Can grammatical gender influence how people conceptualize the referents of nouns? Using an implicit measure, we investigated whether such an effect could be found in a task where neither grammatical nor biological gender is highlighted. In the current study, conducted in English, speakers of French, German and Romanian with knowledge of English were asked to generate adjectives they associate w...

Sentence processing in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated as a function of age of first language acquisition with a timed grammatical judgement task. Participants were 30 adults who were born deaf and first exposed to an fully perceptible language between the ages of birth and 13 years. Stimuli were grammatical and ungrammatical examples of 6 ASL syntactic structures : simple, negati...

On the basis of neuropsychological and functional imaging evidence, meaning and grammatical class (particularly the verb-noun distinction) have been proposed as organizational principles of linguistic knowledge in the brain. However, previous studies investigating verb and noun processing have been confounded by the presence of systematic correlations between word meaning and grammatical class....

Two recent papers (de Villiers & Johnson, 2007; Johnson, de Villiers & Seymour, 2005) have claimed that children have difficulty with verbal -s until five-six-years-old. This contrasts with perceptual studies showing evidence for sensitivity to the grammatical properties of verbal -s as young as 1; 4. These apparently conflicting findings can be reconciled by differentiating between early perce...

Two experiments are reported examining the relationship between lexical and syntactic processing during language comprehension, combining techniques common to the on-line study of syntactic ambiguity resolution with priming techniques common to the study of lexical processing. By manipulating grammatical properties of lexical primes, we explore how lexically based knowledge is activated and gui...

Conceiving grammaticality as gradient poses problems for those traditional conceptions of grammar which assume that linguistic expressions can only be either grammatical or ungrammatical. That a sentence is, for instance, “grammatical to 75%” is a nonsensical statement from this point of view. In this tradition, generative grammar assumes the native speaker’s linguistic competence to be the sys...

A number of disparate approaches to language, ranging from cognitive linguistics to stochastic implementations of optimality theory, have challenged the classical distinction between knowledge of language and use of language. Supporters of such approaches point to the functional motivation of grammatical structure, language users’ sensitivity to the frequency of occurrence of grammatical elemen...

Designers bring individual knowledge and perspectives to the team. The hypothesis tested in this research is that semantic and grammatical structures (the language through which concepts are expressed) enable designers to bridge relations among ideas stored in each designer’s mind and from this to generate design concepts. This paper describes a linguistic and a computational method to examine ...

Verbal understanding (śābdabodha) of any utterance requires the knowledge of how words in that utterance are related to each other. Such knowledge is usually available in the form of cognition of grammatical relations. Generative grammars describe how a language codes these relations. Thus the knowledge of what information various grammatical relations convey is available from the generation po...