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It is generally accepted among psycholinguists that real-time human sentence processing proceeds incrementally from left to right. Recently proposals have been made in the domain of syntax to reduce phenomena which have hitherto been accounted for in terms of linguistic performance to linear structures given at the level of competence. Keeping in line with this tendency in research, this paper tries to reestablish the much discussed relationship between the two aspects of language, competence and performance: the issue of processing difficulty dependent on sorts of multiple clause embedding is addressed by incorporating into HPSG a mechanism reflecting left-to-right processing and memory costs calculated at each processing step.
Is language the key to number? This article argues that the human language faculty provides the cognitive equipment that enables humans to develop a systematic number concept. Crucially, this concept is based on non-iconic representations that involve relations between relations: relations between numbers are linked with relations between objects. In contrast to this, language-independent numerosity concepts provide only iconic representations. The pattern of forming relations between relations lies at the heart of our language faculty, suggesting that it is language that enables humans to make the step from these iconic representations, which we share with other species, to a generalised concept of number.
The present article analyzes the development of the system of spatial prepositions in the acquisition of German as a foreign language by Brazilian learners. The study is based on a corpus of written language data produced by students in the undergraduate course in Letras, collected from 1996 to 1998. The theoretical bases of the study are theories of second language acquisition, cognitive processing of space, and the linguistic encoding of spatial relations through prepositions. The main section of the analysis begins with the quantitative evaluation of the occurrences of spatial prepositions found in the data. Subsequently, each preposition found in the corpus is individually discussed in relation to its correct and incorrect uses. The main results are a steady increase in the number of spatial prepositions used by the subjects from the first year to the fourth year of the course, an increase in the variation of the use of these prepositions, and a constant reduction of the percentage of incorrect uses. In the first phase, acquisition can be seen in the increasing specificity of the semantic oppositions involved in neutralizations, whereas in the second phase, a quantitative reduction of errors can be found.