This study is based on naturalistic speech samples produced by one child learning Cree as her first language (2;01-4;03) and presents the first investigation into the development of preverbs in the language. Preverbs are an optional class of morpheme which precede the lexical verb stem, dividing into grammatical, lexical and directional (deictic)…

Infants are able to use the contexts in which familiar words appear to guide their inferences about the syntactic category of novel words (e.g. 'This is a' + 'dax' -> dax = object). The current study examined whether 18-month-old infants can rapidly adapt these expectations by tracking the distribution of syntactic structures in their input. In…

Background: Despite its importance, in-depth analysis of connected speech is often neglected in the diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) -- especially for the logopenic variant (lvPPA) for which unreliable differential diagnosis has been documented. Only a few studies have been conducted on this topic in lvPPA. Aims: The aim of this…

This dissertation presents the judgment of what is 'correct' American Sign Language (ASL) structure by the younger generation, using the word order strategies that were used in older generation signers, as well as younger generation attitudes towards the ideology of ASL being a SOV language. This study used an on-line survey to evaluate 83…

In two visual priming experiments, we investigated the relation of form-identical word forms with different grammatical functions in L1 and L2 German. Four different grammatical types (inflected verbs, infinitives, deverbal conversion forms, and countable nouns) were used as primes and their influence on the processing of form-identical inflected…

Young children struggle more with mapping novel words onto relational referents (e.g., verbs) compared to non-relational referents (e.g., nouns). We present further evidence for this notion by investigating children's extensions of noun-noun compounds, which map onto combinations of non-relational referents, i.e., objects (e.g., "baby"…

Although research in sentence comprehension has suggested that processing long-distance dependencies involves maintenance between the elements that form the dependency, studies on maintenance of long-distance subject-verb (SV) dependencies are scarce. The few relevant studies have delivered mixed results using self-paced reading or…

This concept paper highlights the problem of the lack of a unified Arab list of Bloom's taxonomy to be used in teacher-preparation programs across Arab universities. The paper illustrates the current problem and offers steps needed for completing a project that would produce a unified list. The unified list would have both the required validity…

The research presented in this paper aimed to serve two purposes. First, the objective was to understand the relationship between lexical and grammatical spelling. In this way, we studied how the frequency and consistency of verb interacted with the application of grammatical rules. Second, we investigated the dynamics of spelling during the…

Purpose: How older adults engage in predictive processing compared to young adults during sentence processing has been a controversial issue in psycholinguistic research. This study investigated whether age-related differences in predictive processing emerge and how they influence young and older adults' construction of sentential representations…

Purpose: This review article summarizes programmatic research on sentence diversity in toddlers developing language typically and explores developmental patterns of sentence diversity in toddlers at risk for specific language impairment. Method: The first half of this review article presents a sentence-focused approach to language assessment and…

The language of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often characterized by difficulties with pronouns. The underlying reasons for such difficulties are still unclear. This study is the first to test the abilities of children with ASD who speak Italian, a language in which overt subject pronouns are optional but verbs obligatorily…

Subject-verb (SV) agreement helps listeners interpret the number condition of ambiguous nouns ("The sheep is/are fat"), yet it remains unclear whether young children use agreement to comprehend newly encountered nouns. Preschoolers and adults completed a forced choice task where sentences contained singular vs. plural copulas…

Studies have shown that test-takers tend to use keyword-matching strategies when taking listening tests. Keyword-matching involves matching content words in the written modality (test items) against those heard in the audio text. However, no research has investigated the effect of such keywords in listening tests, or the impact of gazing upon…

Relative clauses have long been examined in research on first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition and processing, and a large body of research has shown that object relative clauses (e.g. 'The boy that the girl saw') are more difficult to process than subject relative clauses (e.g. 'The boy that saw the girl'). Although there are different…