The present study investigates the processing of Spanish gender agreement during an online comprehension task. The linguistic variables examined are the noun class (semantic or non-semantic) and gender (masculine or feminine) of the head and attractor nouns, head noun morphology (overt or non-overt), and noun class and gender congruencies (matched…

Previous studies indicate that English-learning children acquire the distinction between singular and plural nouns between 22 and 24 months of age. Also, their use of the distinction is correlated with the capacity to distinguish nonlinguistically between singular and plural sets in a manual search paradigm (D. Barner, D. Thalwitz, J. Wood, S.…

The spelling of many disyllabic English word endings holds cues to their grammatical category, beyond obvious inflectional endings such as "-ing" for verbs. For example, some letter sequences are clearly associated with nouns (e.g., "-oon") and others with verbs (e.g., "-erge"). This study extended recent research by Arciuli and Cupples (2006),…

This paper documents the acoustic reflexes of ATR harmony in Kinande followed by an analysis of the dominance reversal found in class 5 nominals. The principal findings are that the ATR harmony is reliably reflected in a lowering of the first formant. Depending on the vowel, ATR harmony also affects the second formant. The directional asymmetry…

Lexical priming, whereby a prime word facilitates recognition of a related target word (e.g., "nurse" [right arrrow] "doctor"), is typically attributed to association strength, semantic similarity, or compound familiarity. Here, the authors demonstrate a novel type of lexical priming that occurs among unassociated, dissimilar,…

In three eyetracking studies, we investigated the role of conceptual plurality in initial parsing decisions in temporarily ambiguous sentences with reciprocal verbs (e.g., "While the lovers kissed the baby played alone"). We varied the subject of the first clause using three types of plural noun phrases: conjoined noun phrases ("the bride and the…

The present study is a grammatical overview of the Bao'an Tu language (one of the varieties included in the designation "ISO6393-3:PEH", also known as "Tongren Monguor", "Southwestern Monguor", or "Tongren Tu"). Bao'an Tu is spoken by approximately 4,000 people who live on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau in…

This dissertation is a typological study of verb-final languages, the purpose of which is to examine various grammatical phenomena in verb-final languages to discover whether there are correlations between the final position of the verb and other aspects of grammar. It examines how finality of the verb interacts with argument coding in simple…

Three experiments tested theories of syntactic representation by assessing "stem-exchange" errors ("hates the record"[right arrow]"records the hate"). Previous research has shown that in stem exchanges, speakers pronounce intended nouns ("REcord") as verbs ("reCORD"), yielding syntactically well-formed utterances. By "lexically based" theories,…

Grammatical gender is generally considered an early and error-free acquisition in French children. This article first examines how children cope with the gender attribution problem, "i.e.", how they determine the gender of individual nouns. We consider the plausibility and requirements of an account in which tacit phonological assignment rules are…

Speakers are known to make subject-verb agreement errors both when a number-mismatching noun intervenes between the head of the subject phrase and the verb (e.g., "*The key to the cabinets are on the table") and in configurations in which there is a number-mismatching noun that does not intervene (e.g., "*The cabinets that the key open are on the…

In this study participants were asked to describe pictured events in one type-written sentence, containing one of two different syntactic structures (subordinated vs. coordinated subject noun phrases). According to the hypothesis, the larger subordinated structure (one noun phrase including a second, subordinated, one) should be cognitively more…

Parents' use of conventional versus unconventional labels with their two- (n=12), three- (n=12) and four-year-old children (n=12) was assessed as they talked about objects that were either known or unknown to them. For known objects, parents provided typical conventional labels casually during the conversation. For unknown objects, parents were…

In the current article, we introduce a new methodology for detecting whether a word in a sentence is conceptually represented as plural and use it to shed light on a debate about whether comprehenders interpret singular indefinite noun phrases within a distributed predicate as plural during online reading. Experiment 1 extended a methodology…

This volume includes two sections of the 2019 NORDSCI international conference proceedings: (1) Education and Educational Research; and (2) Language and Linguistics. Education and Educational Research includes 11 papers covering scientific topics in the full spectrum of education, including history, sociology and economy of education, educational…