This study explored Wh question comprehension in Hebrew-speaking children with syntactic SLI (SySLI), comparing which and who questions and subject and object questions. The participants were 14 Hebrew-speaking children with SySLI aged 9;312;0, and the control group included 25 typically-developing children aged 9;1-10;0. The study used two binary picture selection tasks. The results indicated ...

The starting point for this paper is an asymmetry between overt linguistic indexicals and (alleged) covert indexicals. It has been proposed that the problem can be solved by making covert indexicals optional (Martí 2006) and that this provides a much better (linguistically respectable) account of the key phenomena than one that advocates an optional process of free (not linguistically mandated)...

In spoken language, pitch accent can mark certain information as focus, whereby more attentional resources are allocated to the focused information. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, this study examined whether pitch accent, used for marking focus, recruited general attention networks during sentence comprehension. In a language task, we independently manipulated the prosody and sema...

Patients with right hemisphere damage (RHD) often show communicative-pragmatic deficits involving different expressive modalities, i.e. linguistic, extralinguistic and paralinguistic. Most previous research has evaluated pragmatic ability using linguistic tasks only, while the extralinguistic aspects of communication have received less attention. The aim of the present study was to provide a mu...

This article examines the nature and time course of the processing of discontinuous dependency relationships in language and draws suggestive parallels to similar issues in music perception. The on-line language comprehension data presented demonstrate that discontinuous structural dependencies cause reactivation of the misordered or "stranded" sentential material at its underlying canonical po...

Increasing research evidence suggests that women are more advanced than men in pragmatic language comprehension and Theory of Mind (ToM), which is a cognitive component of empathy. We measured the hemodynamic responses of men and women while they performed a second-order false-belief (FB) task and a coherent story (CS) task. During the FB condition relative to the baseline (unlinked sentences [...

In this contribution we focus on one phenomenon that has a special role in pragmatic theorizing, namely metaphor, and select two issues deriving from theoretical models and prone to be tested experimentally. The first issue concerns the comprehension procedure, that is whether access to metaphorical meaning goes through a mandatory literal stage and thus is indirect, as predicted by a Gricean i...

AIM This cross-sectional study focused on the effect of very preterm (VPT) birth on language development by analysing phonological, lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic skills and assessing the role of cognitive and memory skills. METHOD Sixty children (29 males, 31 females) born VPT (<32wks) aged 5 years were compared with 60 children with typical development. The linguistic assessment was pe...