It is a remarkable phenomenon that children can learn to speak without ever being consciously aware of the sophisticated grammar they are using. Indeed, adults too can live a perfectly satisfactory life without ever thinking about ideas such as parts of speech, subjects, predicates or subordinate clauses. Both children and adults can easily recognise ungrammatical sentences, at least if the mis...

The title of this article looks in two different directions. It asks, "When do intuitions fail?" hoping to locate the conditions under which intuitions are likely to beunreliable.But it can also be the subordinate clause, of the question, "When intuitions fail, what can we do?": Both approaches, the remedial and the prophylactic, will be considered here. In 1951, Carl Voegelin and Zellig Harris...

The function of verbal short-term memory is supported not only by the phonological loop, but also by semantic resources that may operate on both short and long time scales. Elucidation of the neural underpinnings of these mechanisms requires effective behavioral manipulations that can selectively engage them. We developed a novel cued sentence recall paradigm to assess the effects of two factor...

Why are young children's utterances short? This elicited imitation study used a new task--double imitation--to investigate the factors that contribute to children's failure to lexicalize sentence subjects. Two-year-olds heard a triad of sentences singly and attempted to imitate each; they then again heard the same triad singly and again attempted to imitate each. Comparisons between the two att...

The clinical significance of sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) for assessing children's language ability is well-recognized. SRT has been identified as a good clinical marker for children with (specific) language impairment as it shows high diagnostic accuracy levels. Furthermore, qualitative analysis of repetition samples can provide information to be used for intervention protocols. Despite th...

BACKGROUND Recent studies have indicated that many children with autism spectrum disorders present with language difficulties that are similar to those of children with specific language impairments, leading some to argue for similar structural deficits in these two disorders. AIMS Repetition of sentences involving long-distance dependencies was used to investigate complex syntax in these gro...

PURPOSE The present study examined the utility of 2 measures proposed as markers of specific language impairment (SLI) in identifying specific impairments in language or working memory in school-age children. METHOD A group of 400 school-age children completed a 5-min screening consisting of nonword repetition and sentence recall. A subset of low (n = 52) and average (n = 38) scorers complete...

A majority of Machine Aided Translation systems are based on comparisons between a source sentence and reference sentences stored in Translation Memories (TMs). The translation search is done by looking for sentences in a database which are similar to the source sentence. TMs have two basic limitations: the dependency on the repetition of complete sentences and the high cost of building a TM. A...

Yelin, Boris. M.A., Purdue University, May 2014. The case of capaz in Argentina: an epistemic adverb with mood variability. Major Professor: Lori Czerwionka. This thesis examines mood selection in Argentine Spanish with epistemic adverbs considering the independent variables of certainty, temporal reference, and epistemic adverb. It is the first known study to investigate mood selection with th...