It is commonly held that implicit knowledge expresses itself as fluency. A perceptual clarification task was used to examine the relationship between perceptual processing fluency, subjective familiarity, and grammaticality judgments in a task frequently used to produce implicit knowledge, artificial grammar learning (AGL). Four experiments examined the effects of naturally occurring difference...

This thesis deals with gradience in grammar, i.e., with the fact that some linguistic structures are not fully acceptable or unacceptable, but receive gradient linguistic judgments. The importance of gradient data for linguistic theory has been recognized at least since Chomsky’s Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. However, systematic empirical studies of gradience are largely absent, and n...

This paper presents a study in which four law students and four Library and Information Science (LIS) students judged independently the relevance of documents selected from the e-discovery test collections of the Text REtrieval Conference. The results were compared with the official relevance ground truth and among participants. Given the same task guidelines and minimal training, on average th...

A growing body of linguistic studies is now deploying linguistic judgment experiments to probe both syntactic and phonological knowledge. A research question arises as to what kind of judgment format is useful to probe our linguistic knowledge. Against this background, this study compares two types of phonological judgment experimentation: a scale-based naturalness judgment task and a forced-ch...

Bishop (2000) has recently raised the question of discriminating between grammatical SLI, pragmatic impairment, and social cognition problems linked to a spectrum of autistic behaviour. In this paper we report pilot findings which indicate that grammatical SLI may be associated with a lexical deficit in verbs that involve interpersonal action, and in particular verbs whose meanings involve ment...

It is common to find that so-called minority languages enjoy fewer (if any) diagnostic tools than the so-called majority languages. This has repercussions for the detection and proper assessment of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) brought up in these languages. With a view to remedy this situation for Catalan, I developed a sentence repetition task to assess grammatical maturity...

Abstract This study combines explicit (pen-and-paper) and sensitive (time-pressured) measures to gauge the impact of three instructional interventions (contextualized input with meaning-focused activities, contextualized word-focused decontextualized exercises) on learning 20 L2 French target verbs. Participants ( N = 313, L1 Dutch) completed a combination (form recognition, meaning recall, gra...

Extensive research has shown that second language (L2) learners find it difficult to apply grammatical knowledge during real-time processing, especially when differences exist between the first (L1) and L2. The current study examines extent which British English-speaking of French can their subjunctive whether this ability is modulated by properties L1 grammar, and/or proficiency. Data from an ...

This paper proposes an account of the acquisition of grammatical relations using the basic concepts of connectionism and a construction-based theory of grammar. Many previous accounts of first-language acquisition assume that grammatical relations (e.g., the grammatical subject and object of a sentence) and linking rules are universal and innate; this is necessary to provide a first set of assu...

This paper provides a further investigation into the linguistic abilities of a subgroup of 12 Grammatical specific language impaired (SLI) children (aged 10;2 to 13;11). The study investigates the use of referential expressions (e.g. pronouns) in a narrative discourse, and provides insight into the underlying nature of Grammatical SLI, thereby contributing to the modularity debate. Previous inv...