Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the core domains of child language acquisition research (phonology, word-learning, inflectional morphology, syntax and binding) and includes a complete introduction…

Forty children (ages 5-18) with mild to severe hearing losses were administered a battery of speech and language tasks. Misarticulation, syntactic, and pragmatic errors indicated a consistent pattern of oral communication behavior that reflects the reduction of acoustic input such children experience. (Author/DB)

This case study describes an adolescent with multiple articulation errors. Comparison with previous studies found this individual demonstrated longer phrase durations and more variability than either normally articulating or speech-disordered and language-disordered children. Interaction between syntactic and articulatory performance was also…

Comparison of dysphasic children (N=8) with control children found that the dysphasic children's language development was both delayed and deviant, and that the children's deviant syntax structures were the result of insufficient language processing and could not be traced back to structural characteristics of the sentences used by their mothers.…

This study investigated whether syntactic complexity exerts an influence on the frequency of stuttering in the speech of seven adolescents who stuttered and seven who were normally fluent. Although normal disfluencies and errors in repetition accuracy increased as syntactic complexity increased, stuttering frequency did not appear to be affected…

Syntactic processing was explored in nine individuals who stutter (IWS). Grammaticality judgments and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were obtained while participants read sentences, half containing verb-agreement violations, via computer or paper. Judgment accuracy of IWS for the online task, but not offline, was lower, especially for more…

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)

Examines speech samples from six children aged 2 years to 2 years, 5 months, with Mean Lengths of Utterance ranging from 2.93 to 4.14, were examined for evidence of six syntactic categories: determiner, adjective, noun, noun phrase, preposition, and prepositional phrase. (HOD)

Reviews psycholinguistic theories on the relationship between structure and function in language production. Criticizes the theory that sentence structures are reducible to the general forces of cognition that drive interpretation and communication. Argues that syntactic structures are necessary elements in an explanation of language use. (FMW)

This longitudinal study assessed the narrative language development of primary grade children with slow expressive language development (SELD) as toddlers who either had or had not moved into the normal range of expressive language by early school age. Deficits in narrative skills tended to disappear in children with a history of SELD, though…

This study examined the complex syntax production of 45 pre-school-aged African American boys and girls from urban, low income homes. Results provide quantitative descriptions of amounts of complex syntax and suggest a potential positive relationship between amounts of complex syntax and amounts of nonstandard English form usage in the children's…

A study of five adult males with autism investigated which combination of input/output modalities (typed or spoken) enhanced the syntactic, semantic, and/or pragmatic performance of individuals with autism when engaging in conversations with a normal language adult. Results found that typed communications facilitated the use of longer utterances.…

This study compared (1) performance on language skills and phonological process measures by 41 kindergarten children with speech/language impairments, and (2) their reading ability in first grade. Children with semantic-syntactic language deficits exhibited more difficulties in reading than did children with articulation impairments. Phonological…

Papers on French linguistics, most in French, address the following topics: micro structural treatment of regionalisms in three French dictionaries; effects of the use of Quebec French on the intelligibility of synthesized speech; reading comprehension as a constructive process; acoustic markers of the utterance in Quebec French; constraints and…