Many studies have used a neuroscience-based approach towards examination of writing and reading skills and how these might differ between languages. However, few studies have focused on differences in grammatical processing that may be specific to certain languages. Studies have shown that grammar for active and passive sentences differs between Chinese and English. Chinese, a morphologically n...

Previous research has demonstrated that properties of a currently fixated word and of adjacent words influence eye movement control in reading. In contrast to such local effects, little is known about the global effects on eye movement control, for example global adjustments caused by processing difficulty of previous sentences. In the present study, participants read text passages in which voi...

People with agrammatic aphasia often experience greater difficulty comprehending passive compared to active sentences. The Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH; Grodzinsky, 2000) proposes that aphasic individuals cannot generate accurate syntactic representations of passive sentences and, hence, use an agent-first processing strategy which leads to at-chance performance. We tested this claim using th...

This paper shows that some individuals with Down syndrome are capable of producing, imitating (repeating) and comprehending passive sentences, even though group studies indicate that this is not the norm. Experimental tests of elicited production, repetition and comprehension of passive and active sentences applied in ten adolescents with Down syndrome, speakers of Portuguese, showed that out o...

Formal work in linguistics has both produced and used important mathematical tools. Motivated by a survey of models for context and word meaning, syntactic categories, phrase structure rules and trees, an attempt is being made in the present paper to present a mathematical model for structuring of sentences from active voice to passive voice, which is is the form of a transitive verb whose gram...

When native English speakers say active and passive sentences, verb stems are longer in passive sentences than in their active counterparts (Stromswold et al., 2002; Rehrig et al., 2015) because phrase-final lengthening and polysyllabic shortening cause the verb stem vowel to be longer in passives (Aveni et al., 2016; Mayro et al., 2016). Eye-tracking and gating studies of unaltered sentences r...