Learning language requires acquiring the grammatical categories of words in the language, but learning those categories requires understanding the role of words in the syntax. In this study, we examined how this chicken and egg problem is resolved by learners of an artificial language comprising nouns, verbs, adjectives, and case markers following…

Purpose: This study examined two markers of language impairment (LI) in a single experiment, testing sentence imitation and grammatical morphology production using an imitation task with masked morphemes. One goal was to test predictions of the morphological richness account of LI in Czech. We also tested the independent contributions of language…

Most current models of sentence comprehension assume that the human parsing mechanism (HPM) algorithmically computes detailed syntactic representations as basis for extracting sentence meaning. These models share the assumption that the representations computed by the HPM accurately reflect the linguistic input. This assumption has been challenged…

This article presents three studies that investigate when syntactic constraints become available during the processing of long-distance backwards pronominal dependencies ("backwards anaphora" or "cataphora"). Earlier work demonstrated that in such structures the parser initiates an active search for an antecedent for a pronoun, leading to gender…

Purpose: The authors asked whether adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) could fast-map novel nouns and verbs when word learning depended on using the speaker's pragmatic or syntactic cues. Compared with typically developing (TD) comparison children, the authors predicted that syntactic cues would prove harder for the group with DS to use and that…

Evidence from recognition memory tests using German-English bilinguals indicates that bilinguals can code words either in terms of language-specific cues or in terms of general semantic cues, as the task requires, but that the two sets of cues are not independent. (FB)

Research supported by Public Health Service grants to the Bureau of Child Research, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas. (VM)

Based on the author's doctoral dissertation. Experiments supported by a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship and a National Institute of Mental Health grant; paper preparation supported by the Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, through the U.S. Office of Education. (VM)

Research supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Educational Testing Service; examines the psychological validity of Fillmore's theory of case grammar. (DD)

Five experiments, using a subject-verb agreement error elicitation procedure, investigated syntactic planning processes in production. The experiments examined the influence of semantic integration--the degree to which phrases are tightly linked at the conceptual level--and contrasted two accounts of planning: serial stack-based systems and…

Reports on four experiments designed to compare the accuracy of the listener's memory for information associated with the thematic and nonthematic portions of sentences. Results are consistent with the identification of the nonthematic portion of a sentence as the locus of new ideas conveyed to the language recipient. (CLK)

This paper describes and gives the results of a psycholinguistic experiment investigating the impact of certain surface syntactic structures on the perception and memory of language. The basic assumption is that the content of an utterance must be its most salient aspect in memory. The for of an utterance, its surface grammar and phonology, must…

In the first section a sketch of a tense logic is presented and a mechanism is suggested for including aspects of the tense logic into the Grammar (theory of language). Specifically, several grammatical structures are shown to incorporate temporal features. A semantic projection mechanism is utilized to amalgamate the temporal features in elements…