Describes a category of riddles based on lexical ambiguity and uses category theory to illustrate the function of the accessibility hierarchy in riddling. A discussion of riddles and parallelism (the tendency to stay on the same syntactic, semantic, pragmatic track while processing language) shows how parallelism partially accounts for how the…

Infants heard sentences in which prosodic structure was either consistent or inconsistent with the syntactic structure. Results suggest that the prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign a syntactic structure and that learners must engage in active inferential processes to arrive at the correct syntactic…

In 2 experiments, eye movements were monitored as participants followed instructions containing temporary syntactic ambiguities (e.g., "Pour the egg in the bowl over the flour"). The authors varied the affordances of task-relevant objects with respect to the action required by the instruction (e.g., whether 1 or both eggs in the visual workspace…

This article presents a reading-time study of scope resolution in the interpretation of ambiguous cardinality interrogatives in English-French and in English and French native sentence processing. Participants were presented with a context, a self-paced segment-by-segment presentation of a cardinality interrogative, and a numerical answer that…

Research on language comprehension has focused on the resolution of syntactic ambiguities, and most studies have employed garden-path sentences to determine the system's preferences and to assess its use of nonsyntactic sources information. A topic that has been neglected is how syntactically challenging but essentially unambiguous sentences are…

This study compares quantitative and qualitative results for task-based second language (L2) grammar instruction conducted as whole-class, teacher-led discourse (TLD) versus small-group, learner-led discourse (LLD). Participants included 78 English-speaking adults from six university classes of beginning L2 Spanish, with two assigned to each…

This paper links experimental psycholinguistics and theoretical syntax in the study of subject--verb agreement. Three experiments of elicited spoken production making use of specific characteristics of Italian and French are presented. They manipulate and examine its impact on the occurrence of "attraction" errors (i.e. incorrect agreement with a…

Background: Problems with subject-verb agreement and phonological (processing) skills have been reported to occur in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and in those with developmental dyslexia, but only a few studies have compared such problems in these two groups. Previous studies have claimed a causal relationship between…

Describes a study that examines the ability of children to identify given/new elements in passive and cleft forms in order to ascertain the relationship between syntactic and pragmatic acquisition. Results indicate that complete competence with these marked sentence forms does not occur universally until some time in adolescence. (SED)

Examined whether the preferences of verbs for appearing in particular subcategory structures can influence parsing and whether this influence is graded according to the strength of the preferences. Findings suggest that the verb subcategory preferences do produce a graded influence on the parse, according to their strength. (28 references)…

Syntactic processing was explored in nine individuals who stutter (IWS). Grammaticality judgments and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were obtained while participants read sentences, half containing verb-agreement violations, via computer or paper. Judgment accuracy of IWS for the online task, but not offline, was lower, especially for more…

A systematic analysis of the French interrogative focuses on the distinction between the syntactic processes (identification of question words, interrogative phrase preposing, and rules of question formation) and phonological processes (intonation patterns) that characterize questions in French. (Author/MSE)

Investigates whether patient animacy affected the acquisition of the passive construction of syntax of 32 children aged two-five years. Results indicate that children who were taught the passive with animate patients produced more passives in the teaching phase than did comparable children who received inanimate patients. (RJC)

Recent investigations of filler-gap dependencies in sentence processing have assumed that the parser must compute an antecedent-trace relationship in which the trace site is identical to the canonical position of the moved phrase. Pickering and Barry's challenge to this view is refuted and a "direct association hypothesis" is suggested.…

Pickering and Barry's recent argument against the existence of empty categories (ECs) in human sentence processing is disputed. It is argued here that ECs may still play a linking role between thematic role assigners and wh-phrases. One possible parsing algorithm is given that accounts for Pickering and Barry's data. (28 references) (Author/LB)