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…

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement-clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief…

This study compared syntactic complexity between undergraduate students' research papers and published research papers. A 2 (Groups: experts, students) × 4 (Sections: introduction, methods, results, discussions) mixed factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted on each of the following variables: T-unit length, clause density, the…

Previous studies show that infants store functional morphemes for inferring syntactic categories of adjacent words, and they generally perform better with nouns than with verbs. In this study, we tested whether toddlers can exploit phrasal groupings for syntactic categorization in the face of noisy co-occurrence patterns. Using a visual fixation…

Purpose: The Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn; Scarborough, 1990) is widely used to measure syntax production in young children. The goal of this article is to promote greater clarity and consistency in machine and hand scoring by presenting a revised version of the IPSyn (IPSyn-R) and comparing it with the original IPSyn (IPSyn-O). Method:…

The present study investigated the impact of chunk reading training (CRT) on the online syntactic processing and verbal working memory (WM) of Japanese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners in secondary school. For four weeks, the treatment group (N = 31) underwent CRT, while the control group (N = 25) participated in reading training in…

Background and aims: Although autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has not traditionally been associated with morphosyntactic impairments, some children with ASD manifest significant difficulties in this domain. Sentence Repetition (SRep) tasks are highly reliable tools for detecting morphosyntactic impairment in different languages and across various…

This study proposed a set of measures for assessing noun phrase (NP) complexity in second language (L2) Chinese writing and compared the predictive power of these measures for L2 Chinese writing quality to that of a set of syntactic complexity measures based on the topic-comment unit (TC-unit). Our data consisted of 101 narratives written by…

This study investigates whether there are different first-language-second-language (L1-L2) dependency resolutions by focusing on less-studied crosslinguistic variances in L2 acquisition of Chinese, a null-subject language, by speakers of English, a non-null-subject language. The overt subject pronoun of a Chinese main clause has free orientation…

Despite writing and speaking being related activities, their end-products are entirely different. However, previous studies have not shown consistency in terms of grammar use in these two modes. Accordingly, in the present study, I aim to define the syntactic characteristics in these two modes with large-scale data and organized research designs.…

Preschoolers' earliest productions of sentential complement sentences have matrix clauses that are limited in form. Diessel proposed that matrix clauses in these early productions are propositionally empty fixed phrases that lack semantic and syntactic integration with the clausal complement. By 4 years of age, however, preschoolers produce…

Purpose: This research investigated the nature of cognitive decline in prodromal Alzheimer's disease (AD), particularly in mild cognitive impairment, amnestic type (aMCI). We assessed language in aMCI as compared with healthy aging (HA) and healthy young (HY) with new psycholinguistic assessment of complex sentences, and we tested the degree to…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

Translators employ an array of tools to streamline the translation process, ensuring precision and coherence. The necessity of these tools is particularly pronounced when tackling authentic materials, such as texts from the United Nations (UN). Among these tools, corpora stand out as a pivotal resource. In light of this, this study undertook a…

Agreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as…