Comprehension of Vernacular Features in Aphasia.

Purpose: Insights from linguistic variation research illustrate a linguistically diverse population, in which even speakers who can be classified as speaking a "mainstream" variety have grammatical knowledge of vernacular or "nonmainstream" features. However, there is a gap in our knowledge regarding how vernacular features are comprehended in people with aphasia (PWA). This article presents the results of a pilot study exploring how PWA respond to linguistic stimuli that include the vernacular feature, negative concord (NC), often referred to by the more colloquial term (e.

The hunt for structure-dependent interpretation: The case of Principle C.

Jacques Mehler's earliest work concerned the independence of syntactic and semantic representations in adult sentence understanding, probing for independent contributions of sentence structure and sentence meaning in the psychological processes that underlie linguistic perception (e.g., Mehler, 1963; Mehler & Miller, 1964).

Asymmetries in the Acceptability and Felicity of English Negative Dependencies: Where Negative Concord and Negative Polarity (Do Not) Overlap.

Negative Concord (NC) constructions such as (meaning "the news anchor warned nobody"), in which two syntactic negations contribute a single semantic one, are stigmatized in English, while their Negative Polarity Item (NPI) variants, such as , are prescriptively correct. Because acceptability is often equated with grammaticality, this pattern has led linguists to treat NC as ungrammatical in "Standard" or standardized English (SE). However, it is possible that SE grammars do generate NC sentences, and their low incidence and acceptability is instead due to social factors.

Where are the cookies? Two- and three-year-olds use number-marked verbs to anticipate upcoming nouns.

We tested toddlers' and adults' predictive use of English subject-verb agreement. Participants saw pairs of pictures differing in number and kind (e.g.