Spoken language is one of the most compact and structured ways to convey information. The linguistic ability to structure individual words into larger sentence units permits speakers to express a nearly unlimited range of meanings. This ability is rooted in speakers' knowledge of syntax and in the corresponding process of syntactic encoding. Syntactic encoding is highly automatized, operates la...

The acquisition of syntactic categories is a crucial step in the process of acquiring syntax. At this stage, before a full grammar is available, only surface cues are available to the learner. Previous computational models have demonstrated that local contexts are informative for syntactic categorization. However, local contexts are affected by sentence-level structure. In this paper, we add se...

This thesis addresses the cognitive basis of syntactic adaptation, which biases speakers to repeat their own syntactic constructions and those of their conversational partners. I address two types of syntactic adaptation: short-term priming and longterm adaptation. I develop two metrics for syntactic adaptation within a speaker and between speakers in dialogue: one for short-term priming effect...

During sentence production, linguistic information (semantics, syntax, phonology) of words is retrieved and assembled into a meaningful utterance. There is still debate on how we assemble single words into more complex syntactic structures such as noun phrases or sentences. In the present study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the time course of syntactic planning. Thir...

An eye movement study of temporarily ambiguous closure sentences confirmed that the early closure penalty in a sentence like While John hunted the frightened deer escaped is larger for a simple past verb (hunted) than for a past progressive verb (was hunting). The results can be explained by the observation that simple past tense verbs convey an external viewpoint on an event, which presumably ...

In the current event-related potential (ERP) study, we investigated how speech rhythm impacts speech segmentation and facilitates the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in auditory sentence processing. Participants listened to syntactically ambiguous German subject- and object-first sentences that were spoken with either regular or irregular speech rhythm. Rhythmicity was established by a cons...

Abstract To assess the presence of cross-linguistic influence, this study compared processing Dutch sentences by English–Dutch and German–Dutch bilingual monolingual children in a self-paced listening task. We combined insights from studies on child bilingualism adult second language acquisition. Sentence structures showing partial overlap between languages were investigated (long passives), as...

This paper raises specific puzzles for the Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT) based on certain crosslinguistic patterns. I do so by pointing out that SMT entails two undesirable consequences: first, assumes Borer-Chomsky Conjecture is true; in other words, all syntactic variation across languages due to...