Cross-linguistic similarities and differences in early lexical and grammatical development are reported for 1001 English-speaking children and 386 Italian-speaking children between 1;6 and 2;6. Parents completed the English or Italian versions of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences, a parent report instrument that provides information about vocabulary size, vo...

This study examined whether the degree of complexity of a grammatical component in a language would impact on its representation in the brain through identifying the neural correlates of grammatical morpheme processing associated with nouns and verbs in Chinese. In particular, the processing of Chinese nominal classifiers and verbal aspect markers were investigated in a sentence completion task...

OBJECTIVE To determine if linguistic ability in early life is associated with cognitive function and Alzheimer's disease in late life. DESIGN Two measures of linguistic ability in early life, idea density and grammatical complexity, were derived from autobiographies written at a mean age of 22 years. Approximately 58 years later, the women who wrote these autobiographies participated in an as...

Design.Two measures of linguistic ability in early life, idea density and grammatical complexity, were derived from autobiographies written at a mean age of 22 years. Approximately 58 years later, the women who wrote these autobiographies participated in an assessment of cognitive function, and those who subsequently died were evaluated neuropathologically. Setting.-Convents in the United State...

The last decade has seen increasing attention paid to questions of grammatical complexity, in particular regarding the extent to which some languages can be said to be more “complex” than others, whether globally or with respect to particular subsystems. Creoles have featured prominently in these debates, with various authors arguing that they are particularly simple when set against noncreoles...

Csuhaj-Vajh, E. and A. Kelemenovi, Descriptional complexity of context-free grammar forms, Theoretical Computer Science 112 (1993) 277-289. Descriptional complexity aspects of grammar forms are studied. It is shown that grammatical complexity measures HEI,q, LEV,<, VAR,<, PROD,< and DEP., related to any appropriate infinite class ‘8 of grammars are unbounded on the infinite class of languages d...

The grammatical inference problem is easy to state: One must choose, on the basis of a finite set of symbol strings, a grammar for the language of which the given set is a sample. Precisely the same problem arises in trying to choose a model (theory, function, etc.) to explain a collection of sample data. This is one of the most important information processing problems known and it is surprisi...

One traditional view of the time course of language acquisition holds that a child's difficulties in learning her language are due to general processing, memory or conceptual limitations. As the child's cognitive capacities expand, so do her abilities to use her already-acquired grammar or to recognize additional properties of her soon-to-be native language. Recent work in the study of child la...