The ability of second language (L2) learners to use structural information during sentence processing has been questioned by Clahsen and Felser (2006a; 2006b) in their shallow structure hypothesis. They maintain that L2 learners process target language by using semantic information derived from the argument structure of the verb, not by using structural information such as a syntactic gap. The ...

The abstractness of children’s early syntactic representations has been questioned in the recent acquisition literature. While some research has suggested that children’s knowledge of basic constructions such as the transitive is robust and abstract at a very young age, other work has proposed that young children only have constructions that are specific to individual lexical items. The present...

In the ongoing philosophical debate over the origins and nature of lexical concepts stemming from the work of Fodor (1970, 1998, 2000, 2008), the potential of first language acquisition studies as a source of evidence has been somewhat overlooked. At the lexical interface with syntax, a restricted set of lexical conceptual elements can be shown to play a pivotal role in the generation of syntac...

This paper reports a series of self-paced reading time experiments designed to probe how the reference of pronominal expressions is resolved on-line in (Mandarin) Chinese. It is assumed that pronoun resolution is achieved by narrowing the candidate set of potential antecedents for a pronoun. The experimental evidence reported here indicates that two factors – syntactic prominence and the matchi...

This article demonstrates that very young children have knowledge of a range of syntactic categories. Speech samples from six children aged 2 years to 2 years, 5 months, with Mean Lengths of Utterance (MLUs) ranging from 2.93 to 4.14, were examined for evidence of six syntactic categories: Determiner, Adjective, Noun, Noun Phrase, Preposition, and Prepositional Phrase. Performance was evaluated...

goal: this study aims at analyzing and categorizing different grammatical errors including morpho-syntactic and syntactic errors in written narratives of mentally retarded students in tehran. the frequencies of errors are compared among students in different grades. method: descriptive-analytic method has been used. a test consisted of four picture stories have been administered to 125 students...

This paper shows that Spanish ‘más que’ (lit. more than) is much than a comparative construction synchronically. Phonological, syntactic, and semantic evidence various grammatically different entities hide under this single spelling. The most prominent of these (phonologically unstressed) negative polarity item with meaning “only” or “just”. By means robust synchronic diachronic corpus evidence...

This study tested American preschoolers' ability to use phrasal prosody to constrain their syntactic analysis of locally ambiguous sentences containing noun/verb homophones (e.g., [The baby flies] [hide in the shadows] vs [The baby] [flies his kite], brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). The words following the homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating inform...

In this paper I introduce some data from an aphasic patient who demonstrates a robust effect of grammatical class; he is unable to read any function words, and makes characteristic ‘within-category’ substitution errors. These errors extend to the class of unaccusative verbs, and this leads to a consideration of the functional nature of unaccusativity. Existing accounts of unaccusativity as a sy...

Whether the Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC) (Ross, 1967) is a syntactic constraint has been discussed much in the literature. This paper reconsiders this issue by drawing on evidence from Japanese and Korean. Our examination of the CSC patterns in relative clauses in the two languages reveals that a pragmatically-based approach along the lines of Kehler (2002) predicts the relevant empiri...