Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a proposed speech disorder subtype that interferes with motor planning and/or programming, affecting prosody in many cases. Pilot data (Peter & Stoel-Gammon, 2005) were consistent with the notion that deficits in timing accuracy in speech and music-related tasks may be associated with CAS. This study…

Recent neurophysiological and brain imaging studies have shown that the motor system is involved in language processing. However, it is an open question whether this involvement is a necessary requisite to understand language or rather a side effect of distinct cognitive processes underlying it. In order to clarify this issue we carried out three…

The double dissociation between noun and verb processing, well documented in the neuropsychological literature, has not been supported in imaging studies. Recent imaging studies, in fact, suggest that once confounding with semantics is eliminated, grammatical class effects only emerge as a consequence of building frames. Here we assess this…

In psycholinguistic research, there is still considerable debate about whether the type or token count of the frequency of a particular unit of language better predicts word recognition performance. The present study extends this distinction of type and token measures to the investigation of possible causes underlying syllable frequency effects.…

Several previous studies (B. C. Adams, C. Clifton, & D. C. Mitchell, 1998; D. C. Mitchell, 1987; R. P. G. van Gompel & M. J. Pickering, 2001) have explored the question of whether the parser initially analyzes a noun phrase that follows an intransitive verb as the verb's direct object. Three eye-tracking experiments examined this issue in more…

These experiments investigated whether bilinguals activate phonological representations from both of their languages when reading silently in one. The critical stimuli were interlingual homophones (e.g., sank in English and cinq in French). French-English and English-French bilinguals completed an English lexical decision task. Decisions made by…

Four experiments investigate the scope of grammatical planning during spoken sentence production in Japanese and English. Experiment 1 shows that sentence latencies vary with length of sentence-initial subject phrase. Exploiting the head-final property of Japanese, Experiments 2 and 3 extend this result by showing that in a 2-phrase subject…

Utilizing relevance theory, this study investigated the ability of children with Asperger syndrome (AS) and high-functioning autism (HFA) to use context when answering questions and when giving explanations for their correct answers. Three groups participated in this study: younger AS/HFA group (age 7-9, n = 16), older AS/HFA group (age 10-12, n =…

Many studies reveal effects of verb type on verb retrieval, mainly in agrammatic aphasic speakers. In the current study, two factors that might play a role in action naming in anomic aphasic speakers were considered: the conceptual factor instrumentality and the lexical factor name relation to a noun. Instrumental verbs were shown to be better…

Five experiments used ERPs and eye tracking to determine the interplay of word-level and discourse-level information during sentence processing. Subjects read sentences that were locally congruent but whose congruence with discourse context was manipulated. Furthermore, critical words in the local sentence were preceded by a prime word that was…

Across most languages, verbs produced by agrammatic aphasic individuals are frequently marked by syntactically and semantically inappropriate inflectional affixes, such as "Last night, I walking home." As per language production models, verb inflection errors in English agrammatism could arise from three potential sources: encoding the verbs'…

The authors show that verb aspect influences the activation of event knowledge with 4 novel results. First, common locations of events (e.g., arena) are primed following verbs with imperfective aspect (e.g., was skating) but not verbs with perfect aspect (e.g., had skated). Second, people generate more locative prepositional phrases as…

Two divided visual field priming experiments examined cerebral asymmetries for understanding metaphors varying in sentence constraint. Experiment 1 investigated ambiguous words (e.g., SWEET and BRIGHT) with literal and metaphoric meanings in ambiguous and unambiguous sentence contexts, while Experiment 2 involved standard metaphors (e.g., "The…

Today as in the past, many students struggle with mathematics and become affected as they continually encounter obstacles to engagement. Mathematics is generally seen as a difficult subject and how this subject is communicated to pupils will influence how pupils learn the subject. Classroom routines play an important role in developing students'…

Agrammatism is a frequent sequela of Broca's aphasia that manifests itself in omission and/or substitution of the grammatical morphemes in spontaneous and constrained speech. The hierarchical structure of syntactic trees has been proposed as an account for difficulty across grammatical morphemes (e.g., tense, agreement, and negation). Supporting…