2 Abstract In this article I defend the view that many central aspects of the semantics of tense are determined by independently-motivated principles of syntactic theory. I begin by decomposing tenses syntactically into a temporal ordering predicate (the true tense, on this approach) and two time-denoting arguments corresponding to covert a reference time (RT) argument and an eventuality time (...

Reports present mixed findings on the extent to which the development of receptive language skills in children with severe speech and physical impairments (SSPI) is compromised by their difficulty with speaking (V. W. Berninger & B. M. Gans, 1986; D. V. M. Bishop, B. Byers Brown, & J. Robson, 1990; O. Udwin & W. Yule, 1990). In this study, grammaticality judgments were used to measure the sensi...

We examined the effects of syntactic (tense) violations occurring on regularly versus irregularly inflected verbs using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants read sentences in which the main verb varied in terms of regularity (regular vs. irregular), frequency (high vs. low), and grammaticality (tense violation vs. no tense violation). For regular verbs, we found a reliable N400 e...

Background: The P600 brain wave reflects syntactic processes in response to different first language (L1) syntactic violations, syntactic repair, structural reanalysis, and specific semantic components. Unlike semantic processing, aspects of the second language (L2) syntactic processing differ from the L1, particularly at lower levels of proficiency. At higher L2 proficiency, syntactic violatio...

Languages that are classified as non-Sequence-of-Tense come in more than one variety (e.g., Arregui & Kusumoto 1998): some of these languages allow a past tense in beforeclauses while others do not. We propose that some languages have quantificational (existential) tenses, while others have pronominal (referential/bound) tenses. The past tense in before-clauses is ill-formed in a language that ...

(1981), the Cognitive Science Society meetings in 1984, and the publication of the PDP volumes (Rumelhart, McClelland, and the PDP Study Group, 1986, McClelland, Rumelhart, and the PDP Study Group, 1986). Figure 1: A prototypical example of a three-layer feed forward network, used by Plunkett and Marchman (1991) to simulate learning the past-tense of English verbs. The input units encode repres...

BACKGROUND Recent literature documented the presence of spatial-temporal interactions in the human brain. The aim of the present study was to verify whether representation of past and future is also mapped onto spatial representations and whether the cerebellum may be a neural substrate for linking space and time in the linguistic domain. We asked whether processing of the tense of a verb is in...

In recent research on aphasia, a considerable number of studies have examined deficits in patients with agrammatism in the domain of verb-finiteness marking in different languages. Whilst much of this research has focused on tense and subject-verb agreement and has shown that tense is particularly impaired, the nature of verb-finiteness deficits in agrammatism is still a matter of controversy. ...

This study investigates the storage vs. composition of inflected forms in typically-developing children. Children aged 8-12 were tested on the production of regular and irregular past-tense forms. Storage (vs. composition) was examined by probing for past-tense frequency effects and imageability effects--both of which are diagnostic tests for storage--while controlling for a number of confoundi...

Patients with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia commonly present with impaired language. Here we investigate language in schizophrenia with a focus on inflectional morphology, using an intensively studied and relatively well-understood linguistic paradigm. Patients with schizophrenia (n=43) and age-matched healthy control subjects (n=42) were asked to produce past tenses of regular (s...