Investigated the relationship between syntactic and semantic processing using a word-by-word reading paradigm and a cross-modal integration paradigm. The study evaluated the experimental results with regard to serial autonomous models, strongly and weakly interactive models, and a hybrid model proposed here. (92 references) (Author/CK)

This study investigates the phenomenon that listeners of English were surprisingly accurate at predicting the temporal end of a sentence when only given the part up to the "potentially last word," that is a noun before an optional prepositional phrase of varying lengths. Results of four experiments using either French or English are given. (35…

Investigates the incidence of segmental and prosodic contrasts in recorded sentence materials and the use of such distinctions in the processing of utterances. The chosen materials involve sites of parsing ambiguity. Results show that in the immediate interpretation of spoken language input, intonational contrasts function as clear structural…

Four experimental studies were designed to test, in Norwegian, the hypothesis that children's non-adultlike interpretations of pronouns may be partly attributable to a lexical factor interacting with the A-Chain Condition. (Author/VWL)

Investigated the source of agrammatic aphasic patients' difficulty comprehending semantically reversible sentences. Found approximately equal distributions of three distinct patterns. Results conflict with explanations of comprehension failure which state that a single pattern of performance on sentence structures characterizes comprehension of…

To compare Japanese autistic children's use of semantic knowledge and theory of mind with mentally retarded and typically developing children's, they were tested on their comprehension of active and passive sentences and false belief understanding. Autistic children were sensitive to plausibility levels of semantic bias as were 4-year-olds with…

When presented with several time-compressed sentences, young adults' performance improves with practice. Such adaptation has not been studied in older adults. To study age-related changes in perceptual learning, the authors tested young and older adults' ability to adapt to degraded speech. First, the authors showed that older adults, when equated…

Examines patterns of transfer in the sentence processing strategies displayed by Chinese-English and English-Chinese bilinguals. Results indicate that late bilinguals display strong evidence for forward transfer: late Chinese-English bilinguals transfer animacy-based strategies to English sentences; late Chinese-English bilinguals transfer…

Two experiments examined the process of acquisition of sentence structure in the passive voice among young children. The subjects were several hundred monolingual French-speaking children aged 4-11 in schools in Liege, Belgium. The two experiments used different subject groups. In the first experiment, the children were required to interpret…

The purpose of the study was to investigate children's understanding of "before" and "after" in temporal directions, in temporal questions, and in pictorial events through the use of three interview methods. The subjects for the study were 62 children, ranging in age from 40 to 80 months, enrolled in a half-day, private nursery/kindergarten…

Investigates the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragamatics from the perspectives of functional constraints on sentence processing. Findings reveal that native speakers of Italian first become aware of the importance of the concept of word order in a second language before being able to determine the specifics of word order in that…

When asked to judge as correct or incorrect three categories of sentences (those with errors similar to their own patterns, those with common "baby errors," and correct sentences), four-year-olds made significantly fewer corrections of errors similar to their own, suggesting that children learn their own errors. (MSE)

This article discusses a study by Segalowitz and Galang that reports results showing better mastery of patient-focus sentences than agent-focus sentences for Tagalog children. (CFM)

Teachers are encouraged to learn to codify student errors of selection and usage and to promote use of dictionaries and other lexical tools so students can achieve proper pronunciation and identify colloquialisms, misuse of idioms, and lack of grammatical logic in complex constructions. (MSE)

Effects of case inflections, gender agreement, noun animacy, and word position on decisions and reaction times were explored for agent-object assignments in Croatian, a case-marking language. Results support the view that there may be constraints on the particular combinations of cues that may converge to facilitate, or compete to inhibit,…