This study compared the relative use by four male and four female youth with mental retardation of linguistic (grammatical) devices identified as characteristic of typical female speech (qualifying markers, question styles, and politeness terms). Females produced significantly more qualifying markers than did males, although neither question style…

Discusses prevailing ideas of how children learn language and addresses the argument of rules versus analogies in learning to form the past tense of verbs. Cites cases involving connectionist models. (ML)

Examination of the spontaneous speech of 10 English-speaking children (ages 3 to 5) with specific language impairment revealed evidence of the functional categories of determiner, inflection, and complementizer. However, compared to younger children with comparable mean utterance lengths, these children showed lower percentages of use of many…

Two linguistic microstructures (propositions and cohesive devices) were analyzed in story recalls by 11 primary and intermediate level hearing-impaired students. When stories were very simple, students generated mostly complete propositions, however as complexity increased, semantic errors resulted in fewer complete propositions. (Author/DB)