This paper intends to study the effect of explicit-inductive and explicit-deductive grammar instruction on the acquisition of relative clauses by Persian learners of English. The two intact classes were randomly assigned to one of the treatments, inductive or deductive. Both groups received instruction about English relative clauses using the explicit-inductive (experimental group), or the expl...

This study attempts to specify the contribution of two subregions of Broca's area during syntactic and semantic processing of sentences by examining brain activation in a grammaticality judgment task. The processing of two types of ungrammatical sentences was examined. One type leaves the thematic interpretation generally unaffected, by violating the noun-verb agreement in number, while the oth...

Working memory capacity (WMC) has been shown to correlate with performance on complex cognitive tasks, including language comprehension and production. However, some scholars have suggested that performance outcomes result from an interaction between individual differences (IDs), such as WMC, and learning conditions (Robinson, 2005a). Reber, Walkenfeld, and Hernstadt (1991) specifically claimed...

A central question in online human sentence comprehension is, "How are linguistic relations established between different parts of a sentence?" Previous work has shown that this dependency resolution process can be computationally expensive, but the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. This article argues that dependency resolution is mediated by cue-based retrieval, constrained by in...

Recursion is argued to be the crucial property distinguishing human and non-human primates language learning faculty (Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002). Recently, 2 studies (Bahlmann & Friederici, 2006; de Vries, Monaghan, Knecht, & Zwitserlood, 2008), which investigated the learnability of a recursive artificial grammar of the type of AB, used the same material but reported divergent results. We...

The functional anatomy of syntactic transformations, a major computational operation invoked in sentence processing, was identified through a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation. A grammaticality judgment task was used, presented through a novel hidden-blocks design. Subjects listened to transformational and nontransformational sentences in which a host of other complexity gener...

Generative works over the last few decades have focused mostly on deriving the word order and hierarchical relations of these three genitives, as well as on deriving their possible interpretations. However, very often, these analyses seem to overgenerate, such that speaker judgment on genitive acceptability is frequently lower than what would be predicted on the basis of those analyses. In this...

Task-Based Language Teaching has been developed in response to the teacher-dominated, focus-on-forms methods such as Present, Practice, Produce (PPP). The body of literature is replete with studies examining learning efficacy PPP approach versus TBLT; however, these did not use assessment tasks comparing two methods. To this end, present study used an Assessment Task, a Grammaticality Judgment ...

Abstract The selective vulnerability of morphology in agrammatic aphasia is often interpreted as evidence that closedclass items reside in a particular part of the brain (i.e., Broca's area); thus, damage to a part of the language processor maps onto behavior in a transparent fashion. We propose that the selective vulnerability of grammatical morphemes in receptive processing may be the result ...

Agrammatic aphasic individuals exhibit marked production deficits for tense morphology. This paper presents three experiments examining whether a group of English-speaking agrammatic individuals (n=10) exhibit parallel deficits in their comprehension of tense. Results from two comprehension experiments (on-line grammaticality judgment studies) suggest that these individuals are impaired for ten...