Purpose: To gain a better understanding of the cognitive processes supporting verbal abilities, the underlying structure and interrelationships between common verbal measures were investigated. Methods: An epidemiological sample (n = 374) of school-aged children completed standardized tests of language, intelligence, and short-term and working memory, as well as nonstandardized measures of gram...

In this study we investigate the effect of age of acquisition (AoA) on grammatical processing in second language learners as measured by event-related brain potentials (ERPs). We compare a traditional analysis involving the calculation of averages across a certain time window of the ERP waveform, analyzed with categorical groups (early vs. late), with a generalized additive modeling analysis, w...

Native languages (L1s) are tacitly assumed to be complete and stable in adults. Here we report an unexpected individual variation in judgment of L1 regarding Japanese sentences including honorification, and further clarify its neural basis with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). By contrasting an honorification judgment task with a spelling judgment task, the lower performance group ...

The learnability of center-embedded recursive structures has attracted much attention (Corballis, 2007; Friederici, 2004; Rey, Perruchet, & Fagot, 2012). However, most of the previous studies adopted the artificial grammar learning paradigm (Reber, 1967) and did not apply natural language stimuli. Rather, they applied synthetic meaningless training materials, which hardly represent the richness...

Long-distance dependencies in center-embedded recursion are among the most typical but also most difficult structures in human language (Corballis, 2007; Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002). Concerning the impact of the learning sample on grasping object-action relations, there are two opposing arguments: more is better vs. fewer is better (Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Brandone, 2008). The fo...

Although very young children process ongoing language quickly and effortlessly, research indicates that they continue to improve and mature in their language skills through adolescence. This prolonged development may be related to differing engagement of semantic and syntactic processes. This study used event related potentials and time frequency analysis of EEG to identify developmental differ...

Linguistic interference in the acquisition of tenses has remained a fertile area for extensive studies on the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. Congruent with previous studies, this study aims to find out whether errors in the learning of a grammatical category is more ascribable to negative transfer resulting from learners’ first language or the rules governing its use in the...

We propose in this paper a method for quantifying sentence grammaticality. The approach based on Property Grammars, a constraint-based syntactic formalism, makes it possible to evaluate a grammaticality index for any kind of sentence, including ill-formed ones. We compare on a sample of sentences the grammaticality indices obtained from PG formalism and the acceptability judgements measured by ...

The demand for computer-assisted language learning systems that can provide corrective feedback on language learners’ speaking has increased. However, it is not a trivial task to detect grammatical errors in oral conversations because of the unavoidable errors of automatic speech recognition systems. To provide corrective feedback, a novel method to detect grammatical errors in speaking perform...