Purpose: Pronouns are referentially ambiguous: For example, "she" could refer to any female. Nonetheless, errors in pronoun interpretation rarely occur for adults with typical development (TD) due to several strategies implicitly shared between the talker and listener. The purpose of this study was to test the impacts of syntactic,…

It has been proposed that second language (L2) learners differ from native speakers in processing due to either influence from their native language or an inability to integrate information from multiple linguistic domains in a second language. To shed new light on the underlying mechanism of L2 processing, we used an event-related potentials…

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children's comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an…

Purpose: The fine-tuning of linguistic prosody in later childhood is poorly understood, and its neurological processing is even less well studied. In particular, it is unknown if grammatical processing of prosody is left- or rightlateralized in childhood versus adulthood and how phonological working memory might modulate such lateralization.…

Listeners interpret cues in speech processing immediately rather than waiting until the end of a sentence. In particular, prosodic cues in auditory speech processing can aid listeners in building information structure and contrast sets. Native speakers even use this information in combination with syntactic and semantic information to build mental…

What determines consonant doubling in English? This question is pursued by using a large lexical database to establish systematic correlations between spelling, phonology and morphology. The main insights are: Consonant doubling is most regular at morpheme boundaries. It can be described in graphemic terms alone, i.e. without reference to…

This study examines the effect of non-sentential context prosody pattern on lexical activation in Persian. For this purpose a questionnaire including target and non-target words is used. The target words are homographs with two possible stress patterns belonging to different syntactic categories. Participants are asked to read out the words aloud…

Background: Sentence repetition is gaining increasing attention as a source of information about children's sentence-level abilities in clinical assessment, and as a clinical marker of specific language impairment. However, it is widely debated what the task is testing and therefore how informative it is. Aims: (1) To evaluate the effects of…

The "syntactic bootstrapping" hypothesis proposes that syntactic structure provides children with cues for learning the meaning of novel words. In this article, we address the question of how children might start acquiring some aspects of syntax before they possess a sizeable lexicon. The study presents two models of early syntax…

The present study examined the use of prosody in semantic and syntactic disambiguation by means of comparison between Japanese and Chinese speakers' production of English sentences. In Chinese and Japanese, lexical prosody is more prominent than sentence prosody, and the sentential meaning contrast is usually realized through particles or a change…

The study of definite descriptions has been a central part of research in linguistics and philosophy of language since Russell's seminal work "On Denoting" (Russell 1905). In that work Russell quickly dispatches analyses of denoting expressions with forms like "no man," "some man," "a man," and "every…

A Korean particle "-(n)un" is widely known as a topic and/or contrast marker. Despite this seemingly well-established view on the meaning/function of "-(n)un," however, its exact nature is far from clearly understood. The main purpose of this dissertation is to shed light on the meaning of "-(n)un," by looking at it…

Prosody plays a variety of roles in infants' communicative development, aiding in attention modulation, speech segmentation, and syntax acquisition. This study investigates the extent to which parents also spontaneously modulate prosodic aspects of infant directed speech in ways that distinguish semantic aspects of language. Fourteen mothers of…

This study analyzes the complex predicates in Bangla (Bengali); serial verb constructions (SVCs) and verb compounds (VCs). Based on semantics, syntactic behavior and prosody, I claim that the predicates belong to two different modules of grammar: SVCs in syntax and VCs in the lexicon. Additionally, I show that clausal tense marked in the last verb…

This article contains a literature review of evidence of large prosodic domains that correspond to syntactic units such as a clause or a sentence. In particular, different phonetic nonmanual cues that may relate to clause or sentence boundaries are discussed in detail. On the basis of various ideas and views in the literature, we also describe two…