Children's and adults' eye movements and the extraction of number information from ambiguous and unambiguous markings.

Children learn to extract number information from utterances using a variety of language-specific cues, but in some languages this information is encoded in features that display high variability in their realization. How does this affect their acquisition process? In this paper, we present an eye tracking study comparing 3.5- to 7.5-year-old children and adults' use of number information on the verb and the determiner of the subject noun phrase in Chilean Spanish, a dialect of Spanish with variable realization of plural morphology in the noun phrase (due to phonological weakening) and categorical realization of number on the verb. Our results suggest that, while adults can determine whether the subject refers to a plurality or a singleton set based on the morphology of the verb alone, even 5- to 7.5-year-old children do not and, instead, require information from the noun phrase determiner to make a decision. Children younger than 5 years, instead, cannot use number information on the verb and on the determiner to make a decision. This supports Miller and Schmitt's (2010, 2012) hypothesis that number morphology is not always mapped into syntactic and semantic features by younger children in varieties of Spanish where number is subject to variation.

Interpretation of verb phrase telicity: sensitivity to verb type and determiner type.

PURPOSE: The authors examine how adults use linguistic information from verbs, direct objects, and particles to interpret an event description as encoding a logical endpoint to the event described (in which case, it is telic) or not (in which case, it is atelic). Current models of aspectual composition predict that quantity-sensitive verbs combined with quantized objects produce telic predicates. Behavioral results from previous experiments have not unequivocally confirmed this prediction. The study presents a more fine-grained analysis that examines the influence of partitive verbs, resultative particles, and different determiner types on listeners' evaluations of verb phrases as telic or atelic. METHOD: Forty-eight English-speaking adults participated in a truth-value judgment task to determine whether they interpreted verb phrases with different types of verbs and direct objects as telic or atelic. Participants viewed short videos and responded to a yes/no question after each one. RESULTS: The presence of partitive quantity-sensitive verbs and the presence of a definite determiner versus a cardinal number in quantized direct objects had a differential impact on listeners' interpretations of sentences as telic. CONCLUSION: The results indicate that actual behavioral interpretations of telicity are meaningfully influenced by the presence of partitive verbs, resultative particles, and different types of determiners.

Sentence comprehensionin Parkinson's disease.

Parkinson's disease (PD) patients with dementia have impairment of syntactic comprehension. Non-demented PD patients also experience difficulties in sentence comprehension and can be particularly impaired in the processing of grammatical characteristics of syntactically complex sentences. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to verify the performance of PD patients without dementia in a syntactic comprehension task compared with normal elderly. METHODS: We studied oral sentence comprehension in fourteen patients with idiopathic PD together with fourteen controls matched for age and education, using the Token Test and Schmitt's Syntactic Comprehension Test (developed in Brazilian Portuguese). RESULTS: For the Token Test, there was no statistically significant difference between the PD group and the control group, whereas on the Syntactic Comprehension Test there was a slight statistically significant difference between the groups only for relatives in subject clauses (p=0.0407). CONCLUSIONS: PD patients differed from controls in the oral comprehension for relatives subject sentences alone. These results did not strictly reproduce those previously reported in the literature, and therefore point to the need for creating tests with diverse syntactic constructions in Portuguese able to produce consistent data regarding language behavior of Brazilian subjects with PD in comprehension tasks.

Pacientes com doença de Parkinson (DP) e demência apresentam prejuízo da compreensão sintática. Pacientes com DP sem demência também apresentam dificuldades na compreensão de sentenças e podem estar particularmente comprometidos na habilidade de processar as características gramaticais de sentenças sintaticamente complexas. OBJETIVO: O objetivo deste estudo foi verificar o desempenho de pacientes com DP sem demência em tarefas de compreensão sintática, comparados a idosos normais. MÉTODOS: Foram estudados quatorze pacientes com DP idiopática e quatorze controles emparelhados por idade e escolaridade, usando o Teste Token e o Teste de Compreensão Sintática de Schmitt (desenvolvido em português do Brasil). RESULTADOS: No Teste Token, não houve diferenças estatisticamente significantes entre os pacientes com DP e o grupo controle. No Teste de Compreensão Sintática, foi encontrada diferença estatisticamente significante entre os grupos apenas nas sentenças relativas de sujeito (p=0.0407). CONCLUSÃO: Os pacientes com DP diferenciam-se do grupo controle apenas na compreensão oral de sentenças relativas de sujeito. Tendo em vista estes resultados, que não reproduzem de forma estrita o que é descrito na literatura, torna-se evidente a necessidade da criação de testes de linguagem com diferentes construções sintáticas em português do Brasil, a fim de obtermos dados consistentes a respeito do comportamento de pacientes brasileiros com DP em tarefas de compreensão sintática.