This study investigated the aspect first hypothesis which claims that children initially use verbal morphology to mark aspect and not tense. Experiment 1 tested 46 two- and three-year-old children's comprehension of tense as it is marked in the auxiliary system using a sentence-to-scene matching task. Children were presented with multiple performances of the same event and asked where a charact...

Contemporary studies of the semantics of tense and aspect tend to rely on syntactic hypotheses that are at odds with those of a phrase-structure based and lexicalist approach to syntax, such as that embodied in HPSG. For instance, de Swart (1998) explicitly assumes that tense relations originate in a syntactic position distinct from that of the head verb of the clause; and the approach to aspec...

Studies of English have shown that temporal-lobe patients, including those with Alzheimer's disease, are spared at processing real and novel regular inflected forms (e.g., walk-->walked; blick-->blicked), but impaired at real and novel irregular forms (e.g., dig-->dug; spling-->splang). Here we extend the investigation cross-linguistically to the more complex system of Italian verbal morphology...

This paper presents results on using a new inductive logic programming method called Foidl to learn the past tense of English verbs. The past tense task has been widely studied in the context of the symbolic/connectionist debate. Previous papers have presented results using various neural-network and decision-tree learning methods. We have developed a technique for learning a special type of Pr...

DOI 10.1027/0044-3409.216.3.162 Abstract. Three measures have been found to be predictive of developmental language impairment: nonword repetition, the production of English past tense, and categorical speech perception. Despite this, direct comparisons of these tasks have been limited. The present study explored the associations between these measures and other language and cognitive skills in...

We use STAG to model the interaction between demonstratives and tense found in Blackfoot (Algonquian). In clauses with no tense or aspect marking, past tense can be encoded through a distal demonstrative on either the internal argument (transitives, unaccusatives) or the external argument (unergatives). A fourth class of predicate, semantically transitive but syntactically intransitive with a p...