Easy access to the internet allows adolescents to share humor, such as memes, via social media. This quasi-experimental study investigated whether there was a difference in the number of memes comprehended on an assessment test among adolescents who were typically developing, adolescents who were deaf or hard of hearing, and adolescents with…

This study examines the comprehension of relative clauses by Chinese-speaking children, and evaluates the validity of the predictions of the Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson, 1998, 2000) and the Relativized Minimality approach (Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi, 2009). One hundred and twenty children from three to eight years of age were tested by…

This study investigates children's acquisition of the distinction between direct speech (Elephant said, "I get the football") and indirect speech ("Elephant said that he gets the football"), by measuring children's interpretation of first, second, and third person pronouns. Based on evidence from various linguistic sources, we…

This study provides evidence for implicit learning in syntactic comprehension. By reanalyzing data from a syntactic priming experiment (Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008), we find that the error signal associated with a syntactic prime influences comprehenders' subsequent syntactic expectations. This follows directly from error-based implicit learning…

This work has two objectives. First of all, to offer psychometric instruments that help more precisely identify and differentiate children with specific language impairment (SLI) in the educational field and, secondly, to establish profiles of the two cases that illustrate the two current subtypes of SLI: phonologic-syntactic SLI and…

Although pragmatic deficits are well documented in autism, little is known about the extent to which grammatical knowledge in this disorder is deficient, or merely delayed when compared to that of typically developing children functioning at similar linguistic or cognitive levels. This study examines the knowledge of constraints on the…

This study reports on the characteristics and distribution of naming errors of patients undergoing cortical stimulation mapping (CSM). During the procedure, electrical stimulation is used to induce temporary functional lesions and locate "essential" language areas for preservation. Under stimulation, patients are shown slides of common objects and…

This study examines syntactic and morphological aspects of the production and comprehension of pronouns by 99 typically developing French-speaking children aged 3 years, 5 months to 6 years, 5 months. A fine structural analysis of subject, object, and reflexive clitics suggests that whereas the object clitic chain crosses the subject chain, the…

Background: Children with language impairments have difficulty in reporting verbal inferences, but it is unclear whether the source of this problem lies in limitations of language comprehension, an inability to access world knowledge, or the integration of information in discourse. Children with pragmatic language impairments (CwPLI) are often…