Using the self-paced reading paradigm, the present study examines whether highly proficient second language (L2) speakers of German (English first language) use case-marking information during the on-line comprehension of unambiguous wh-extractions, even when task demands do not draw explicit attention to this morphosyntactic feature in German. Results support previous findings, in that both th...

The acquisition of connective forms and the meaning relations between connected clauses in the development of complex sentences is described for four children from two to three years of age. The major results of the study include the developmental interactions between syntactic connectives and meaning relations, and between these interactions and the discourse environments in which they occurre...

In case of standard form vN-algebras, the Bures distance is the natural distance between the fibres of implementing vectors at normal positive linear forms. Thereby, it is well-known that to each two normal positive linear forms implementing vectors exist such that the Bures distance is attained by the metric distance of the implementing vectors in question. We discuss to which extent this can ...

We present a novel theoretical model of multiple stages in the acquisition of tense and agreement in Child French. First, we show that tense and agreement inflection follow independent courses of acquisition. Over the three stages of development attested in the data, tense production starts and ends at near-adult levels, but suffers a “dip” in production at the second stage. Agreement develops ...

Metagrammaticai formalisms that combine context-free phrase structure rules and metarules (MPS grammars) allow concise statement of generalizations about the syntax of natural languages. Unconstrained MPS grammars, tmfortunately, are not cornputationally "safe." We evaluate several proposals for constraining them, basing our amae~ment on computational tractability and explanatory adequacy. We s...

This paper describes a computational model which simulates the change in the use of optional infinitives that is evident in children learning Dutch as their first language. The model, developed within the framework of MOSAIC, takes naturalistic, child directed speech as its input, and analyses the distributional regularities present in the input. It slowly learns to generate longer utterances a...

Clefts and extraposition have structural and functional similarities, yet they have been mostly treated separately. An investigation of the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English reveals cases where the two constructions appear confounded and difficult to disentangle. The present paper argues that they can indeed be differentiated, and provides a test which can be used to this end. Thi...

MOSAIC, a model that has already simulated cross-linguistic differences in the occurrence of the Optional Infinitive phenomenon, is applied to the simulation of the pattern of finiteness marking within Dutch. This within-language pattern, which includes verb placement, low rates of Optional Infinitives in Wh-questions and the correlation between finiteness marking and subject provision, has bee...

The general problem of the relationship between instant-based and interval-based temporal semantics is studied. The paper is in two parts. In the first part we specified conditions for the mutual definability of instant and interval temporal structures. In this second part we extend this 'area of agreement' for temporal semantics proper and consider some natural 'logics of change' generated by ...

Using a self-paced reading task, the present study investigates how highly proficient second language (L2) speakers of German with English as their native language process unambiguous wh-subject-extractions and wh-object-extractions in German. Previous monolingual research has shown that English and German exhibit different processing preferences for the type of wh-question under investigation,...