When we read or listen to language, we are faced with the challenge of inferring intended
messages from noisy input. This challenge is exacerbated by considerable variability …

Within the cognitive sciences, most researchers assume that it is the job of linguists to
investigate how language is represented, and that they do so largely by building theories …

There has been a consistent pattern of criticism of the reliability of acceptability judgment
data in syntax for at least 50 years (eg, Hill 1961), culminating in several high-profile …

This work focuses on explaining both grammatical universals of word order and quantitative
word-order preferences in usage by means of a simple efficiency principle: dependency …

In order to explain the unacceptability of certain long-distance dependencies–termed
syntactic islands by Ross (1967)–syntacticians proposed constraints on long-distance …

This book is about one of the most intriguing features of human communication systems: the
fact that words that go together in meaning can occur arbitrarily far away from each other. In …

Growing evidence suggests that syntactic processing may be guided in part by expectations
about the statistics of the input that comprehenders have encountered; however, these …

Abstract According to Featural Relativized Minimality, the local relation between an
extracted element and its trace is disrupted when it crosses an intervening element whose …

Synthesizing the theory behind and methodology for conducting judgment tests, Using
Judgments in Second Language Acquisition Research aims to clarify the issues surrounding …

We ask whether word order preferences for binomial expressions of the form A and B (eg
bread and butter) are driven by abstract linguistic knowledge of ordering constraints …