Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a developmental language disorder characterised by morpho-syntactic errors in the absence of neurological trauma, cognitive impairment, psycho-emotional disturbance, or motor-articulatory disorders. Among the hypotheses that have argued for SLI as an impairment at the linguistic level, rather than at the cognitive or perceptual level, there is a debate as t...

Case marking is the major cue to sentence interpretation in Japanese, whereas animacy and word order are much weaker. However, when subjects and their cases markers are omitted, Japanese honorific and humble verbs can provide information that compensates for the missing case role markers. This study examined the usage of honorific and humble verbs as cues to case role assignment by Japanese nat...

Grammatical agreement is present in many of the world’s languages today and has become an essential feature that guides linguistic processing. When two words in a sentence are said to “agree”, this means that they share certain features such as “gender”, “number”, “person” or others. The primary hypothesis of this paper is that marking agreement within one linguistic phrase reduces processing e...

In the current paper, we assess whether morphophonological information (consistent, inconsistent or ambiguous with the syntactic information) affects syntactic encoding. We report four experiments (one in Italian, one in French and two in Spanish) in which we elicited gender agreement errors between the subject of a sentence and a predicative adjective using the same methodology used by Viglioc...

The present paper presents a cross-linguistic overview of animacy effects in (differential) case marking, and provides an explanation for the attested patterns in terms of two competing case marking strategies. It is argued that the complexity of animacy effects in differential case marking is due to the fact that some of these patterns result from the differentiating function of case marking, ...

OBJECTIVE To develop and evaluate a modified OSCE assessing the assimilation and application of a range of ethical principles relevant to Obstetric and Gynecological practice. SETTING Candidates for an SpR training rotation Methods. Twenty six candidates working in Obstetrics and Gynecology were presented with four questions covering a range of relevant ethical scenarios. Their responses were...

Reports present mixed findings on the extent to which the development of receptive language skills in children with severe speech and physical impairments (SSPI) is compromised by their difficulty with speaking (V. W. Berninger & B. M. Gans, 1986; D. V. M. Bishop, B. Byers Brown, & J. Robson, 1990; O. Udwin & W. Yule, 1990). In this study, grammaticality judgments were used to measure the sensi...

This study presents results from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgement tasks with seven German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and seven age-matched control subjects examining verb finiteness marking and verb-second (V2) placement. The patients were found to be selectively impaired in tense marking in the face of preserved mood and agreement marking. Moreover, our results revealed that ...