The traditional binary notion of grammaticality is more and more often replaced by intermediate levels of acceptability, also called gradience. This paper aims to provide a numerical account of syntactic gradience. It introduces and investigates a numerical model with which acceptability can be predicted by factors derivable from the output of a parser. Its performance is compared to other expe...

In this paper we investigate the movement constraints superiority and discourse linking. These have played an important role in the tradition of generative syntax and might therefore be expected to be universal, but they are usually argued to be absent from German. We looked for evidence of them in German data using the methodology of magnitude estimation of well-formedness, and compared this d...

We present in this paper a method for hybridizing constituency treebanks with constraint-based descriptions and enrich them with an evaluation of sentence grammaticality. Such information is calculated thanks to a two-steps technique consisting in : (1) constraint grammar induction from the source treebank and (2) constraint evaluation for all sentences, on top of which a grammaticality index i...

In an artificial grammar learning task, amnesic patients classified test items as well as normal subjects did. Item similarity did not affect grammaticality judgments when similar and nonsimilar test items were balanced for the frequency with which bigrams and trigrams (chunks) that appeared in the training set also appeared in the test items. Amnesic patients performed like normal subjects. Th...

Does tuning to one's native language explain the "sensitive period" for language learning? We explore the idea that tuning to (or becoming more selective for) the properties of one's native-language could result in being less open (or plastic) for tuning to the properties of a new language. To explore how this might lead to the sensitive period for grammar learning, we ask if tuning to an earli...

The present research investigates the acquisition of the English locative alternation by Korean EFL learners, which poses a learnability paradox taking Pinker’s framework of learnability theory as its basis. It focuses on two questions (1) whether the broad-range and narrow-range semantic constraints are operative in the interlanguage of Korean EFL learners as they are in L1 children’s and (2) ...

UNLABELLED This article reviews the some of the most widely used methods used for studying children's language acquisition including (1) spontaneous/naturalistic, diary, parental report data, (2) production methods (elicited production, repetition/elicited imitation, syntactic priming/weird word order), (3) comprehension methods (act-out, pointing, intermodal preferential looking, looking while...

Comprehension of filler-gap dependency relations (as in this is the man who the woman is touching) is supported by Broca's area. There are two views regarding the processing role of this brain region in comprehending these dependencies. Specifists hold that Broca's area plays a specific syntactic role in processing filler-gaps. Generalists maintain that as the on-line linking of fillers and gap...

Over many years now, we have provided evidence that the cortical area associated with Broca’s aphasia sustains operations necessary for the analysis of syntactic constructions that contain displaced constituents. A massive body of empirical data— from comprehension, real-time processing, and grammaticality judgment—shows that Broca’s area supports mechanisms involved in the computation of trans...