Current syntactic theory limits the range of grammatical variation so severely that the logical problem of grammar learning is essentially trivialized. Yet, children exhibit characteristic stages in syntactic development at least through their sixth year. Rather than positing maturational delays in the substantive principles of children's grammars, I suggest that acquisition di culties are the ...

This quasi-experimental study aimed to investigate the effect of task repetition under four conditions on the three dimensions of oral production (accuracy, complexity and fluency) and grammatical knowledge gain of learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). 40 young learners of English as a Foreign Language in four classes were randomly assigned into one of the following groups: repetitio...

We present algorithms for identifying Hindi Noun Groups and Verb Groups in a given text by using morphotactical constraints and sequencing that apply to the constituents of these groups. We provide a detailed repertoire of the grammatical categories and their markers and an account of their arrangement. The main motivation behind this work on word group identification is to improve the Hindi PO...

Using an audio-book as a stimulus, and timelocked hemodynamic response modelling of individual events, we show that grammatical subjects and grammatical objects can be differentiated based on fMRI images acquired immediately after hearing a word. A searchlight analysis suggests that grammatical relation information is encoded in the superior and middle temporal gyrus. This finding confirms earl...

To better understand the influence of grammatical encoding on the retrieval and encoding of phonological word-form information during speech production, we examine how grammatical class constraints influence the activation of phonological neighbors (words phonologically related to the target--e.g., MOON, TWO for target TUNE). Specifically, we compare how neighbors that share a target's grammati...

Recent parsing research has started addressing the questions a) how parsers trained on different syntactic resources differ in their performance and b) how to conduct a meaningful evaluation of the parsing results across such a range of syntactic representations. Two German treebanks, Negra and TüBa-D/Z, constitute an interesting testing ground for such research given that the two treebanks mak...

Sharing portions of grammars across languages greatly reduces the costs of nutltilingual grammar engineering. Related languages share a ntuch wider range of linguistic itff'ornuttio;t than typically assunwd in stamlard mttltilingttal gramtmtr atwhitectures. Taking grammatical relatedness seriously, we are particularly interested in designing lhtguistically motivated grammatical resottrces Jbr S...

Unification grammars (UG) are a grammatical formalism that underlies several contemporary linguistic theories, including Lexical-functional Grammar and Head-driven Phrase-structure Grammar. UG is an especially attractive formalism because of its expressivity, which facilitates the expression of complex linguistic structures and relations. Formally, UG is Turing-complete, generating the entire c...

We used an online word-monitoring paradigm to examine sentence processing in healthy seniors and frontotemporal dementia patients with progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA) or a nonaphasic disorder of social and executive functioning (SOC/EXEC). Healthy seniors were sensitive to morphosyntactic, major grammatical subcategory, and selection restriction violations in a sentence. PNFA patients were...

The knowledge of grammatical categories such as nouns and verbs is considered to lie at the foundations of human language comprehension and production abilities. Words’ distributional and phonological properties contribute to both adult and infant learning of grammatical categories. Here we investigate the contribution of semantic cues to the acquisition of grammatical categories using grammati...