Previous research has shown that listening to stories supports vocabulary growth in preschool and school-aged children and that lexical entries for even very difficult or rare words can be established if these are defined when they are first introduced. However, little is known about the nature of the lexical representations children form for the words they encounter while listening to stories,...

The present study examined whether linguistic cognitive control skills were related to non-linguistic cognitive control skills in monolingual children (Study 1) and in bilingual children from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds (Study 2). Linguistic inhibitory control was measured using a grammaticality judgment (GJ) task in which children judged the grammaticality of sentences while ig...

This study evaluated the critical period hypothesis for second language (L2) acquisition. The participants were 240 native speakers of Korean who differed according to age of arrival (AOA) in the United States (1 to 23 years), but were all experienced in English (mean length of residence 5 15 years). The native Korean participants’ pronunciation of English was evaluated by having listeners rate...

The acquisition of French object pronominal clitics was investigated from a crosslinguistic transfer and markedness perspective of parameterization. Native speakers of English (-clitics) and Spanish (+clitics) were provided with brief training in French lexical items and the cliticization of object pronouns followed by a grammaticality judgment task including both cliticized and non-pronominal ...

Two studies explored whether sentence comprehension impairments in Alzheimer's disease (AD) are due to deficits in syntactic processing or memory. Study 1 used a picture-pointing sentence comprehension task to measure the final outcome of comprehension in an off-line fashion. It showed the comprehension of 30 patients with AD to be impaired, but suggested that the deficits could not be attribut...

Although disfluencies such as uh are generally not treated as linguistic items, our results suggest that they can affect syntactic parsing. Using a grammaticality judgment task, we demonstrate that disfluencies are able to affect the syntactic parse of a sentence in two ways. First, disfluencies can make syntactic reanalysis more difficult by coming between an ambiguous constituent and a disamb...

Three neuropsychological experiments on a group of 16 cerebellar patients and 16 age- and education-matched controls investigated the effects of damage to the cerebellum on English grammatical morphology across production, comprehension, and grammaticality judgment tasks. In Experiment 1, participants described a series of pictures previously used in studies of cortical aphasic patients. The ce...

We examined the abilities of aphasic patients to make grammaticality judgments on English sentences instantiating a variety of syntactic structures. Previous studies employing this metalinguistic task have suggested that aphasic patients typically perform better on grammaticality judgment tasks than they do on sentence comprehension tasks, a finding that has informed the current view that gramm...

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 ...

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 ...