This paper investigates the nature of verbal working memory (WM) in sentence comprehension and provides evidence for overlapping pools of verbal WM resources between on-line sentence comprehension and other verbally-mediated tasks. We report the results of two dual-task experiments. In Experiment 1, participants simultaneously performed a selfpaced reading task and a self-paced arithmetic addit...

This paper reports the results of four dual-task experiments that were designed to determine the extent of domain-specificity of the verbal workingmemory resources used in linguistic integrations. To address this question, syntactic complexity was crossed in a 2 · 2 design with the complexity of a secondary task, which involved either (1) arithmetic integration processes and therefore relied on...

This study aims at investigating the effect of dynamic assessment (DA) on L2 writing achievement if applied via blogging as a Web 2.0 tool, as well as examining which pattern of interaction is more conducive to learning in such an environment. The results of the study indicate that using weblogs to provide mediation contributes to the enhancement of the overall writing performance, vocabulary a...

We conducted an Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) meta-analysis to identify brain regions that are recruited by linguistic stimuli requiring relatively demanding semantic or syntactic processing. We included 54 functional MRI studies that explicitly varied the semantic or syntactic processing load, while holding constant demands on earlier stages of processing. We included studies that int...

Accounts that specify semantic and/or syntactic complexity as the primary determinant of the order in which children acquire particular words or grammatical constructions have been highly influential in the literature on question acquisition. One explanation of wh-question acquisition in particular suggests that the order in which English speaking children acquire wh-questions is determined by ...

Currently, the majority of investigations of linguistic manifestations of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease are conducted based on manual linguistic analysis. Grammatical complexity is one of the language use characteristics sensitive to the effects of Alzheimer's disease and is difficult to operationalize and measure using manual approaches. In the current study, we demon...

The language development of two deaf girls and four deaf boys in Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) and spoken Dutch was investigated longitudinally. At the start, the mean age of the children was 3;5. All data were collected in video-recorded semistructured conversations between individual children and deaf and hearing adults. We investigated the lexical richness and syntactic complexity o...

Narrative is a complex discourse unit. Creating it requires “a joint process of event comprehension and language production” (Trabasso & Rodkin, 1994, p.87), and perspective taking, understanding and explaining behaviors and emotions of others. In the present study, it is claimed that these requirements map onto three levels of complexity: 1) Plot complexity reflecting the temporal and thematic...

since the appearance of the knowledge of syntax the grammarians made an effort to develop the rules of arabic language, through which the quran was sent down. to do this they considered some principles:1 ) to develop the rules of syntax they only referred to the language of arab noble and eloquent tribes. 2) they developed the rules of syntax based on the widespread and prevalent language of ar...