This study investigates whether distinct neurodevelopmental disorders show distinct patterns of impairments in particular grammatical abilities and the relation of those grammatical patterns to general language delays and intellectual disabilities. We studied two disorders (autism and Williams syndrome [WS]) and two distinct properties (Principle A that governs reflexives and Principle B that, ...

The present study aimed to examine the effect of proficiency on pragmatic comprehension speech acts, implicatures, and routines, as well way learners different levels employ strategies when comprehending a task. Thirty-three high-proficiency forty-one low-proficiency Chinese English completed multiple-choice discourse completion task (MDCT). Of participants, six were selected from two groups pe...

The present investigation was designed to study the production and comprehension of specific means for information highlighted by advanced Iranian learners of English as a Foreign Language. The study focused on the discourse-pragmatically motivated variations of the basic word order such as inversion, pre-posing, it- and Wh-clefts. After taking the Nelson test, a homogeneous group was settled. ...

In current approaches to pragmatic reasoning the comprehension and production of referring expressions is modeled as a result of the interlocutors’ mutual perspective-taking. While such models of pragmatic reasoning have been empirically validated in referential language games experiments, empirical (and computational) work on the generation of referring expressions has shown that speakers do n...

In two event-related potential (ERP) experiments, we determined to what extent Grice's maxim of informativeness as well as pragmatic ability contributes to the incremental build-up of sentence meaning, by examining the impact of underinformative versus informative scalar statements (e.g. "Some people have lungs/pets, and…") on the N400 event-related potential (ERP), an electrophysiological inde...

The role of interference as a primary determinant of forgetting in memory has long been accepted, however its role as a contributor to poor comprehension is just beginning to be understood. The current paper reports two studies, in which speed-accuracy tradeoff and eye-tracking methodologies were used with the same materials to provide converging evidence for the role of syntactic and semantic ...