This study tested 14 school-age orally-trained children with hearing impairment who have a deficit in A-bar movement, manifested in an impaired comprehension of object relatives and topicalization structures. When they produce a grammatical object relative clause, they typically produce it with a resumptive pronoun, unlike their age-matched controls, who tend to produce object relatives with a gap. They also produce resumptive pronouns where only a gap is licit, in the highest embedded subject position in subject relatives. We interpret these results as supporting the claim that resumptive pronouns are a last resort when movement is blocked, not only because of islands in intact syntax, but also due to impairment. The participants also doubled the relative head in both subject- and object-relatives, producing ungrammatical sentences. The bearing of these errors on the copy theory of movement is discussed.

This paper investigates the status of the lexicon and the possibilities for expressing lexical generalizations in the paradigm of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). We illustrate that the architecture readily supports the use of implicational principles to express generalizations over a class of word objects. A second kind of lexical generalizations expressing relations between classes of words is often expressed in terms of lexical rules. We show how lexical rules can be integrated into the formal setup for HPSG developed by King (1989, 1994), investigate a lexical rule specification language allowing the linguist to only specify those properties which are supposed to differ between the related classes, and define how this lexical rule specification language is interpreted. We thereby provide a formalization of lexical rules as used in HPSG.

A central question in online human sentence comprehension is: how are linguistic relations established between different parts of a sentence? Previous work has shown that this dependency resolution process can be computationally expensive, but the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. We argue that dependency resolution is mediated by cue-based retrieval, constrained by independently motivated working memory principles defined in a cognitive architecture (ACT-R). To demonstrate this, we investigate an unusual instance of dependency resolution, the processing of negative and positive polarity items, and confirm a surprising prediction of the cue-based retrieval model: partial cue-matches—which constitute a kind of similarity-based interference—can give rise to the intrusion of ungrammatical retrieval candidates, leading to both processing slow-downs and even errors of judgment that take the form of illusions of grammaticality in patently ungrammatical structures. A notable achievement is that good quantitative fits are achieved without adjusting the key model parameters.