Proposes that the bei-construction, a Mandarin Chinese passive construction, is not derived uniformly, but rather, three types of bei-sentences must be recognized. Presents basic facts about bei-construction; shows consistent structural differences between bei-sentences with and without the lexical logical subject, discussing A-dependency and…

Examines parallelisms between surface structure and logical structure and why those parallelisms do not extend farther than they do. If syntactic deep structures are identified with logical structures, an appropriate cyclic principle guarantees that cyclic rules will apply so that large-scale parallelisms exist between surface syntactic structures…

Explored the processing of ambiguous sentences that may be assigned a gapping or nongapping structure. Focuses on what factors affect the ultimate interpretive preferences for these sentences. In a questionnaire, sentences with greater parallelism between arguments received more gapping responses, though an overall bias toward the nongapping…

Using the speeded-grammaticality judgment task, shows that factors that regulate garden path strength in ambiguous sentences also have an influence on processing of corresponding ungrammatical sentences in that they determine how reliably the ungrammaticality is detected. Argues that this processing correlation provides evidence for serial parsing…

Reacts to Cook's (2001) essay on invented sentences, which argues that sentences such as "the philosopher pulled the lower jaw of the hen," have the valuable language teaching functions of providing useful language data for the student, promoting noticing and memorability, and allowing he teacher to create new sentences. (Author/VWL)

Real-time language comprehension is a principal cognitive ability and thereby relates to central properties of the human cognitive architecture. Yet how do the presumably universal cognitive and neural substrates of language processing relate to the astounding diversity of human languages (over 5,000)? The authors present a neurocognitive model of…

All other things being equal the parser favors attaching an ambiguous modifier to the most recent possible site. A plausible explanation is that locality preferences such as this arise in the service of minimizing memory costs--more distant sentential material is more difficult to reactivate than more recent material. Note that processing any…

An on-line ''word detection'' paradigm was used to assess the comprehension of thematic and transitive verb agreements during sentence processing in individuals diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's Disease (AD, n=15) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD, n=14). AD, FTD, and control participants (n=17) were asked to listen for a word in a sentence.…

The experiments reported in this article used a delayed same/different sentence matching task with concurrent measurement of eye movements to investigate the nature of the plausibility effect. The results clearly show that plausibility effects are not due to low level lexical associative processes, but arise as a consequence of the processing of…

We often speak about developing students' cultural and intercultural awareness as part of the language learning process. However, these elements are often dealt with superficially and the methods used are somewhat unclear to many practitioners and to learners themselves. As a result, we very often hear that learners do not learn a language at the…

SV sentences with unaccusative verbs like "The leaf fell" involve movement from object to subject position. This line of studies tested whether young children can produce this movement and whether they represent SV sentences with unaccusatives as derived by movement. In Hebrew, unaccusatives appear in both SV and VS orders. This optionality allows…

In "The New Language of the Old West," "Deadwood"'s creator and executive producer David Milch offers an extended exposition of the television show's language: "Language--both obscene and complicated--was one of the few resources of society that was available to these people.... It's very well documented that the obscenity…

Eight experiments evaluated a core assumption of several theories of text processing, the shared resource assumption, which states that component text processes share limited processing resources. Short texts each contained two critical sentences that together warranted a causal inference. The syntactic structure of the second sentence was either…

Purpose: To compare morphosyntactic skills of preschoolers in different subgroups of language impairment. Method: Eighty-three children participated in this study. They represented 4 groups: (a) language impairment-only, (b) speech-language impairment with minimal or no final cluster reduction/consonant deletion, (c) speech-language impairment…

Presenting extensive entertaining explanations of the rules of punctuation, this revised and expanded book offers advice on punctuation and a "bizarre comedy of manners." Whimsical illustrations and the travails of numerous fictional characters accompany explanations of the rules of punctuation. Chapters in the book address the…