Description of Assessment The Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (CASL) is a norm-referenced oral language assessment. It provides a thorough evaluation regarding the processes of comprehension, expression, and retrieval in four language categories: (1) lexical/semantic skills, (2) syntactic knowledge, (3) supralinguistic knowledge, and (4) pragmatic abilities through use of fifteen su...

The ability of an agrammatic patient to construct structural syntactic and interpretative representations on-line was tested in two experiments. The first focused on global representations spanning an entire utterance, while the second examined lexical syntactic and semantic constraints on verb-argument relations. An off-line version of the second experiment was also carried out. There were two...

Fragile X syndrome is the first cause of hereditary mental retardation. Numerous studies have approached the physical and behavioural phenotypes. This paper will review the main characteristics of speech and language in children with fragile X syndrome. Boys show a late language acquisition, differing comprehension and expression levels, good semantic and syntax acquisition, and speech problems...

Introduction Anaphora has an important function in text comprehension. The processes of anaphoric inference are to make local coherence among sentences. The coherence constructed from several variables (e.g. Lee, 1993). The first variable is an anaphora type: noun phrase, pronoun or ellipsis. Another variable is the properties of antecedents: syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic. Yet another varia...

This paper is designed to illustrate and consider the relations between three types of metarepresentational ability used in verbal comprehension: the ability to metarepresent attributed thoughts, the ability to metarepresent attributed utterances, and the ability to metarepresent abstract, non-attributed representations (e.g. sentence types, utterance types, propositions). Aspects of these abil...

This study examines pragmatic language production deficits in people with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Participants (PD and non-PD) were interviewed and their responses coded for degree of informativeness. PD participants were more under-informative than non-PD participants. Response underinformativeness was associated with decreased executive control, mental status, and speech act comprehension m...

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...