Age 3 follow-up data are presented for sample of 34 toddlers diagnosed between ages of 24 and 31 months with expressive specific language impairment. Late talkers made more rapid progress in lexical development and in descriptive, explanatory, and definitive use of language than in syntactic and morphological language. Toddlers who'd been more…

This longitudinal study assessed the narrative language development of primary grade children with slow expressive language development (SELD) as toddlers who either had or had not moved into the normal range of expressive language by early school age. Deficits in narrative skills tended to disappear in children with a history of SELD, though…

Attempts to show that exophora falls within the category of anaphora proper and not deixis; it is in terms of a conceptual representation of the situation evoked that the anaphor is interpreted; and exphora is a more central manifestation of anaphora than the "endophoric" type. Naturally occurring data from English and French are the…

Addresses the position of adjectives in the noun phrase in Modern Greek, concentrating on the possible interpretations that the adjective can have relative to the noun. Differences observed between definite and indefinite noun phrases are suggested to be consequences of their predicative nature and the way this interacts with the…

Examines recent trends in research in natural language processing and discusses some applications of this research to the solution of information management problems. The article emphasizes that the importance of natural language processing systems is reflected in their frequent use in support of other computer programs. (71 references) (CK)

Examines the application of linguistic theory to machine translation and translator tools, discusses the use of machine translation and translator tools in the real world of translation, and addresses the impact of translation technology on conceptions of language and other issues. Findings indicate that the human mind is flexible and linguistic…

Examines, through two studies, how prosodic information affects syntactic processing in locally ambiguous sentences. The first study dealt with people's judgments of the continuation of locally ambiguous sentence fragments of differing lengths. The second concerned ratings of normality of sentence types with differing contours. (27 references)…

Demonstrates the similarities between English and Farsi with respect to discourse-functional constraints on inversion. It is argued that this phenomenon is significant because these two languages exhibit different canonical word order and thus expectations can be raised from some functional-syntactic universals. (15 references) (Author/CK)

Focuses on the brain's response to one aspect of syntactic processing--the processing of sentences that violate constraints on constituent movement. Findings indicate that movement constraints can be applied during the earliest stages of sentence processing, perhaps in conjunction with the creation of phrase structure. (46 references) (Author/CK)

Compared effects of syntactic context and attention on identifying masked spoken words in reading-disabled seventh graders and good readers. Found that, in both groups, syntactic structure of context triggers a process of anticipation for particular syntactic categories based on an assumption that linguistic messages are syntactically coherent;…

Explores an Optimality-Theoretic approach to account for observed cross-linguistic patterns of code switching that assumes that code switching strives for well-formedness. Optimization of well-formedness in code switching is shown to follow from (violable) ranked constraints. An argument is advanced that code-switching patterns emerge from…

Investigates the contraction of negatives in a corpus of discourse and writing in order to permit comparison of the relative influences of various linguistic and social parameters on contraction. Argues that pragmatic and morphological interpretation of negatives entails that negative contraction and auxiliary contraction should be distinguished…

Focuses on the consequences that the structural configuration of lexical knowledge has for the timecourse of parsing. Discusses reduced relative clauses and proposes a new lexical-structural analysis for manner of motion verbs. The article examines consequences for frequency-based models and all models whose difficulty derives from the ambiguity…

Discusses the varieties of Liberian English spoken in Liberia: Kru Pidgin English, spoken by Kru mariners and migrant workers; Settler English, spoken by descendants of 19th-century African American immigrants to Liberia; and Vernacular Liberian English (VLE), spoken by the rest of Liberia's English-speaking population. Focuses on tense aspect in…

Two experiments examine the effects of the native language on the second language acquisition argument structure. The linguistic focus is on agentive verbs of directed motion and change-of-state verbs in Spanish and English. Examined whether Spanish and Turkish learners of English undergeneralize the transitivity alternation with manner of motion…