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…

Comprehension of sentences with a center-embedded, object-gapped relative clause (ORC) is challenging for children as well as adults. Mismatching lexical and grammatical features of subject noun phrases (NPs) across the main clause and relative clause has been shown to facilitate comprehension. Adani et al. concluded that children's comprehension…

This guide draws on English-related errors from around 6000 papers written by non-native authors, 500 abstracts written by PhD students, and over 2000 hours of teaching researchers how to write and present research papers. This new edition has chapters on exploiting AI tools such as ChatGPT, Google Translate, and Reverso, for generating,…

Inflectional affixes expressing the same grammatical category (e.g., subject agreement) tend to appear in the same morphological position in the word. We hypothesize that this cross-linguistic tendency toward "category clustering" is at least partly the result of a learning bias, which facilitates the transmission of morphology from one…

We present a self-organizing approach to sentence processing that sheds new light on notional plurality effects in agreement attraction, using pseudopartitive subject noun phrases (e.g., "a bottle of pills"). We first show that notional plurality ratings (numerosity judgments for subject noun phrases) predict verb agreement choices in…

The 23rd Annual Graduate Student Conference of the College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature (LLL) at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa was held on Saturday, April 20th, 2019. As in past years, this conference offered the students in the six departments across the college, East Asian Languages and Literatures, English, Indo-Pacific…

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…

Previous research in the area of children's knowledge of number agreement morphology has yielded mixed results. Some researchers have found evidence for sensitivity to agreement morphology at as early as 16 months, while others report that children do not comprehend number agreement morphology until as late as five or six years old. Studies of…

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…

Typologists have long observed that there are certain distributional patterns that are not evenly distributed among the world's languages. This discussion note revisits a recent experimental investigation of one such intriguing case, so-called "universal 18", by Culbertson, Smolensky, and Legendre (2012). The authors find that adult learners are…

Speakers are known to make subject-verb agreement errors both when a number-mismatching noun intervenes between the head of the subject phrase and the verb (e.g., "*The key to the cabinets are on the table") and in configurations in which there is a number-mismatching noun that does not intervene (e.g., "*The cabinets that the key open are on the…

THE MORPHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CZECH NOMINALS, WHICH CONSIST OF NOUNS, ADJECTIVE, NUMERALS AND PRONOUNS, ARE DESCRIBED IN THIS PREPRINT. THE PAPER DISCUSSED EACH CATEGORY SEPARATELY, DIVIDING IT INTO SUBCLASSES, AND PROVIDES ILLUSTRATIONS IN CZECH. IN THE PARADIGMS, SEPARATE FORMS FOR THE VOCATIVE ARE GIVEN FOR MASCULINE AND FEMININE NOUNS…

SIMILAR IN FORMAT TO THE AUTHOR'S "OUTLINE OF BIELORUSSIAN MORPHOLOGY," THIS STRUCTURALLY-ORIENTED TREATMENT OF UKRAINIAN INCLUDES SECTIONS ON --(1) PHONOLOGY, (2) MORPHOPHONEMIC ALTERNATIONS, (3) THE NOUN, (4) THE ADJECTIVE, (5) PRONOUNS, (6) NUMERALS, AND (7) THE VERB. THE AUTHOR BASES HIS FINDINGS ON PUBLISHED HANDBOOKS AND GRAMMARS AS WELL AS…

As an aid to students of Russian, two general rules concerning numerals are suggested: rule of the genitive case and rule of the case of "enumerated object." These rules, together with five secondary rules and corresponding declension forms, define the numeral system. (Text is in Russian.) (SK)

THE PAPER DESCRIBES MORPHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SERBOCROATIAN NUMERALS, PRONOUNS, AND ADJECTIVES (NOUNS ARE DESCRIBED IN PART I). THE FIRST PART OF THE PAPER DISCUSSES AT SOME LENGTH STRESS PATTERNS OCCURRING IN SERBOCROATIAN NOUN PARADIGMS. THE PATTERNS ARE BASED ON THE DESCRIPTION OF STRESS SHIFTS GIVEN IN THE STANDARD TEXTBOOKS. NEXT, THE…