Arai et al. (2007) showed that structural priming in the comprehension of English dative sentences only occurred when the verb was repeated between prime and target, suggesting a lexically-dependent mechanism of structure prediction. However, a recent study in Mandarin comprehension found abstract (verb-independent) structural priming and such…

Two experiments tracked the encoding of relational information (actions at the level of the prelinguistic message and verbs at the level of the sentence) during formulation of transitive event descriptions (e.g., The tiger is scratching the photographer). At what point during message and sentence formulation do speakers encode actions and verbs?…

Previous studies have demonstrated that, for adults, differences between unaccusative verbs (e.g., "fall") and unergative verbs (e.g., "dance") lead to a difference in processing. However, so far we don't know whether this effect shows up in children's processing of these verbs as well. This study measures children's processing…

The results of a self-paced reading study with advanced German, Dutch and French second language (L2) learners of English showed that their online comprehension of early closure (EC) sentences which are initially misanalysed by native English speakers (e.g. "While John hunted the frightened rabbit escaped") was affected by whether or…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated whether errors with subject-verb agreement in monolingual Dutch children with specific language impairment (SLI) are influenced by verb phonology. In addition, the productive and receptive abilities of Dutch acquiring children with SLI regarding agreement inflection were compared. Method: An SLI…

Many studies have demonstrated that listeners use information extracted from verbs to guide anticipatory eye movements to objects in the visual context that satisfy the selection restrictions of the verb. An important question is what underlies such verb-mediated anticipatory eye gaze. Based on empirical and theoretical suggestions, we…

This study examined how noun and verb processing in bilingual visual word recognition are affected by within and between-language overlap. We investigated how word class ambiguous noun and verb cognates are processed by bilinguals, to see if co-activation of overlapping word forms between languages benefits from additional overlap within a…

This article presents the results of experimental data on language production and comprehension. These show that adult learners of Dutch as an additional language, with different language backgrounds, and a L2 proficiency below level A2 (Waystage) of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR; Council of Europe, 2001), use…

Previous studies have examined cross-serial and embedded complement clauses in West Germanic in order to distinguish between different types of working memory models of human sentence processing, as well as different formal language models. Here, adult plasticity in the use of these constructions is investigated by examining the response of…

This study investigates effects of verb movement in nine Dutch-speaking agrammatic aphasics. According to linguistic theory, in verb second languages such as Dutch and German, the verb remains in its clause-final base position in embedded clauses, whereas it moves to second position in main clauses. In recent linguistic accounts of agrammatic…