The syntactic bootstrapping mechanism of verb learning was evaluated against child-directed speech in Turkish, a language with rich morphology, nominal ellipsis and free word order. Machine-learning algorithms were run on transcribed caregiver speech directed to two Turkish learners (one hour every two weeks between 0;9 to 1;10) of different…

The study reports the results of a masked priming experiment with morphologically complex Russian nouns. Participants performed a lexical decision task to a visual target that differed from its prime in one consonant. Three conditions were included: (1) "transparent," in which the prime was morphologically related to the target and contained the…

Two-year-olds assign appropriate interpretations to verbs presented in two English transitivity alternations, the causal and unspecified-object alternations (Naigles, 1996). Here we explored how they might do so. Causal and unspecified-object verbs are syntactically similar. They can be either transitive or intransitive, but differ in the semantic…

Two eye-tracking experiments and two self-paced reading experiments investigated processing of sentences containing reduced relative clauses. Processing of a reduced relative is facilitated when it is preceded by a sentence that has the same syntactic structure, as long as the preceding sentence contains the same critical verb as the target…

Focuses on the major cues processed in Hungarian in order to distinguish subjects and objects in transitive clauses: subject-verb and object-verb agreement-marking; case-marking; animacy; and word order. The research reveals that double agreement-marking in Hungarian exists even in week agreement situations, a testimony to the diachronic tenacity…