The aim of this study was to determine whether Hebrew readers reference phonological information for the silent processing of unpointed Hebrew nouns. A research paradigm in which participants were required to perform consecutive same/different judgments regarding the identicalness of members of stimulus pairs was used for answering this question.…

This study examines the mental processes involved in children's on-line recognition of inflected word forms using event-related potentials (ERPs). Sixty children in three age groups (20 six- to seven-year-olds, 20 eight- to nine-year-olds, 20 eleven- to twelve-year-olds) and 23 adults (tested in a previous study) listened to sentences containing…

Four experiments were performed which had the goal of determining how and when young children acquire the ability to understand long distance dependencies. These studies examined the operations underlying the auditory processing of non-canonically ordered constituents in object-relative sentences. Children 4-6 years of age and an adult population…

The purpose of this study is twofold: (a) to examine whether English finite morphology has the potential to differentiate children with and without language impairment (LI) from Spanish-speaking backgrounds and different levels of English proficiency in comparison to Hispanic English speakers and (b) to investigate the extent to which children who…

We compare native and non-native processing of homonyms in sentence context whose two most frequent meanings are nouns (e.g., sentence) or a noun and a verb (e.g., trip). With both participant groups, we conducted a combined reaction time (RT)/event-related brain potential (ERP) lexical decision experiment with two stimulus-onset asynchronies…

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences in which two noun phrases or two independent clauses were connected by the word or (NP-coordination and S-coordination, respectively). The word either could be present or absent earlier in the sentence. When either was present, the material immediately following or was read more quickly,…

Creating compound nouns is the most productive process of Dutch morphology, with an interesting pattern of form variation. For instance, "staat" "nation" simply combines with "kunde" "art" ("staatkunde" "political science, statesmanship"), but needs a linking element "s" or…

The present study examined the relationship between word concreteness and word frequency using event-related potential (ERP) measurements during a lexical decision task. Potential effects of concreteness in the processing of verbs were also examined. ERPs were recorded from 119 scalp electrodes in 23 right-handed participants. The results showed…

The current study examines whether young and older adults have similar preferences for animate-subject and active sentences, and for using the order of activation of a verb's arguments to determine sentence structure. Ninety-six participants produced sentences in response to three-word stimuli that included a verb and two nouns differing in…

Noun and verb comprehension and production was investigated in two groups of late bilingual, Greek-English speakers: individuals with anomic aphasia and a control group of non-brain injured individuals matched for age and gender. There were no significant differences in verb or noun comprehension between the two groups in either language. However,…

The paper presents a computational model of language in which linguistic abilities evolve in organisms that interact with an environment. Each individual's behavior is controlled by a neural network and we study the consequences in the network's internal functional organization of learning to process different classes of words. Agents are selected…

This article reports on a crosslinguistic comparative study of the processing of Japanese relative clauses (RCs) by Chinese-, Sinhalese-, Vietnamese-, Thai-, and Indonesian-speaking second language (L2) learners. A robust finding in studies on the acquisition of RCs in L2 English and other European languages is that subject-gap RCs are easier than…

In order to study the role of working memory in sentence formulation, we elicited errors of subject-verb agreement in spoken sentence completion, while speakers did or did not maintain an extrinsic memory load (a word list). We compared participants with low and high speaking spans (a measure of verbal working memory for sentence production). As…

The effect of word frequency on the processing of monomorphemic vs. inflected words was investigated in a morphologically relatively limited language, Swedish, with two participant groups: early Finnish-Swedish bilinguals and Swedish monolinguals. The visual lexical decision results of the monolinguals suggest morphological decomposition with…

Positron emission tomography was used to investigate whether the motor-iconic basis of certain forms in American Sign Language (ASL) partially alters the neural systems engaged during lexical retrieval. Most ASL nouns denoting tools and ASL verbs referring to tool-based actions are produced with a handshape representing the human hand holding a…