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Two striking contrasts currently exist in the sentence processing literature. First, whereas adult readers rely heavily on lexical information in the generation of syntactic alternatives, adult listeners in world-situated eye-gaze studies appear to allow referential evidence to override strong countervailing lexical biases (Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). Second, in contrast to adults, children in similar listening studies fail to use this referential information and appear to rely exclusively on verb biases or perhaps syntactically based parsing principles (Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, & Logrip, 1999). We explore these contrasts by fully crossing verb bias and referential manipulations in a study using the eye-gaze listening technique with adults (Experiment 1) and Wve-year-olds (Experiment 2). Results indicate that adults combine lexical and referential information to determine syntactic choice. Children rely A portion of this work was presented in proceedings to the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. The ideas in this paper owe much to our conversations with Lila Gleitman and to the comments of the many audiences who heard preliminary reports of this research. We thank Kirsten Thorpe for her assistance with testing, coding, and participant recruitment and Sylvia Yuan for her assistance in data analysis. We also gratefully acknowledge Tracy Dardick who carried out the norming studies and Jared Novick and David January who assisted in comparisons between head-mounted eye-tracking and our procedure. This work was supported by NIH Grant 1-R01-HD37507 to the second author and a National Science Foundation Science and Technology grant to the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania (NSF-STC Coo...

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Most of us would like to believe that the different patterns of language breakdown observed in aphasic patients reflect the way that the human mind and brain are organized for language. However, because so much modern research on aphasia has been carried out in English, it is difficult to separate universal mechanisms from language-specific content. Crosslinguistic com-parisons permit us to disentangle these confounds, while we address one of the most important issues in cognitive neurobiology, the issue of behavioral and neural plasticity: How many different forms can the language processor take under a range of normal and abnormal conditions? We must have an answer to this question if we want to understand what the neural mechanisms responsible for language

The selective vulnerability of morphology in agrammatic aphasia is often interpreted as evidence that closed-class 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 of decrements in overall processing capacity, and not the result of a selective lesion. We demonstrate agrammatic profiles in healthy adults who have their processing capacity diminished by engaging in a secondary task during testing. Our results suggest that this selective profile does not necessarily indicate the existence of a distinct sub-system specialized for the implicated aspects of syntax, but rather may be due to the vulnerability of these forms in the face of global resource diminution, at least in grammaticality judgment. Introduction Agrammatism is a clinical syndrome that is often found i...

Distributional information, in the form of simple, locally computed statistics of an input corpus, provides a potential means of establishing initial syntactic categories (noun, verb, etc.). Finch and Chater (1991, 1992) clustered words hierarchically, according to the distribution of local contexts in which they appeared in large, written English corpora, obtaining clusters that corresponded well with the standard syntactic categories. Here, a stronger demonstration of their method is provided, using `real' data, that to which children are exposed during category acquisition, taken from the childes corpus. For 2\Delta5 million words of adult speech, clustering on syntactic and semantic bases was observed, with a high degree of clear differentiation between syntactic categories. For child data, some noun and verb clusters emerged, with some evidence of other categories, but the data set was too small for reliable trends to emerge. Some initial results investigating the possibility of c...

Complex words consist of morphemic subunits that can recombine to form other words. Thus midnight is standardly analyzed as consisting of the prefix mid- and stem night, which also occur in words such as midstream and nightly. A considerable body of empirical and theoretical research suggests that morphological structure governs the representation of words in memory and that many words are decomposed into morphological components in processing. We investigated an alternative approach in which morphology arises from the interaction of semantic, phonological, and orthographic codes. Five cross-modal lexical decision experiments show that the magnitude of priming (e.g., for pairs such as teacher-teach) is affected by the degree of semantic and phonological overlap between words. Crucially, items that are only moderately similar produce intermediate facilitation effects (e.g., latelylate) . This pattern is observed both for words standardly treated as morphologically related (e.g., teacher-teach) and for morphologically unrelated words that exhibit similar degrees of semantic and phonological overlap (e.g., snarl-sneer). The results can be understood in terms of connectionist models employing distributed representations rather than discrete morphemes. Graded semantic and phonological similarity effects in priming: Evidence for a distributed connectionist approach to morphology One of the fundamental problems in the study of language is to characterize knowledge of words and how this knowledge is used in comprehension and production. The focus of the present article is on derivational morphology, the aspect of lexical knowledge concerning the structure and formation of complex words. Words such as baker and talking appear to consist of components, traditionally called m...

Many recent models of language comprehension have stressed the role of distributional frequencies in determining the relative accessibility or ease of processing associated with a particular lexical item or sentence structure. However, there exist relatively few comprehensive analyses of structural frequencies, and little consideration has been given to the appro- priateness of using any particular set of corpus frequencies in modeling human language. We provide a comprehensive set of structural frequencies for a variety of written and spoken corpora, focusing on structures that have played a critical role in debates on normal psycholinguistics, aphasia, and child language acquisition, and compare our results with those from several recent papers to illustrate the implications and limitations of using corpus data in psycholinguistic research.

This paper considers how fluent language users are rational in their language processing, their unconscious language representation systems optimally prepared for comprehension and production, how language learners are intuitive statisticians, and how acquisition can be understood as contingency learning. But there are important aspects of second language acquisition that do not appear to be rational, where input fails to become intake. The paper describes the types of situation where cognition deviates from rationality and it introduces how the apparent irrationalities of L2 acquisition result from standard phenomena of associative learning as encapsulated in the models of Rescorla and Wagner (1972) and Cheng and Holyoak (1995), which describe how cue salience, outcome importance, and the history of learning from multiple probabilistic cues affect the development of ‘learned selective attention’ and transfer. This article considers how fluent language users are rational in their language processing, rational in the sense that their unconscious language representation

The present study discusses and describes codeswitches produced by two trilingual children acquiring English, Spanish and Hebrew simultaneously from birth. Data were collected regularly over a period of 20 months (from age 2;6 to 4;2 for M and from age 5;5 to 7;1 for E), in naturalistic tape-recorded sessions. Codeswitches drawn from transcriptions of 32 h of spontaneous conversation were analysed. We describe and explain trilingual switches involving morphosyntactic boundary violations, some of which have not yet been reported in the literature. We claim that these switches provide incipient evidence for a developing trilingual competence that stands at the base of trilingual performance. doi: 10.2167/ijm020.0