Recent advances in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) offer a significant new approach to studying semantic representations in humans by making it possible to directly observe brain activity while people comprehend words and sentences. In the proposed work, we used fMRI to study the cortical systems that underpin semantic representation while people comprehended linguistic concepts li...

Many previous studies have shown that predictable words are read faster and lead to reduced neural activation, consistent with a model of reading in which words are activated in advance of being encountered. The nature of such preactivation, however, has typically been studied indirectly through its subsequent effect on word recognition. Here, we use magnetoencephalography to study the dynamics...

The article deals with the characteristics of noun phrases functioning in pre-position. Pre-noun modifiers, or attributive modifiers, are among the high-capacity structures in the contemporary English language, as they enable to devoid of prepositions and to describe objects in a laconic way. The goal of this research was to analyze the way scholars interpret this linguistic structure today, as...

Although it is well-established that children with Specific Language Impairment characteristically optionally inflect forms that require tense and agreement marking, their abilities with regards to derivational suffixation are less well understood. In this paper we provide evidence from children with Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI) that derivational suffixes, unlike tense and a...

In this study, we investigated grammatical feature selection during noun phrase production in German and Dutch. More specifically, we studied the conditions under which different grammatical genders select either the same or different determiners or suffixes. Pictures of one or two objects paired with a gender-congruent or a gender-incongruent distractor word were presented. Participants named ...

Learning the syntax of a second language (L2) often represents a big challenge to L2 learners. Previous research on syntactic processing in L2 has mainly focused on how L2 speakers respond to "objective" syntactic violations, that is, phrases that are incorrect by native standards. In this study, we investigate how L2 learners, in particular those of less than near-native proficiency, process p...