The main goal of this study is to provide a more precise picture of the pattern of copular omission attested in Italian and English child grammar through a closer investigation of negative contexts. If copular omissions could be considered as a reflex of a " defective " inflectional system, in the sense that certain functional projections could be left underspecified in the first stages of ling...

How children acquire knowledge of verb inflection is a long-standing question in language acquisition research. In the present study, we test the predictions of some current constructivist and generativist accounts of the development of verb inflection by focusing on data from two Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2;0 and 2;6. The constructivist claim that children's early knowledge...

Fluent speakers' representations of verbs include semantic knowledge about the nouns that can serve as their arguments. These "selectional restrictions" of a verb can in principle be recruited to learn the meaning of a novel noun. For example, the sentence He ate the carambola licenses the inference that carambola refers to something edible. We ask whether 15- and 19-month-old infants can recru...

We investigated the knowledge of emotional and motor verbs in children and adolescents from three age ranges (8-11, 12-15, 16-19 years). Participants estimated the verbs familiarity, age of acquisition, valence, arousal, imageability, and motor- and emotion-relatedness. Participants were familiar with the verbs in our dataset. The younger (8-11) attributed an emotional character to the verbs le...

Dissociations of nouns and verbs following brain damage have been interpreted as evidence for distinct neural substrates underlying different aspects of the language system. Some neuroimaging studies have supported this claim by finding neural differentiation for nouns and verbs [Brain 122 (1999) 2337] while others have argued against neural specialisation [Brain 119 (1996) 159; Brain 124 (2001...

Neuroimaging studies have consistently indicated that semantic processing involves a brain network consisting of multimodal cortical regions distributed in the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes. However, little is known about how semantic information is organized and processed within the network. Some recent studies have indicated that sensory-motor semantic information modulates the activa...

The ability to generate novel sentences depends on cognitive operations that specify the syntactic function of nouns, verbs, and other words retrieved from the mental lexicon. Although neuropsychological studies suggest that such operations rely on neural circuits distinct from those encoding word form and meaning, it has not been possible to characterize this distinction definitively with neur...

The common causes of 18p deletion syndrome are spontaneous errors in the chromosomal structure in the early stages of human embryonic development. In this study, a 29-year-old girl was introduced with the features of deletion of chromosome 18. In addition, GTG banding karyotype revealed that this case had a deletion involving the short arm of chromosome 18. In comparison with the usual phenotyp...