We studied spontaneous speech noun-phrase production in eight French-speaking children with SLI (aged 5;0 to 5; 1) and controls matched on age (4;10 to 5;11) or MLU (aged 3;2 to 4;1). Results showed that children with SLI prefer simple DP structures to complex ones while producing more substitution and omission errors than controls. The three…

Memory-based language processing (MBLP) is an approach to language processing based on exemplar storage during learning and analogical reasoning during processing. From a cognitive perspective, the approach is attractive as a model for human language processing because it does not make any assumptions about the way abstractions are shaped, nor any…

As is well known, the Insular Celtic languages (Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Breton and the now-extinct Manx and Cornish) utilize a class of verbal abstracts known as "verbal nouns" to perform the functions that are fulfilled in other Indo-European languages by infinitives and supines. Yet in many ways the Celtic verbal noun remains somewhat of an…

An impairment for verbs has been described in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), suggesting that a disruption of frontal-subcortical circuits may result in dysfunction of the neural systems involved in action-verb processing. A previous study suggested that deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) during verb generation…

The form of a determiner is dependent on different contextual factors: in some languages grammatical number and grammatical gender determine the choice of a determiner variant. In other languages, the phonological onset of the element immediately following the determiner affects selection, too. Previous work has shown that the activation of…

Word learning is a lifelong activity constrained by cognitive biases that people possess at particular points in development. Age of acquisition (AoA) is a psycholinguistic variable that may prove useful toward gauging the relative weighting of different phonological, semantic, and morphological factors at different phases of language acquisition…

The phonetics and phonology of the Kyungsang dialect of Korean is distinct from those of the standard Seoul dialect with regard to segments and lexical pitch. However, whether the distinctive phonetics and phonology of Kyungsang Korean are maintained by younger speakers is questionable due to the increased exposure to Seoul Korean and 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…

The correct use of an affix, such as the English plural suffix, may reflect mastery of a morphological process, but it may also depend on children's syntactic, semantic, and phonological abilities. The present article reports a set of experiments in support of this latter view, specifically focusing on the importance of the phonological make-up of…

Adult Spanish speakers generally know which form a determiner preceding a noun should have even if the noun is not in their lexicon, because Spanish demonstrates high predictability between determiner form and noun form ("la" noun-"a" and "el" noun-"o"). We asked whether young children learning Spanish are similarly sensitive to the correlation of…

This study investigates the phonetic implementation of stress in American English compounds by measuring the interaction of stress cues with different intonation patterns. Participants in an experiment produced compounds and phrases such as "greenhouse" and "green house" in different prosodic positions and sentence types to elicit the contrast in…

Research has demonstrated that children use different strategies to infer a referent. One of these strategies is to use inflectional morphology. We present evidence that toddlers learning Spanish are capable of using gender word inflections to infer word reference. Thirty-month-olds were tested in a preferential looking experiment. Participants…

Some syllables are louder, longer and stronger than other syllables at the lexical level. These prominent prosodic characteristics of certain syllables are captured by suprasegmental features including fundamental frequency, duration and intensity. A language like English uses fundamental frequency, duration and intensity to distinguish stressed…

Gumuz is a Nilo-Saharan dialect cluster spoken in the river valleys of northwestern Ethiopia and the southeastern part of the Republic of the Sudan. There are approximately 200,000 speakers, the majority of which reside in Ethiopia. This study is a phonological and grammatical analysis of two main dialects/languages: Northern Gumuz and Southern…

In this paper we analyzed some of the phonological rules of Russian loanword adaptation in Persian, on the view of Optimal Theory (OT) (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004). It is the first study of phonological process on Russian loanwords adaptation in Persian. By gathering about 50 current Russian loanwords, we selected some of them to analyze. We…