This paper addresses two central issues related to the problem of auxiliary inversion in English wh-questions: 1) there are multiple proposals of the source of the error but none can explain the data in full; 2) the data on children’s wh-questions are inconsistent, due to differences in methods and techniques. We propose that language-specific structural characteristics of the target grammar (e...

This study investigates the prosody of rhetorical questions in German. In an interaction study we examined how speakers use boundary tones, pitch, duration and voice quality to mark syntactically ambiguous questions as rhetorical or information seeking. To this end, speakers produced identical interrogatives (polar and wh questions) in rhetorical and information seeking contexts. The results sh...

It has been known that the ungrammaticality of (1b) is due to the violation of the Superiority Effect (SE) to the effect that WH is not allowed to move over another c-commanding WH (Chomsky 1995) unless the WH is the D-linked (Discourse-linked) phrase like which apple, which carries an implication that there exists a set of entities that can be determined from the context (Pesetky 1987). In oth...

The active maintenance of sentence meaning in working memory was investigated using event-related electroencephalogram (EEG) coherences. Participants read a sentence, retained it for 2.5 s, and then verified a statement about its meaning. The sentences contained either three semantically related nouns or unrelated nouns and started either with a what phrase (WH sentences) or not (non-WH sentenc...

1 Introduction 1.1 Wh-expressions as diagnostics of scope 1.1.1 Fronting and possible answers as indicators of scope 1.1.2 3 Subjacency and wh-in-situ 3.1 The diagnostic of possible answers 3.

BACKGROUND Nondaily or intermittent smokers (ITS) are increasingly common, but how much nicotine, if any, ITS take in and how quickly they metabolize it has not yet been studied. METHODS We compared carbon monoxide (CO), urinary cotinine, and nicotine metabolism [nicotine metabolite ratio (NMR): 3-hydroxycotinine:cotinine] in 224 ITS and 222 daily smokers (DS). Effects of gender and ethnicity...

In this paper, we present data from three Norwegian dialect types, NOR-1, NOR-2 and NOR-3, which differ with respect to the verb second (V2) requirement in wh-questions: NOR-1 (represented by Standard Norwegian) requires V2 in all main clauses, NOR-3 (represented by the Nordmøre dialect) lacks this requirement in all wh-questions, while NOR-2 (represented by the Tromsø dialect) lacks the requir...

Hearing loss during the critical period for language acquisition restricts spoken language input. This input limitation, in turn, may hamper syntactic development. This study examined the comprehension, production, and repetition of Wh-questions in deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. The participants were 11 orally trained Hebrew-speaking children aged 9.1-12.4 with moderate-to-profound hea...

Unlike comprehension of declarative sentences, comprehension of wh-questions in agrammatic aphasia is a neglected research topic. Not all whquestions are understood equally well yet the nature of this difficulty has received sparse attention in the literature. According to one view (Avrutin 2000), which follows Pesetsky's (1987) well-known distinction of whquestions, questions beginning with wh...

Single-Nanowire Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering Paritosh Mohanty,† Ilsun Yoon,† Taejoon Kang,† Kwanyong Seo,† Kumar S. K. Varadwaj,† Wonjun Choi,‡ Q-Han Park,‡ Jae Pyung Ahn,§ Yung Doug Suh,| Hyotcherl Ihee,† and Bongsoo Kim*,† Department of Chemistry, KAIST, Daejeon 305-701, Korea, Department of Physics, Korea UniVersity, Seoul 136-701, Korea, Nano-Material Research Center, KIST, Seoul 136-7...