Overtensing (the use of an inflected form in place of a nonfinite form, e.g. *"didn't broke" for target "didn't break") is common in early syntax. In a ChiLDES-based study of 36 children acquiring English, I examine the effects of phonological and lexical factors. For irregulars, errors are more common with verbs of low frequency and when…

We investigated the relationship between the acquisition of singular-plural morpho-syntax and children's representation of the distinction between singular and plural sets. Experiment 1 tested 18-month-olds using the manual-search paradigm and found that, like 14-month-olds (Feigenson & Carey, 2005), they distinguished three objects from one but…

This article reports on some of the findings of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project that looks at the mark-making of children under three years old. The data were all collected in the children's homes, and multimodal transcription and analyses were used. The project focused on an investigation of the principles that…

Participant's eye-movements were recorded while they read locally ambiguous sentences. Evidence for processing difficulty was found when the interpretation of the initially preferred misanalysis clashed with that of the globally correct analysis, demonstrating the persistence of the earlier interpretation. Processing difficulty associated with the…

In this article, an empirical study of how Chinese wh-questions are mentally represented in Japanese speakers' grammars of Chinese as a second language (L2) is reported. Both Chinese and Japanese are generally considered "wh-in-situ" languages in which a wh-word is allowed to remain in its base-generated position, and both languages use question…

To what extent do bilinguals have a single, integrated representation of syntactic information? According to Hartsuiker et al. (2004) [Hartsuiker, R. J., Pickering, M. J., & Veltkamp, E. (2004). "Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish-English bilinguals." "Psychological Science," 15,…

The abstractness of children's early syntactic representations has been questioned in the recent acquisition literature. While some research has suggested that children's knowledge of basic constructions such as the transitive is robust and abstract at a very young age, other work has proposed that young children only have constructions that are…

Due to the role language and literature play in the construction of social, economic and cultural systems, reading comprehension has become a growing challenge. This study examined how the relationship between English as a foreign language reading comprehension and life experiences while using the "Sight Word Strategy" could prove…

Discourse comprehension theories frequently assume that discourse comprehension involves a complete analysis of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse levels of processing. However, discourse psychologists have documented some conditions when a partial processing and underspecification of the resulting representations occurs. The articles in…

Natural language does not lend itself well to discussing metaphysical concepts. It has certain expectations based on internalized rules of sense, reference, and predication that make it difficult if not impossible for laypeople or even ecclesiastical authorities to discuss God and theological concepts with others. Though metaphysics has survived…

READABILITY RESEARCHERS HAVE MADE ADVANCES IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, INCREASING THE ACCURACY OF READABILITY FORMULAS BY AS MUCH AS 75 PERCENT. THIS PROGRESS WAS POSSIBLE LARGELY BECAUSE RESEARCHERS IN SEVERAL DISCIPLINES DEVELOPED RESEARCH TOOLS WHICH AIDED IN THE STUDY OF READABILITY. PSYCHOLOGISTS DEVELOPED THE CLOZE PROCEDURE INTO AN ACCURATE AND…

The document describes the ALMO programing language. (Author)

Forty-four undergraduates were assigned to two groups of 22 subjects each. The high association (HA) group was given booklets that contained a series of associatively related (free association norms) contrastive adjectives, one pair to a page, while the low association (LA) group was given booklets containing pairs of associatively unrelated…

Describes the meanings of question forms in Mandarin Chinese in different syntactic contexts. It is shown that the "wh" question words and other question forms have specific meanings in specific environments. (EKN)