Core concepts of language are highly contested. In some cases this is legitimate: real empirical and conceptual issues arise. In other cases, it seems that controversies are based on misunderstanding. A number of crucial cases are reviewed, and an approach to language is outlined that appears to have strong conceptual and empirical motivation, and…

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…

This study investigated the tendency of overpassivization of unaccusative verbs by Korean learners of English as a foreign language (FL). Sixty Korean native college students participated in the study, along with 17 English-speaking counterparts serving as a comparison group. Consistent with the findings of previous research, this study found…

To examine the role of morphology in verbal working memory. Forty nine children, all native speakers of Arabic from the same region and of the same dialect, performed a "Listening Word Span Task", whereby they had to recall Arabic uninflected words (i.e., base words), inflected words with regular (possessive) morphology, or inflected words with…

This study tests the hypothesis that distributional information can guide infants in the generalization of word order movement rules at the initial stage of language acquisition. Participants were 11- and 14-month-old infants. Stimuli were sentences in Russian, a language that was unknown to our infants. During training the word order of each…

Two self-paced reading experiments using a paraphrase decision task paradigm were performed to investigate how sentence complexity contributed to the relative clause (RC) attachment preferences of speakers of different working memory capacities (WMCs). Experiment 1 (English) showed working memory effects on relative clause processing in both…

The present acoustic-phonetic study explores whether voicing and devoicing assimilations of French fricatives are equivalent in magnitude and whether they operate similarly (i.e., complete vs. gradient, obligatory vs. optional, regressive vs. progressive). It concurrently assesses the contribution of speakers' articulation rate to the proportion…

The quantifier "dou" (roughly corresponding to English "all") in Mandarin Chinese has been the topic of much discussion in the theoretical literature. This study investigated children's knowledge of this quantifier using a new methodological technique, which we dubbed the Question-Statement Task. Three questions were addressed: (i) whether young…

There is a standard version of the history of modern mainstream psycholinguistics that emphasizes an extraordinary explosion of research in mid twentieth century under the guidance and leadership of George A. Miller and Noam Chomsky. The narrative is cast as a dramatic shift away from behavioristic principles and toward mentalistic principles…

Two experiments examined English speakers' choices of count or mass compatible frames for nouns varying in imageability (concrete, abstract) and noun class (count, mass). Pairing preferences with equative ("much/many") and non-equative ("less/fewer") constructions were compared for groups of teenagers, young adults, and older adults. Deviations…

This study investigates the question of whether language background affects the perception of lexical stress in English. Thirty native English speakers and 30 native Chinese learners of English participated in a stressed-syllable identification task and a discrimination task involving three types of stimuli (real words/pseudowords/hums). The…

Linguistic research suggests that certain skeletal frames (e.g., CVC) are preferred to others (e.g., VCC). We examine whether such preferences constrain reading in the Stroop task. We demonstrate that CCVC nonwords facilitate naming the color "black" (/blaek/, a CCVC frame) relative to CVC controls. Conversely, CCVC items inhibit "red" (a CVC…

There is now a growing body of evidence in various languages supporting the claim that syllables are functional units of visual word processing. In the perspective of modeling the processing of polysyllabic words and the activation of syllables, current studies investigate syllabic effects with subtle manipulations. We present here a syllabary of…

The research investigated how comprehenders use verb information during syntactic parsing. Two reading experiments investigated the relationship between verb-specific variables and reading time. These experiments were close replications of prior work; however, two statistical techniques were used, rather than one. These were item-by-item…

Korean writing is a syllabary where spaces occur between phrases rather than between words. This characteristic of Korean allows different types of information in Korean sentences to be dissociated in ways that are not possible in the languages that have been the focus of most psycholinguistic research, thereby providing new opportunities to…