Linguistic dependencies between non-adjacent words have been shown to cause comprehension difficulty, compared with local dependencies. According to one class of sentence comprehension accounts, non-local dependencies are difficult because they require the retrieval of the first dependent from memory when the second dependent is encountered. According to these memory-based accounts, making the ...

OF THESIS EXPLORING CLEFT SENTENCES AND OTHER ASPECTS OF SHUGHNI SYNTAX Shughni, an under-documented language spoken in Tajikistan and Afghanistan, exhibits most syntactic constructions without deep-to-surface-level transformations, thus creating utterances (including questions) in-situ. However, a unique sentence type—the cleft construction—utilizes movement to front an element that receives p...

This paper presents an analysis of Irish clefting couched within LexicalFunctional Grammar. In Irish, cleft sentences are formed using two syntactic permutations. First, a copula is introduced, taking the clefted phrase or word as a predicate. Second, a relative clause is formed containing the remaining material of the original sentence. This basic pattern is valid across a variety of languages...

This study examined patterns of neural activation associated with treatment-induced improvement of complex sentence production (and comprehension) in six individuals with stroke-induced agrammatic aphasia, taking into account possible alterations in blood flow often associated with stroke, including delayed time-to-peak of the hemodynamic response function (HRF) and hypoperfused tissue. Aphasic...

In this paper we describe a parameterisation of lip movements which maintains the dynamic structure inherent in the task of producing speech sounds. A stereo capture system is used to reconstruct 3D models of a speaker producing sentences from the TIMIT corpus. This data is mapped into a space which maintains the relationships between samples and their temporal derivatives. By incorporating dyn...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the effects of infant orthopedics (IO) on the language skills of children with complete unilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP). DESIGN In a prospective randomized clinical trial (Dutchcleft), two groups of children with complete UCLP were followed up longitudinally: one group was treated with IO based on a modified Zurich approach in the first year of life (IO group);...

The  present study aims at exploring the processing difficulty of cleft structures as a type of relative clause for EFL and Persian as  first language learners.The impact of head nouns with various functions as well as that of embedding on the processing of Persian and English cleft structures has been investigated in the present study.The participants  were 68  Iranian male and female students...

This study investigates brain responses to violations of information structure in wh-question-answer pairs, with particular emphasis on violations of focus assignment in it-clefts (It was the queen that silenced the banker). Two types of ERP responses in answers to wh-questions were found. First, all words in the focus-marking (cleft) position elicited a large positivity (P3b) characteristic of...

Complex sentence processing is supported by a left-lateralized neural network including inferior frontal cortex and posterior superior temporal cortex. This study investigates the pattern of connectivity and information flow within this network. We used fMRI BOLD data derived from 12 healthy participants reported in an earlier study (Thompson, C. K., Den Ouden, D. B., Bonakdarpour, B., Garibald...

In two self-paced, sentence-by-sentence reading experiments we examined the difference in the processing of Spanish discourses with repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns in emphatic and non-emphatic contexts. In Experiment 1, repeated names and overt pronouns caused a processing delay when they referred to salient antecedents in non-emphatic contexts. In Experiment 2, both processin...