Children use syntax to interpret sentences and learn verbs; this is syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account of early syntactic bootstrapping proposes that a partial representation of sentence structure, the "set of nouns" occurring with the verb, guides initial interpretation and provides an abstract format for new learning. This…

We report three experiments investigating how people process anomalous sentences, in particular those in which the anomaly is associated with the verb. We contrast two accounts for the processing of such anomalous sentences: a syntactic account, in which the representations constructed for anomalous sentences are similar in nature to the ones…

Structural priming paradigms have been influential in shaping theories of adult sentence processing and theories of syntactic development. However, until recently there have been few attempts to provide an integrated account that explains both adult and developmental data. The aim of the present paper was to begin the process of integration by…

Previous research has found that the single argument of unaccusative verbs (such as "fall") is reactivated during sentence processing, but the argument of agentive verbs (such as "jump") is not ( and ). An open question so far was whether this difference in processing is caused by a difference in thematic roles the verbs assign, or a difference in…

When toddlers view an event while hearing a novel verb, the verb's syntactic context has been shown to help them identify its meaning. The current work takes this finding one step further to reveal that even in the absence of an accompanying event, syntactic information supports toddlers' identification of verb meaning. Two-year-olds were first…

Researchers have long been puzzled by the challenge English passive constructions present for language learners, with adult-like comprehension and production emerging only around the age of 5. It has therefore been of significant interest that researchers of other languages, including the Bantu language Sesotho, have reported acquisition of the…

This study examines French-learning infants' sensitivity to grammatical non-adjacent dependencies involving subject-verb agreement (e.g., "le/les garcons lit/lisent" "the boy(s) read(s)") where number is audible on both the determiner of the subject DP and the agreeing verb, and the dependency is spanning across two syntactic phrases. A further…

We show that comprehenders' expectations about upcoming discourse coherence relations influence the resolution of local structural ambiguity. We employ cases in which two clauses share both a syntactic relationship and a discourse relationship, and hence in which syntactic and discourse processing might be expected to interact. An off-line…

In a corpus analysis of spontaneous speech Jaeger and Snider (2007) found that the strength of structural priming is correlated with verb alternation bias. This finding is consistent with an implicit learning account of syntactic priming: because the implicit learning model implemented by Chang (2002), Chang, Dell, and Bock (2006), and Chang,…

Syntactic priming during language production is pervasive and well-studied. Hearing, reading, speaking or writing a sentence with a given structure increases the probability of subsequently producing the same structure, regardless of whether the prime and target share lexical content. In contrast, syntactic priming during comprehension has proven…

What does mass-count syntax contribute to the interpretation of noun phrases (NPs), and how much of NP meaning is contributed by lexical items alone? Many have argued that count syntax specifies reference to countable individuals (e.g., "cats") while mass syntax specifies reference to unindividuated entities (e.g., "water"). We evaluated this…

Mandarin Chinese allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments (NPs) in discourse, which casts doubt concerning child learners' use of syntax in verb learning. This study investigated whether Mandarin learning children would nonetheless extend verb meanings based on the number of NPs in sentences. Forty-one Mandarin-speaking two- and three-year-olds…

This paper tests two claims about the thematic roles Agent and Patient: first, that they can be decomposed into more primitive features, as laid out in Dowty's (1991) Proto-Roles Hypothesis; and second, that these properties can be inferred directly from the grammatical roles subject and object. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants rated the…

An eye movement study of temporarily ambiguous closure sentences confirmed that the early closure penalty in a sentence like "While John hunted the frightened deer escaped" is larger for a simple past verb ("hunted") than for a past progressive verb ("was hunting"). The results can be explained by the observation that simple past tense verbs…

This paper links experimental psycholinguistics and theoretical syntax in the study of subject--verb agreement. Three experiments of elicited spoken production making use of specific characteristics of Italian and French are presented. They manipulate and examine its impact on the occurrence of "attraction" errors (i.e. incorrect agreement with a…