Event-related brain potentials were recorded while subjects listened to sentences containing a controlled infinitival complement. Subject and object control items were used, both with 2 potential antecedents in the upper clause. Half of the sentences had a gender agreement violation between the null subject of the infinitival complement and an…

Grammatical agreement flags the parts of sentences that belong together regardless of whether the parts appear together. In English, the major agreement controller is the sentence subject, the major agreement targets are verbs and pronouns, and the major agreement category is number. The authors expand an account of number agreement whose tenets…

The family size of the constituents of compound words, or the number of compounds sharing the constituents, has been shown to affect adults' access to compound words in the mental lexicon. The present study was designed to see if family size would affect children's segmentation of compounds. Twenty-five English-speaking children between 3;7 and…

A study of children's structuring of complex sentences requiring mood choices is reported. The objectives were to provide data for an understanding of sentence construction problems and to form a better idea of the acquisition of the intrinsic linguistic contrasts in the Spanish modal system. (MSE)

Demonstrates that an understanding of children's language-acquisition difficulties with a wide range of syntactic constructions should be derived from limitations on the child's ability to deal with processing load and formal representational complexity. Maintains this can be done only in the context of a view of syntactic representation…

Examines and tests the hypothesis that left-branching (LB) sentences are judged to be more formal than right-branching (RB), and that center-branching (CB) sentences would behave like LB. Two studies involving university students are described in which LB, RB, and CB sentence structure formality were judged. (17 references) (GLR)

Attempts to distinguish the role of the structure of a message in determining the different modalities of decodification and memorization in oral discourse based on the theories and experiments of Ragnar Rommetveit of the Oslo School. (CFM)