs (e.g., "Whisky fermented in oak barrels can have a woody taste"), and judge their acceptability based on factors known to influence ambiguity resolution, rather than on the internal/external cause distinction. Regression analyses…