Children's production of bare nominals is universal. When acquiring languages disallowing bare nominals, children will develop from the bare to the non-bare stage. However, Mandarin nominals may appear bare or non-bare in various positions with all kinds of interpretations. This dissertation conducts two acquisition studies to examine the…

English uses three types of generic NPs: bare plurals ("Lions are dangerous"), definite singulars ("The lion is dangerous"), and indefinite singulars ("A lion is dangerous"). These three NP types are not interchangeable: definite singulars and bare plurals can have generic reference at the NP-level, while indefinite singulars are compatible only…

Cyclic Linearization is adopted to account for the island repair of Sluicing in English. The extraction of wh-phrase out of certain islands undergoes non-successive-cyclic movement, which yields conflicting ordering statements. The derivation can be rescued by deleting all ordering statements in IP, including those conflicting ones. Two arguments…

The scope of linguistic planning, or the amount of linguistic information that speakers can prepare in advance for an utterance they are about to produce, is highly variable. Distinguishing between possible sources of this variability provides a way to discriminate between accounts of language production that assume structurally incremental and…

This thesis is concerned with the description and analysis of two semantically different types of definite articles in German. While the existence of distinct article paradigms in various Germanic dialects and other languages has been acknowledged in the descriptive literature for quite some time, the theoretical implications of their existence…

This study contributes an approach to understanding the cognitive models underlying rhetorical arguments about the "first wave" of women's rights discourse in the United States, which began to emerge more publically with the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 and started to gain momentum in 1851 and beyond. The usage of the lexical item "sphere" (in…

We examined priming of adjective-noun structures in Dutch hearing and deaf children. In three experiments, hearing 7- and 8-year-olds, hearing 11- and 12-year-olds, and deaf 11- and 12-year-olds read a prenominal structure (e.g., "the blue ball"), a relative clause structure (e.g., "the ball that is blue"), or a main clause…

Much work has demonstrated so-called attraction errors in the production of subject-verb agreement (e.g., "The key to the cabinets are on the table", [Bock, J. K., & Miller, C. A. (1991). "Broken agreement." "Cognitive Psychology, 23", 45-93]), in which a verb erroneously agrees with an intervening noun. Six self-paced reading experiments examined…

The current experiments address several concerns, both empirical and theoretical in nature, that have surfaced within the verb learning literature. They begin to reconcile what, until now, has been a large and largely unexplained gap between infants' well-documented ability to acquire verbs in the natural course of their lives and their rather…

This study examines Spanish [Verb + Noun (V + N)] compounds based on insights drawn from Construction Grammar. In contrast to previous studies that treat Spanish [V + N] compounds as having one common structural and semantic property, this study proposes two types of [V + N] compound constructions in Spanish, each with its own respective…

Languages differ from one another and must therefore be learned. Processing biases in word order can also differ across languages. For example, heavy noun phrases tend to be shifted to late sentence positions in English, but to early positions in Japanese. Although these language differences suggest a role for learning, most accounts of these…

The verb has traditionally been characterized as the central element in a sentence. Nevertheless, the exact role of the verb during the actual ongoing comprehension of a sentence as it unfolds in time remains largely unknown. This paper reports the results of two Cross-Modal Lexical Priming (CMLP) experiments detailing the pattern of verb priming…

This study investigated noun-verb retrieval patterns of 30 adults with chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia and 67 typical adults, to determine if schizophrenia affected nouns (associated with temporal lobe function) differently from verbs (associated with frontal lobe function). Stimuli were homophonic homographic homonyms, balanced according…

An increasing number of results in sentence and discourse processing demonstrate that comprehension relies on rich pragmatic knowledge about real-world events, and that incoming words incrementally activate such knowledge. If so, then even outside of any larger context, nouns should activate knowledge of the generalized events that they denote or…

The present study investigated the use of lexical bundles in the academic writing of advanced Chinese EFL learners. A corpus of doctoral dissertations by the learners and a corpus of published journal articles by professional writers were collected for the study. Four-word lexical bundles in the two corpora were identified and analysed. Results…