Previous research has highlighted the difficulty that infants have in learning to use color words. Even after acquiring the words themselves, infants are reported to use them incorrectly, or overextend their usage. We tested 146 infants from 5 different age groups on their knowledge of 6 basic color words, "red", "green",…

English as an International Language (EIL) is grounded in the concept of multiplicity. Such proliferation of non-native varieties of English leads to several controversies including the intelligibility of its speakers to listeners from various language backgrounds. Although this concern has been continuously addressed in EIL research, the focus…

Most current models of sentence comprehension assume that the human parsing mechanism (HPM) algorithmically computes detailed syntactic representations as basis for extracting sentence meaning. These models share the assumption that the representations computed by the HPM accurately reflect the linguistic input. This assumption has been challenged…

This study investigated how Turkish-speaking children and adults interpret negative sentences with disjunction (English "or") and ones with conjunction (English "and"). The goal was to see whether Turkish-speaking children and adults assigned the same interpretation to both kinds of sentences and, if not, to determine the…

This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject- and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12;11) with that…

A fundamental question in language acquisition research is whether young children have abstract grammatical representations. We tested this question experimentally. French-learning 30-month-olds were first taught novel word-object pairs in the context of a gender-marked determiner (e.g., un[subscript MASC]ravole "a ravole"). Test trials…

In order to study problems of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) with morphosyntax, we investigated twenty high-functioning Greek-speaking children (mean age: 6;11) and twenty age- and language-matched typically developing children on environments that allow or forbid object clitics or their corresponding noun phrase. Children with…

Background: Understanding lexical abilities in infants and toddlers is important, yet no single tool can be used. Aims: To perform a validation of a new tool (known as the Picture Naming Game, or "PiNG") for assessing lexical comprehension and production in toddlers and to obtain developmental trends for Italian children. Methods &…

We compare the processing of transitive sentences in young learners of a strict word order language (English) and two languages that allow noun omissions and many variant word orders: Turkish, a case-marked language, and Mandarin Chinese, a non case-marked language. Children aged 1-3 years listened to simple transitive sentences in the typical…

Cantonese shape classifiers encode perceptual information that is characteristic of their associated nouns, although certain nouns are exceptional. For example, the classifier "tiu" occurs primarily with nouns for long-narrow-flexible objects (e.g., scarves, snakes, and ropes) and also occurs with the noun for a (short, rigid) key. In 3…

In some theories of sentence comprehension, linguistically relevant lexical knowledge, such as selectional restrictions, is privileged in terms of the time-course of its access and influence. We examined whether event knowledge computed by combining multiple concepts can rapidly influence language understanding even in the absence of selectional…

The authors examined how 12 Estonian-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 60 children with normal speech development (ND) comprehended compound nouns with differing sequence of the components (first task) and how they produced compound nouns to label genuine and accidental categories by using analogy (second task) and…

A spoken language eye-tracking methodology was used to evaluate the effects of sentence context and proficiency on parallel language activation during spoken language comprehension. Nonnative speakers with varying proficiency levels viewed visual displays while listening to French sentences (e.g., "Marie va decrire la poule" [Marie will…

Four experiments demonstrated that the comprehension of novel compound nouns involves the recognition of a general relationship between two categories. They reinforce earlier findings that the process of creating meanings may be equally as efficient as the process of selecting meanings. (33 references) (Author/LB)

A study investigated the extent to which English compound nouns are problematic for learners of English as a second language and identifies some causes of this comprehension difficulty. Subjects were 34 university students, of widely varying language backgrounds, in courses in English for academic purposes. Each was administered an instrument…