Children's understanding of passives of certain mental state predicates appears to lag behind passives of so-called actional predicates, an asymmetry that has posed a major empirical challenge for theories of passive acquisition. This paper argues against the dominant view in the literature that treats the predicate-based asymmetry as…

A fundamental question in psycholinguistics concerns how grammatical structure contributes to real-time sentence parsing and understanding. While many argue that grammatical structure is only loosely related to on-line parsing, others hold the view that the two are tightly linked. Here, I use the incremental growth of grammatical structure in…

The English Resultative Construction (ERC) is a satellite-framed structure with no identical equivalent in Spanish. In a series of studies, we analyzed and compared recognition (acceptability judgment task) and comprehension (sentence comprehension task) of three ERC subtypes with the English Depictive Construction (EDC) (which has a Spanish…

An evaluation measure (EM) guides a learner's choice of grammar when more than one is compatible with available input. EM must be universal, so children receiving comparable input acquire comparable grammars. It must favor the choices children actually make. The theoretical shift from rule-based grammars to principles-and-parameter-based grammars…

Traditionally, acquisition of syntactic knowledge and the development of sentence comprehension behaviors have been treated as separate disciplines. This article reviews a growing body of work on the development of incremental sentence comprehension mechanisms and discusses how a better understanding of the developing parser can shed light on two…

This study investigates whether distinct neurodevelopmental disorders show distinct patterns of impairments in particular grammatical abilities and the relation of those grammatical patterns to general language delays and intellectual disabilities. We studied two disorders (autism and Williams syndrome [WS]) and two distinct properties (Principle…

Twenty-five monolingual (L1) children with specific language impairment (SLI), 32 sequential bilingual (L2) children, and 29 L1 controls completed the Test of Active & Passive Sentences-Revised (van der Lely 1996) and the Self-Paced Listening Task with Picture Verification for actives and passives (Marinis 2007). These revealed important…