We explore the interplay between production and comprehension by investigating why producers insert or omit the function word “that” in Object Relative Clauses, and how this choice affects comprehension. We present data from three experiments which suggests that producers insert “that” to alleviate production difficulty and in doing so create a distributional pattern of “that” use. Comprehender...

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Sentences that contain non-local dependencies between words have long been known to cause comprehension difficulty, relative to sentences where all the dependencies are local. Relative clause (RC) structures have been used extensively to evaluate hypotheses about the source of these complexity effects because different word order configurations can be compared while keeping the words the same a...

in german, a relative clause is marked by relative pronoun, which agrees withtheir head noun in gender and number. however, relative clauses in farsi arealways introduced by using a conjunction “ke”. this difference could be iranianand german learners when learning languages, german and farsi to confrontdifficulties. the present study focuses on relativisation strategies based ontypological ana...

Cortical regions engaged by sentence processing were mapped using functional MRI. The influence of input modality (spoken word vs. print input) and parsing difficulty (sentences containing subject-relative vs. object-relative clauses) was assessed. Auditory presentation was associated with pronounced activity at primary auditory cortex and across the superior temporal gyrus bilaterally. Printed...

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia fail to interpret reversible movement-derived sentences. According to the Trace Deletion Hypothesis, this impairment in comprehension results from the deletion of traces of phrasal movement. In order to test this hypothesis, we compared object relatives with a trace to identical object relatives that are not derived by syntactic movement and do not include a ...

This study is a linguistic investigation of four preschool-aged Italian children with SLI (4:5–5:9), using more than one linguistic modality, with the aim of analyzing their performance with relative clauses (subject and object relatives). Linguistic abilities in comprehension and production do not overlap in children with SLI and in typical developing children, revealing characteristics relate...

Dutch speakers with agrammatic Broca's aphasia are known to have problems with the production of finite verbs in main clauses. This performance pattern has been accounted for in terms of the specific syntactic complexity of the Dutch main clause structure, which requires an extra syntactic operation (Verb Second), relative to the basic Subject-Object-Verb order surfacing in Dutch subordinate cl...

Recent work on object shift in the Scandinavian languages has rejected earlier syntactic analyses in favor of prosodic or information-structural accounts. In this paper I present new evidence from Danish copular clauses that argues against a prosodic analysis of the phenomenon. In particular, I show that speci cational copular clauses do not allow object shift and that this fact cannot be accou...