Discusses syntactic optionality, the coexistence within an individual grammar of two or more variants of a given construction that make use of the same lexical resources and express the same meaning. Focus is on syntactic optionality in second language grammars. (Author/VWL)

Discussion of data repositories available in global information systems focuses on facilitating access by providing semantic views. Highlights include the mapping relation; syntax and semantics of the mapping; query formulation and processing; terminological systems for semantic views; and relational algebraic expressions. (LRW)

Describes Glean, a system which is based on the idea that coherent text contains significant latent information, such as syntactic structure and patterns of language use, which can be used to enhance the performance of information retrieval systems. Proposes an approach to increase the precision of information-retrieval using a supertagger.…

Presents exploratory research evaluating a conceptual structure for the description of visual content of images. The structure classifies visual attributes into a "Pyramid" containing four syntactic levels and six semantic levels. Experiments performed suggest the Pyramid is conceptually robust and can be used to: organize visual content…

Two studies investigated the syntactic bootstrapping abilities of 5- and 7-year-old children with specific language impairment and comparison groups matched for equivalent language level or chronological age. Only typically developing 5-year-olds showed evidence of using syntactic clues. However, continued syntactic growth was seen in all…

This study compared the morphosyntax of French speaking children with specific language impairment to the morphosyntax of English speaking children acquiring a second language (French). Findings indicated that use of morphosyntax by both groups has significant similarities and children in both groups demonstrated optional infinitive effects in…

This study explored the acquisition of regular and irregular past tense in 21 children with specific language impairment. The findings support a morphosyntactic rather than morphophonological learning model, such as the extended optional infinitive model, with regard to the limitations in finiteness marking and for affected children. (Contains…

In a continuation of the conversation with Fitch, Chomsky, and Hauser on the evolution of language, we examine their defense of the claim that the uniquely human, language-specific part of the language faculty (the ''narrow language faculty'') consists only of recursion, and that this part cannot be considered an adaptation to communication. We…

Patient WBN has a lexical-semantic deficit resulting in impaired performance on language comprehension tasks that require access to verb meanings in both single-word and sentence contexts. However, WBN shows no such comprehension impairment with respect to lexical syntax. Specifically, he performs without error on comprehension tasks that rely on…

Four experiments examined whether 3-year-olds' comprehension of pronouns was affected by the discourse prominence of the possible antecedents. In each experiment, children listened to short stories. The final (test) sentence of each story differed in whether it continued the grammatical subject (and first-mentioned character) established in prior…

The study presented here investigated the role of memory in normal sentence processing by looking at ERP effects to normal sentences and sentences containing grammatical violations. Sentences where the critical word was in the middle of the sentence were compared to sentences where the critical word always occurred in sentence-final position.…

There is incomplete consensus on the anatomical demarcation of Broca's area in the left inferior frontal gyrus and its functional characterization remains a matter of debate. Exclusive syntactic specialization has been proposed, but is overall inconsistent with the neuroimaging literature. We examined three functional MRI (fMRI) datasets on…

Recent work has taken different approaches in attempting to use linguistics to identify the authors of documents by the style of their writing. Traditionally, linguists have sought to identify similarities and differences in a host of features, including spelling, syntax, word usage and others, and to draw inferences regarding authorship based on…

In a recent study of conceptual combination, Estes (2003) presented evidence for the priming of relational information in the absence of shared constituents between the prime and target (e.g., "pancake spatula" was interpreted more quickly following "bacon tongs" than following "city riots"). He argued that these data support the view that…

This article presents an empirical and theoretical critique of the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model (Myers-Scotton, 1993; Myers-Scotton and Jake, 2001), and includes a response to Jake, Myers-Scotton and Gross's (2002) (JMSG) critique of MacSwan (1999, 2000) and reactions to their revision of the MLF model as a "modified minimalist approach." The…