Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioral measures were used to study the potential effects of individual differences in verbal working memory capacity on the processing of sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity in German. Results indicate that syntactic processes in language comprehension are related to individual differences in…

Some research has posited a natural order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes common to all learners of English as a Second Language. This meta-analysis investigated whether a combination of five determinants--perceptual salience, semantic complexity, morphophonological regularity, syntactic category, and frequency) accounts for a…

Argues that Tomasello's (2000) interpretation of young children's conservatism in language production depends on questionable premises. Reviews evidence against the assumptions, showing that children learn item-specific facts about verbs and other lexical items. Asserts that researchers must explore the interactions of lexical and more abstract…

Describes a study that investigated the use of natural language questions on Web search engines. Highlights include query languages; differences in search engine syntax; and results of logistic regression and analysis of variance that showed aspects of questions that predicted significantly different performances, including the number of words,…

This study examined the association of chronological age (CA) with syntax and vocabulary comprehension in 102 children and adolescents with mental retardation. Results indicated that intelligence scores accounted for 55% and 29% of the variability of syntax and vocabulary scores, respectively. Introduction of CA into the regression equation…

Examines the history of a construction from later Old English by comparing two approaches to its analysis, one functional and one formal. Both analyses are internally consistent and, at the same time, vulnerable to criticism from both the inside and the outside. (Author/VWL)

Through corpus analysis and experimentation, this article demonstrates that both grammatical complexity (heaviness) and discourse status (newness) simultaneously and independently influence word order in two English constructions. Argues that heavy and new constituents facilitate the processes of planning and production. (Author/VWL)

Discusses how perspectives on the critical period hypothesis (CPH) have shifted over the last 20-20 years, because of the work of applied linguistics and other disciplines. Advises caution into translating CPH research into personal practice or public policy. (Author/VWL)

Reconstructs the present temporal reference system of Early African American English by investigating the aspectual conditioning of a morphosyntactic construction within the domain of present temporal reference in three representative varieties. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on unusual developmental structures during the simultaneous acquisition of German and English in early childhood, which were evident parallel to a majority of target structures. Explains the cognitive motivation for unusual acquisition structures as well as the eventual retraction from them. (Author/VWL)

Writing and speaking are clearly related activities, but the acts of production are different. To what extent are the underlying processes shared? This paper reports three experiments that use syntactic priming to investigate whether writing and speaking use the same mechanisms to construct syntactic form. People tended to repeat syntactic form…

Recent investigations have supported the ability of persons with Down syndrome to continue learning language on into adulthood. The importance of intervention to increase communicative competence is evident--what is not known is the effectiveness of such intervention. The authors report here on a series of case studies that investigated a language…

Using evidence from eye-tracking studies, Van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, and Liversedge (2005) have argued against currently implemented constraint-based models of syntactic ambiguity resolution. The case against these competition models is based on a mismatch between reported patterns of reading data and the putative predictions of the models.…

In the past decade, there has been a surge of interest in morphological awareness, which refers to the ability to reflect on and manipulate morphemes and word formation rules in a language. This review provides a critical synthesis of empirical studies on this topic from a broad cross-linguistic perspective. Research with children speaking several…

The aim of the present study was to determine whether processing of syntactic word information (lemma) is subserved by the same neural substrate as processing of conceptual or word form information (lexeme). We measured BOLD responses in 14 native speakers of German in three different decision tasks, each focussing specifically on one level of…