The current work uses memory errors to examine the mental representation of verb-particle constructions (VPCs; e.g., "make up" the story, "cut up the meat"). Some evidence suggests that VPCs are represented by a cline in which the relationship between the VPC and its component elements ranges from highly transparent ("cut…

Two experiments explored the hypothesis that anaphors and demonstratives signal different procedural instructions: Whereas the anaphor "it" brings a concrete entity into a reader's focus, the demonstrative "this" directs the focus to a predicate proposition in a discourse representation. The findings from an online eye-tracking…

This article explores English-speaking children's acquisition of raising structures with an experiencer (e.g.," John seems to Mary to be happy"). We review and address previously unnoticed issues in the methodologies of existing studies testing the acquisition of raising, thus providing a more reliable picture of children's abilities…

Frequency and contingency are two primary statistical factors that drive the acquisition and processing of language. This study explores the role of phrasal frequency and contingency (the co-occurrence probability/statistical association of the constituent words in multiword sequences) during online processing of multiword sequences. Meanwhile, it…

Previous studies have shown that speakers of languages such as German, Spanish, and French reactivate the syntactic gender of the antecedent of a pronoun to license gender agreement. As syntactic gender is assumed to be stored in the lexicon, this has motivated the claim that pronouns in these languages reactivate the lexical entry of their…

Linguistic dependencies between non-adjacent words have been shown to cause comprehension difficulty, compared with local dependencies. According to one class of sentence comprehension accounts, non-local dependencies are difficult because they require the retrieval of the first dependent from memory when the second dependent is encountered.…

This study explores the widely documented difficulty children have with object clitics in the acquisition of Romance languages. It reports on two experiments: a production task and a comprehension task. Results from the elicitation task confirm that object omission occurs at nonnegligible rates in 2- and 3-year-olds. Findings from the…

This study aims to establish whether connectives can create referential expectations in discourse, and, if so, what these expectations are based on: connective semantics or frequency distributions in language use. This was tested by comparing the processing of the connectives "and" and "but" in Dutch and Russian by means of an…

Parents of 592 children between the age of 0 ; 8 and 1 ; 4 completed the Estonian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (ECDI Infant Form). The relationships between comprehension and production of different categories of words and gestures were examined. According to the results of regression modelling the…