PURPOSE Clinical grammar markers are needed for children with SLI older than 8 years. This study followed children who were previously studied on sentences with omitted finiteness to determine if affected children continue to perform at low levels and to examine possible predictors of low performance. This is the first longitudinal report of grammaticality judgments of questions. METHOD Three...

The Unaccusativity Hypothesis (UH) holds that intransitive verbs are divided into two broad classes, namely unaccusatives and unergatives. While there is evidence that the UH holds cross-linguistically, it is known that languages do not divide the intransitives into two uniform groups. We investigate the unaccusative-unergative distinction in Turkish by an offline grammaticality judgment task u...

This study attempts to specify the contribution of two subregions of Broca's area during syntactic and semantic processing of sentences by examining brain activation in a grammaticality judgment task. The processing of two types of ungrammatical sentences was examined. One type leaves the thematic interpretation generally unaffected, by violating the noun-verb agreement in number, while the oth...

Working memory capacity (WMC) has been shown to correlate with performance on complex cognitive tasks, including language comprehension and production. However, some scholars have suggested that performance outcomes result from an interaction between individual differences (IDs), such as WMC, and learning conditions (Robinson, 2005a). Reber, Walkenfeld, and Hernstadt (1991) specifically claimed...

Recursion is argued to be the crucial property distinguishing human and non-human primates language learning faculty (Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002). Recently, 2 studies (Bahlmann & Friederici, 2006; de Vries, Monaghan, Knecht, & Zwitserlood, 2008), which investigated the learnability of a recursive artificial grammar of the type of AB, used the same material but reported divergent results. We...

The functional anatomy of syntactic transformations, a major computational operation invoked in sentence processing, was identified through a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation. A grammaticality judgment task was used, presented through a novel hidden-blocks design. Subjects listened to transformational and nontransformational sentences in which a host of other complexity gener...

Abstract The selective vulnerability of morphology in agrammatic aphasia is often interpreted as evidence that closedclass items reside in a particular part of the brain (i.e., Broca's area); thus, damage to a part of the language processor maps onto behavior in a transparent fashion. We propose that the selective vulnerability of grammatical morphemes in receptive processing may be the result ...

Previous research shows that due to non-facilitative first language (L1) transfer, second (L2) speakers do not develop implicit knowledge of certain grammatical structures. Therefore, the present paper investigates whether L1-Sinhala–L2-English could acquire English object pronouns. To achieve this goal, compares data collected via an untimed grammaticality judgment task (untimed GJT) and oral ...

In this paper, we present findings from a human judgement task we conducted on the effectiveness of syntax filtering in a word completion task. Human participants were asked to review a series of incomplete sentences and identify which words from accompanying lists extend the expressions in a grammatically appropriate way. The accompanying word lists were generated by two word completion system...