Surface features of essays include nonlinguistic characteristics such as total number of words per essay (essay length), sentence length, and word length as well as linguistic characteristics such as the total number of grammatical errors, the types of grammatical errors, or the kinds of grammatical constructions (e.g., passive or active) that appear in an essay. This study examines the feasibi...

The ambiguity of KO ISS has been much discussed in the literature (see, e.g., works cited above). But it is yet to receive a satisfactory treatment on both empirical and theoretical grounds. It poses a challenge to Lee (2008), for instance: Lee claims that the imperfective marker always selects for a VP that takes an actor subject. As illustrated by (3), however, it is compatible with a sentenc...

This investigation examines the performances of 63 urban 4- to 7-year-old African American children from middle-income homes on two tasks designed to assess the development of comprehension skills. Performances on a task designed to elicit responses to wh-questions, and another to distinctions between active and passive sentence constructions, revealed grade effects and a positive relationship ...

Grodzinsky, Piñango, Zurif, and Drai (1999) argue that a statistical analysis of pooled sentence comprehension data from published studies of Broca's aphasic patients supports the dominance of a differential pattern of performance on active and passive voice structures. They argue that these results counter a previous study in which individual patient data from published studies were analyzed. ...

The resolution of local syntactic ambiguity by the Human Sentence Processing Mechanism is a topic which has provoked considerable interest in recent years. At issue is whether such ambiguities are resolved on the basis of syntactic information alone (cf. Minimal Attachment Frazier, 1979), or whether they are resolved on some other basis. Crain & Steedman (1982) suggest that the resolution proce...

The focus of this paper is a construction which is surprisingly rarely scrutinised: the impersonal passive of the intransitive. Although it sometimes receives a brief mention in discussions of the passive, and although the impersonal passive label is often wrongly given to morpholexical impersonal constructions, there are as yet no thorough analyses of the impersonal passive available for any l...

the polysemy and lexical similarity of the linguistic structures may lead to ambiguity in the speech and latency. but since a language needs to be away from this deficiency so as to be functional and useful, it needs to be cleansed from such meaning latencies based on the available indications. one indication that can be categorized among the verbal indications is the sentence intonation. by ch...

background and aim: with regard to the shortage of proper materials in persian for the evaluation of speech perception in children, this study aimed to develop the persian version of the bkb sentence test, and determine its content validity in normal persian speaking children aged 6-12 years. methods: this study was an applied research. the study procedure comprised sentence construction, deter...

Sentence reading involves multiple linguistic operations including processing of lexical and compositional semantics, and determining structural and grammatical relationships among words. Previous studies on Indo-European languages have associated left anterior temporal lobe (aTL) and left interior frontal gyrus (IFG) with reading sentences compared to reading unstructured word lists. To examin...