To develop theories of how comprehenders extract the message from a linguistic stream, it is critical to understand how they conceptually represent referents. The experiments reported here focus on singular collective nouns (e.g., "committee," "team"), which introduce a single group into the discourse and test whether they…

The question of whether language affects thought is long-standing, with grammatical gender being one of the most contended instances. Empirical evidence focuses on the gender congruency effect, according to which referents of masculine nouns are conceptualized more strongly as male and those of feminine nouns more strongly as female. While some…

Purpose: This study examines the contribution of number morphology to language comprehension abilities among children with specific language impairment (SLI) and age-matched controls. It addresses the question of whether number agreement facilitates the comprehension accuracy of object-initial declarative sentences. According to the predictions of…

The ability to spell correctly is a fundamental skill for participating in society and engaging in professional work. In the German language, the capitalization of nouns and proper names presents major difficulties for both native and nonnative learners, since the definition of what is a noun varies according to one's linguistic perspective. In…

Grammatically masculine role-nouns (e.g., "Studenten"masc.'students') can refer to men and women but may favor an interpretation where only men are considered the referent. If true, this has implications for a society aiming to achieve equal representation in the workplace since, for example, job adverts use such role descriptions. To…

Research has shown that observing iconic gestures helps typically developing children (TD) and children with specific language impairment (SLI) learn new words. So far, studies mostly compared word learning with and without gestures. The present study investigated word learning under two gesture conditions in children with and without language…

Previous studies have shown that speakers of languages such as German, Spanish, and French reactivate the syntactic gender of the antecedent of a pronoun to license gender agreement. As syntactic gender is assumed to be stored in the lexicon, this has motivated the claim that pronouns in these languages reactivate the lexical entry of their…

The study investigated the influence of universal and language-specific morpho-syntactic properties (i.e., flexible word order, case) on the acquisition of verb argument structures in German compared with English. To this end, 65 three- to nine-year-old German learning children and adults were asked to act out grammatical ("The sheep…

One pronoun production experiment and one pronoun comprehension experiment were performed to investigate the role of grammatical number information in long-distance anaphora, with referent and pronoun either in adjacent sentences or separated by an intervening sentence. The experiments tested the assumption that the influence of grammatical number…

In 3 picture-word experiments, the authors explored the activation of 2 grammatical features in Czech during lexical access: declensional class of nouns and conjugational class of verbs. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated congruency effects of declensional and conjugational class, respectively. Picture naming times were reliably longer if the…

Closed-class word selection was investigated by focusing on determiner production. Native speakers from three different languages named pictures of objects using determiner plus noun phrases (e.g., in French "la table" (the [subscript feminine] table), while ignoring distractor determiners printed on the pictures (e.g., "le"…