We report an experiment that examined 3and 4-year-old children’s representation of the passive structure. Early studies of typically-developing children’s acquisition of the passive suggest that this construction is acquired late and – or that its acquisition is semantically constrained: children comprehend actives much earlier than passives and comprehend actional verb passives earlier than no...

A hotly debated issue in reading research concerns the extent to which readers process parafoveal words, and how parafoveal information might influence foveal word recognition. We investigated syntactic word processing both in sentence reading and in reading isolated foveal words when these were flanked by parafoveal words. In Experiment 1 we found a syntactic parafoveal preview benefit in sent...

This paper addresses the question whether locally coherent word sequences in spoken sentences interfere with the global interpretation. We present a visual world experiment where three depicted events were presented simultaneously while a sentence was spoken. The results suggest that local syntactic coherences are not only processed at a syntactic level, but they are interpreted on-line.

In his paper “Do young children have adult syntactic competence?” Tomasello (Cognition 74 (2000) 209) interprets young children’s conservatism in language production as evidence that early language use, and verb use in particular, are based entirely on concrete lexical representations, showing no evidence of abstract syntactic categories such as “verb” or “transitive sentence”. In this reply, I...

Our work addresses the automatic detection of paraphrastic reformulation in French spoken corpora. The proposed approach is syntagmatic. It is based on specific markers and the specificities of the spoken language. Manual multi-dimensional annotation performed by two annotators provides fine-grained reference data. An automatic method is proposed in order to decide whether sentences contain or ...

Recent developments in the theory of finite splicing systems have revealed surprising connections between long-standing notions in the formal language theory and splicing operation. More precisely, the syntactic monoid and Schützenberger constant have strong interaction with the investigation of regular splicing languages. This paper surveys results of structural characterization of classes of ...

The problem of finding palindromes in strings appears in many variants: find exact palindromes, ignore punctuation in palindromes, require space around palindromes, etc. This paper introduces several predicates that represent variants of the problem of finding palindromes in strings. It also introduces properties for palindrome predicates, and shows which predicates satisfy which properties. Th...

If we consider words over the alphabet which is the set of all elements of a semigroup S, then such a word determines an element of S: the product of the letters of the word. S is strongly locally testable if whenever two words over the alphabet S have the same factors of a fixed length k, then the products of the letters of these words are equal. We had previously proved [19] that the syntacti...

this study set out to investigate the distribution of the syntactic properties associatedwith the prodrop parameter by persian-speaking l2 learners of english in an attemptto examine the (un)attainability of native-like knowledge and (in)accessibility of ugin adult sla. to do so, 92 participants were assigned into different levels of l2knowledge based on their performances on the oxford placeme...