The study explored the ability of children with syntactic SLI (S-SLI) to produce relative clauses, using two structured elicitation tasks. A preference task and a picture description task were used to elicit subject and object relative clauses. The participants were 18 Hebrew-speaking children with S-SLI aged 9;3 – 14;6, and the control group included 28 typically developing children aged 7;6 –...

Subject relative (SR) clauses have a reliable processing advantage in VO languages like English in which relative clauses (RCs) follow the head noun. The question is whether this is also routinely true of OV languages like Japanese and Korean, in which RCs precede the head noun. We conducted an event-related brain potential (ERP) study of Korean RCs to test whether the SR advantage manifests in...

NPs with intensional relative clauses such as the impact of the book John needs to write pose a significant challenge for trope theory (the theory of particularized properties), since they seem to refer to tropes that lack an actual bearer. I will propose a novel semantic analysis of such NPs on the basis of the notion of a variable object. This analysis avoids a range of difficulties that an a...

Although syntactic complexity has been investigated across dozens of studies, the available data still greatly underdetermine relevant theories of processing difficulty. Memory-based and expectation-based theories make opposite predictions regarding fine-grained time course of processing difficulty in syntactically constrained contexts, and each class of theory receives support from results on ...