My study (Lindseth, "The Effects of Form-Focused Instruction on the Acquisition of Subject-Verb Inversion in German") that was published in the Volume 49, No. 1 issue of "Foreign Language Annals" suggested that form-focused instruction that targets a specific structure may help learners progress faster toward accurate use of…

Babcok et al. (2012) claim that Paradis (1994, 2004, 2009) argues that the reliance of late L2 learners on L1 neurocognitive mechanisms increases over time across both lexical and grammatical functions, namely for lexical items as well as rule-governed grammatical procedures, when in fact one can find repeated statements to the contrary in the…

In 2 separate self-paced reading experiments, Farmer, Christiansen, and Monaghan (2006) found that the degree to which a word's phonology is typical of other words in its lexical category influences online processing of nouns and verbs in predictive contexts. Staub, Grant, Clifton, and Rayner (2009) failed to find an effect of phonological…

We present a neural network model of learning and processing the English past tense that is based on the notion that experience-dependent cortical development is a core aspect of cognitive development. During learning the model adds and removes units and connections to develop a task-specific final architecture. The model provides an integrated…

In this brief rejoinder, we respond to Farmer, Monaghan, Misyak, and Christiansen (2011). We argue that the data still do not support the claim that reading time is affected by the phonological typicality of a word for its part of speech. We also question Farmer et al.'s claim that interleaving syntactic structures in an experiment modifies…

Allen [Allen, M. D. (2005). The preservation of verb subcategory knowledge in a spoken language comprehension deficit. "Brain and Language, "95, 255-264] presents evidence from a single patient, WBN, to motivate a theory of lexical processing and representation in which syntactic information may be encoded and retrieved independently of semantic…

Any person who has taught Spanish as a second language or who has interacted with a non-native speaker of Spanish can easily tell that mastering the correct use of the copulas "ser" and "estar" is very difficult in both spoken and written production. But L2 learners are not alone. The Spanish copulas also present difficulty and frustration for L2…

Comments on a study by Frazier and others on Dutch-language lexical processing. Claims that the control condition in the experiment was inadequate and that an assumption made by Frazier about closed class verbal items is inaccurate, and proposes an alternative account of a subset of the data from the experiment. (BC)

Responds to a commentary in this issue by Kempen on an experiment by Frazier and others involving Dutch-language lexical processing. Postulates that it is unclear control items were open to complex verbal analysis; more research is needed to determine how the verb "hebben" is interpreted in context; and Kempen's account of the results is…

Ute Bohnacker's (2006) article on the acquisition of the verb second (V2) property in German by native speakers of Swedish (also a V2 language) is an attempted rebuttal of Hakansson et al.'s (2002) work on first language (L1) transfer and aspects of the underlying theory on which the work is based: Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998). The…

Proposes a method for processing datasets that show whether or not each of several patients was impaired on each of several tests, and expressing conclusions about them. Advantages are that results from the patterns of impairment alone are shown, uninfluenced by theories, previous empirical work, knowledge of lesions, or ideas about what the tests…

The complex of factors governing mood choice in Spanish is reexamined. Mood choice is determined by the basic semantic values expressing the content of an utterance. The influence of comment, reaction, emotions, doubt, and uncertainty on mood choice are explored. (PMJ)

We show that Kempen and Harbusch's ("Cognition" (2003) "this issue") arguments against our claims cannot be upheld. On the one hand, their alternative account of our data that is based on the availability of constructions with object-experiencer verbs is not compatible with the literature on the processing of these types of sentences in German.…

Examines samples of primary-school-aged children's writing to identify and describe the various ways in which boys and girls use language to construct meaning, and to discuss the gendered ways of knowing and being that are revealed and constructed. Findings indicate that girls generally write longer, more complex texts, using a wider range of both…

Advanced learners of second languages and natural language processing systems both demand much more detailed lexical information than conventional dictionaries provide. Text composition, whether by humans or machines, requires a thorough understanding of relationships between words, such as selectional restrictions, case patterns, factives, and…