Using the structural priming paradigm, the present study explores predictions made by the implicit prosody hypothesis (IPH) by testing whether an implicit prosodic boundary generated from a silently read sentence influences attachment preference for a novel, subsequently read sentence. Results indicate that such priming does occur, as evidenced by an effect on relative clause attachment. In par...

Perner (1991) has claimed that the linguistic structures and reasoning tasks mastered by 4-year-olds share a requirement to handle metarepresentation. In contrast, de Villiers (2000) has argued that they share a requirement to handle misrepresentation. In the current study, a correlation is observed between success on false belief tasks and the acquisition of relative clause sentences. This cor...

The role of visual salience on utterance form was investigated in a picture description study. Participants heard spoken questions about animate or inanimate entities in a picture and produced a relative clause in response. Visual properties of the scenes affected production choices such that less salient inanimate entities tended to yield longer initiation latencies and to be described with pa...

In morphology, researchers have provided compelling evidence for the storage of even fully compositional structures that could otherwise be computed by rule. For example, a high-frequency word composed of multiple morphemes (e.g., root + plural inflection) may be stored directly rather than computed on the fly (e.g., Baayen, Dijkstra, & Schreuder, 1997). Here, we investigate similar questions o...

Like other Indo-European languages, English also employs a particular type of relative clause constructions, the so-called free-relative constructions, exemplified by the phrase like what Kim ate. This paper provides a constraint-based approach to these constructions. The paper begins with surveying on the properties of the construction. We will discuss two types of free relatives, their lexica...

They all describe events of an apple’s being on the tray and Tom’s eating it. But, there exist several intriguing differences between the two constructions. One crucial difference between the IHRC and EHRC comes from the fact that the semantic object of mekessta ‘ate’ in IHRC examples like (1)a is the NP sakwa ‘apple’ buried inside the embedded clause followed by kes. It is thus the subject of ...