Children often interpret first noun phrases (NP1s) as agents, which improves comprehension of actives but hinders passives. While children sometimes withhold the agent-first bias, the reasons remain unclear. The current study tests the hypothesis that children default to the agent-first bias as a "best guess" of role assignment when they…

The study tested how the Recency Preference and Predicate Proximity model (Gibson et al. in Cognition 59(1):23-59, 1996, https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1016/0010-0277(88)90004-2) plays out by examining the attachment preferences of native Russian speakers when processing locally ambiguous participial relative clause sentences with three potential NP…

Purpose: The results of automatic machine scoring of the Index of Productive Syntax from the Computerized Language ANalysis (CLAN) tools of the Child Language Data Exchange System of TalkBank (MacWhinney, 2000) were compared to manual scoring to determine the accuracy of the machine-scored method. Method: Twenty transcripts of 10 children from…

This study addresses the question of whether gender agreement is impaired in SLI German. Article production and gender marking on articles were examined in three groups of German-speaking children: 10 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), 10 age-matched typically developing (TD) children, and 10 TD children who were on average two…

Purpose: The graphic symbol is the foundation of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for many preliterate individuals; however, research has focused primarily on static graphic symbol sequences despite mainstream commercial technologies such as animation. The goal of this study was to compare static and animated symbol sequences…

Effects of semantic versus syntactic constraints on resolution of Hebrew heterophonic-homographic words were examined at three reading skill levels. Fourth-and sixth-grade students and a group of adults read aloud sentences containing two types of heterophonic-homographs: noun-noun (e.g., BYCH [Hebrew characters] is read as beitsa 'egg' and bitsa…

Purpose: There is limited research on the writing of young Spanish-English bilinguals and their writing in both languages. In the current study, we addressed whether written syntax features differed by language (English and Spanish) and varied as a function of grade level, English learner status, and instructional program (dual or English…

Purpose: There is limited research on the writing of young Spanish-English bilinguals and their writing in both languages. In the current study, we addressed whether written syntax features differed by language (English and Spanish) and varied as a function of grade level, English learner status, and instructional program (dual or English…

Within the last two decades, researchers have begun to investigate how L2 learners process syntactic, morpho-syntactic, and lexical information during the comprehension of L2 sentences. The present study aimed to add to research by investigating how L1 influences L2 processing of sentences indicating plurality in constructions involving numerals.…

This dissertation investigates the morphological and morphosyntactic processing of case-marking by native and nonnative speakers of Turkish, through behavioral and electrophysiological responses. The study explores the locus of case processing costs during first (L1) and second language (L2) word recognition both in isolation and in sentences. It…

The syntactic complexities of English sentence structures induced the Indonesian students' sentence-level accuracies blurred. Reciprocally, the meanings conveyed are left hanging. The readers are increasingly at sixes and sevens. The Sentence Crimes were, therefore, the major essences of diagnosing the students' sentence-level inaccuracies in this…

Although previous research has observed a facilitative influence of the first language (L1) on the acquisition and processing of gender agreement in a second language (L2), particularly in language pairs with similar gender agreement marking, the question of whether knowledge of two languages with gender can confer an additional advantage for…

Purpose: This study examines the contribution of number morphology to language comprehension abilities among children with specific language impairment (SLI) and age-matched controls. It addresses the question of whether number agreement facilitates the comprehension accuracy of object-initial declarative sentences. According to the predictions of…

The topic of this dissertation concerns the ways that (IN)ANIMACY distinctions interact with various sub-systems of the human language faculty, in particular, morpho-syntax. In Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), morpho-syntax and ANIMACY can be pit against each other directly on the same set of target words, allowing a close inspection of the…

It is a common finding across languages that young children have problems in understanding patient-initial sentences. We used Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a reliable voice-marking system and highly frequent patient voice constructions, to test the predictions of several accounts that have been proposed to explain this difficulty: the…