It is proposed that humans have available to them two systems for interpreting natural language. One system is familiar from formal semantics. It is a type based system that pairs a syntactic form with its interpretation using grammatical rules of composition. This system delivers both plausible and implausible meanings. The other proposed system…

We address two important questions about the relationship between theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics. First, do grammatical theories and language processing models describe separate cognitive systems, or are they accounts of different aspects of the same system? We argue that most evidence is consistent with the one-system view. Second,…

Minimalism in grammatical theorizing (Chomsky in "The minimalist program." MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995) led to simpler linguistic devices and a better focalization of the core properties of the structure building engine: a lexicon and a free (recursive) phrase formation operation, dubbed Merge, are the basic components that serve in…

We explore the consequences of letting the incremental and integrative nature of language processing inform the design of competence grammar. What emerges is a view of grammar as a system of local monotonic constraints that provide a direct characterization of the signs (the form-meaning correspondences) of a given language. This…

A digital pursuit rotor was used to monitor oral reading costs by time-locking tracking performance to the auditory wave form produced as young and older adults were reading out short paragraphs. Multilevel modeling was used to determine how paragraph-level predictors of length, grammatical complexity, and readability and person-level predictors…

Implicit learning is a process of acquiring knowledge that occurs without conscious awareness of learning, whereas explicit learning involves the use of overt strategies. To date, research related to implicit learning following stroke has been largely restricted to the motor domain and has rarely addressed implications for language. The present…

Some research in child language suggests that semantically general verbs appear in grammatical structures earlier than semantically complex, specific ones. The present study examines whether this was the case in nouns, using imageability as a proxy measure of semantic generality. Longitudinal corpus data from 12 children from the Manchester corpus…

This study intends to shed light on the inconclusive argument pertaining to children's acquisition of logical form (LF) operation. Specifically, we examined children's interpretations of sentences with the ambiguous modal verb "yinggai" "should," like "Xiaohua yinggai shangchuang shuijiao le", whose meanings…

The current study examined the age of learning effect on second language (L2) acquisition. The research goals of the study were twofold: to test whether there is an independent age effect controlling for other potentially confounding variables, and to clarify the age effect across L2 grammar and speech production domains. The study included 118…

The influence of sublexical and lexico-syntactic factors during the grammatical gender assignment process in Spanish was studied in two experiments using the gender decision task. In Experiment 1, the regularity of the ending of gender-marked nouns (masculine nouns ended in "-o" and feminine nouns ended in "-a" and of nouns…

Opposing views of storage and processing of morphologically complex words (e.g., past tense) have been suggested: the dual system, whereby regular forms are not in the lexicon but are generated by rule, while irregular forms are explicitly represented; the single system, whereby regular and irregular forms are computed by a single system, using…

This study investigates the on-line processing of scrambled sentences in Japanese by preschool children and adults using a combination of self-paced listening and speeded picture selection tasks. The effects of a filler-gap dependency, reversibility, and case markers were examined. The results show that both children and adults had difficulty in…

In the syntax literature, it is commonly assumed that a constraint on linguistic competence blocks extraction of "wh-"expressions (e.g. "what" or "which book") from embedded questions, referred to as "wh-"islands. Furthermore, it is assumed that there is an argument/adjunct asymmetry in extraction from "wh-"islands. We report results from two…

This study examined classifiers in the Hmong language with a particular focus on gaining insights into the underlying cognitive process of categorization. Forty-three Hmong speakers participated in three experiments. In the first experiment, designed to verify the previously postulated configurational (saliently one-dimensional, saliently…

This study investigated the effect of repeated evaluation and repeated exposure on grammatical acceptability ratings for both acceptable and unacceptable sentence types. In Experiment 1, subjects in the Experimental group rated multiple examples of two ungrammatical sentence types (ungrammatical binding and double object with dative-only verb),…