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. We argue that dependency resolution is mediated by cue-based retrieval, constrained by independently m...

Beginning with Fitch and Hauser (2004), a number of studies have used the Artificial Grammar Learning task to investigate learning rules generating hierarchical structural relations among sequences of elements that are characteristic of the grammar of human languages. Studies that have examined the learning of a center-embedding rule (AB rule) exemplified by the sentence, The dogs the girl the ...

Abstract This paper empirically tests the embedding constraints on gapping in Persian. It has been suggested that differs from other kinds of ellipsis banning embedding. However, first counter-examples literature come Following up previous experiments embedded several languages, we report results two acceptability judgment tasks. Our show that, while is overall acceptable Persian, speakers’ jud...

The study explores the difficulties of native English speakers in acquiring the Chinese word order, aiming to relate it to the markedness theories. According to the Differential Markedness Hypothesis (DMH), the degrees of learner difficulty in second language acquisition can be predicted according to the degrees of typological markedness between learners’ first language (L1) and their second la...

Language in autism has been the subject of intense interest, because communication deficits are central to the disorder, and because autism serves as an arena for testing theories of language acquisition. High-functioning older children with autism are often considered to have intact grammatical abilities, despite pragmatic impairments. Given the heterogeneity in language skills at younger ages...

Comprehension failures in agrammatic aphasics, as well as their difficulties in sentence construction, have been attributed to an underlying deficit involving the retrieval of syntactic structure. In this study we show that four agrammatic patients display a remarkable sensitivity to structural information, as indicated by their performance on a grammaticality judgment task. These results indic...

The goals of the present study were (1) to determine whether grammatical gender on a noun modifier can prime recognition of the following noun, (2) to determine whether the priming effect involves facilitation, inhibition, or both, and (3) to compare performance across three different tasks that vary in the degree to which explicit attention to gender is required, including word repetition, gen...

Incidental learning of grammar has been an area of interest for many decades; nevertheless, existing research has primarily focused on artificial or semi-artificial languages. The present study examines the incidental acquisition of the grammar of a natural language by exposing adult speakers of an ungendered L1 (English) to the gender agreement patterns in Russian (a language that was novel to...

In recent research on aphasia, a considerable number of studies have examined deficits in patients with agrammatism in the domain of verb-finiteness marking in different languages. Whilst much of this research has focused on tense and subject-verb agreement and has shown that tense is particularly impaired, the nature of verb-finiteness deficits in agrammatism is still a matter of controversy. ...

Dynamical, self-organizing models of sentence processing predict "digging-in" effects: The more committed the parser becomes to a wrong syntactic choice, the harder it is to reanalyze. Experiment 1 replicates previous grammaticality judgment studies (F. Ferreira & J. M. Henderson, 1991b, 1993), revealing a deleterious effect of lengthening the ambiguous region of a garden-path sentence. The aut...