Adults are able to access semantic and syntactic information rapidly as they hear or read in real-time in order to interpret sentences. Young children, on the other hand, tend to rely on syntactically-based parsing routines, adopting the first noun as the agent of a sentence regardless of plausibility, at least during oral comprehension. Little is…

In this study, the influence of plausibility information on the real-time processing of locally ambiguous ("garden path") sentences in a nonnative language is investigated. Using self-paced reading, we examined how advanced Greek-speaking learners of English and native speaker controls read sentences containing temporary subject-object…

This study examines whether adult second language (L2) learners of an ungendered first language (L1) are sensitive to gender congruency (grammatical feature absent in the L1) and noun animacy (semantic feature present in the L1) when processing L2 gender concord and whether L2 proficiency level determines such sensitivity. To address these…

This study compared negative and positive evidence in adult word learning, predicting that adults would learn more forms following negative evidence. Ninety-two native English speakers (32 men and 60 women [M[subscript age] = 20.38 years, SD = 2.80]), learned nonsense nouns and verbs provided within English frames. Later, participants produced…

This study investigated vocabulary size and vocabulary composition in Greek children aged 1 ; 6 to 2 ; 11 using a Greek adaptation of Rescorla's Language Development Survey (LDS; Rescorla, 1989). Participants were 273 toddlers coming from monolingual Greek-speaking families. Greek LDS data were compared with US LDS data obtained from the…

In this brief rejoinder, we respond to Farmer, Monaghan, Misyak, and Christiansen (2011). We argue that the data still do not support the claim that reading time is affected by the phonological typicality of a word for its part of speech. We also question Farmer et al.'s claim that interleaving syntactic structures in an experiment modifies…

Learning a new word consists of two primary tasks that have often been conflated into a single process: "referent selection", in which a child must determine the correct referent of a novel label, and "referent retention", which is the ability to store this newly formed label-object mapping in memory for later use. In addition, children must be…

Constraint-based lexical models of language processing assume that readers resolve temporary ambiguities by relying on a variety of cues, including particular knowledge of how verbs combine with nouns. Previous experiments have demonstrated verb bias effects only in structurally complex sentences, and have been criticized on the grounds that such…

Shifting from a focus on transitions between speakers at turn boundaries, this study examines projective and multimodal structures "inside" a turn-constructional unit (TCU), out of which any turn is built. It analyzes how particular noun-phrasal components within a TCU become projective and shape interactive turn spaces (ITSs) where…

The aim of the current study is to reveal asymmetries in the linguistic encoding of male and female persons in Slovak by analyzing ample lexical material from a synchronic perspective. Specifically, I examine a corpus of over 60,000 lemmas, document a sub-corpus of approximately 6,000 personal nouns, devise a taxonomy model of sixteen semantic…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to describe the nature of informational (expository) language in terms of unique grammatical characteristics and discuss applications for assessment and intervention for older school-aged children and adolescents with language impairments. Methods: Information presented is based on a selected literature…

The calculation of text coverage, that is the proportion of a text covered by a vocabulary of a given size, has become a standardized procedure in recent years. Such calculations provide important information for research and pedagogy about issues such as the goals of vocabulary learning and the ease or difficulty of particular texts. Chujo and…

Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving-picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are…

In this study, we performed a fine grained analysis of writing by children with a specific language impairment (SLI) and examined the contribution of oral language, phonological short-term memory (STM), nonverbal ability, and word reading to three writing constructs (productivity, complexity and accuracy). Forty-six children with SLI were compared…

Against the background of the increasing number of multilingual children with atypical language development around the world, this study reports research results on grammatical word class processing involving children with specific language impairment (SLI). The study investigates lexical retrieval of verbs (through picture-naming actions) and…