The relation between prosody and syntax is investigated here by tracing the emergence of each in a new language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language. We analyze the structure of narratives of four signers of this language: two older second generation signers, and two about 15 years younger. We find that younger signers produce prosodic cues to dependency between semantically related constituents, e...

Functionalist typologists have long argued that pressures associated with language usage influence the distribution of grammatical properties across the world's languages. Specifically, grammatical properties may be observed more often across languages because they improve a language's utility or decrease its complexity. While this approach to the study of typology offers the potential of expla...

This paper describes the Tenjinno Machine Translation Competition held as part of the International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference 2006. The competition aimed to promote the development of new and better practical grammatical inference algorithms used in machine translation. Tenjinno focuses on formal models used in machine translation. We discuss design issues and decisions made when crea...

The longitudinal effects of repeating a timed writing activity on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students’ second language (L2) writing development were investigated. Data for 46 students in two university classes (23 in each class), each with a different course objective, were collected 30 times in the same way over one year. The students’ compositions were analyzed for fluency, grammatic...

This paper describes the Omphalos Context-Free Language Learning Competition held as part of the International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference 2004. After the success of the Abbadingo Competition on the better known task of learning regular languages, the competition was created in an effort to promote the development of new and better grammatical inference algorithms for context-free langu...

Neuropsychological evidence and recent rTMS studies strongly suggest that damage or inhibition of left prefrontal areas may result in specific impairment of verb morphosyntactic processing. However, functional imaging studies have so far failed to identify an area specifically related to grammatical aspects of verb knowledge. To date very few functional studies have been conducted in languages ...

Rapid and automatic processing of grammatical complexity is argued to take place during speech comprehension, engaging a left-lateralized fronto-temporal language network. Here we address how neural activity in these regions is modulated by the grammatical properties of spoken words. We used combined magneto- and electroencephalography to delineate the spatiotemporal patterns of activity that s...