It has been argued that children learning a second language (L2) omit agreement inflection because of communication demands. The conclusion of these studies is that L2 children know the morphological and syntactic properties of agreement inflection, but sometimes insert an inflectional default form (i.e., the bare verb) in production. The present…

Joanne Paradis' Keynote Article on bilingualism and specific language impairment (SLI) is an impressive overview of research in language acquisition and language impairment. Studying different populations is crucial both for theorizing about language acquisition mechanisms, and for practical purposes of diagnosing and supporting children with…

Cross-linguistic research on the development of tense-aspect marking has revealed a strong effect of lexical aspect. But the degree of this effect varies across languages. Explanation for this universal tendency and language-specific variation is still an open issue. This study investigates the early emergence and subsequent development of four…

Attempts to demonstrate that specifically language-impaired (SLI) children can be viewed as normal learners faced with systematically altered input. By assuming SLI children are limited in their ability to perceive and hypothesize grammatical morphemes that are low in phonetic substance, many features of SLI children's language can be explained by…

Fourteen matched pairs of German-speaking and English-speaking children were tested for their knowledge of grammatical morphology and expressive vocabulary. The finding that the German-speaking children earned higher scores than did the English-speaking children adds to the literature that documents language-specific sensitivity to particular…

Analyzes speech samples from 9- to 12-year olds with specific language impairment. There were few differences between utterances that did and did not include correctly inflected forms; errors occurred on words later in an utterance. Slowed processing in a limited system handling several operations in parallel may lead to the omission of…

Analysis of the spontaneous speech of English- and Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment indicated that word-final consonants adversely influenced Italian subjects' tendency to use articles. There was no evidence of syntactic differences between the language groups. (Author/CB)

Reanalyzes Gierut's study that presents a case in which a phonological intervention program is used to effect a phonemic split in a child with a highly restricted phonological system. Three alternatives to Gierut's analysis are presented and discussed. (21 references) (Author/OD)

Focuses on the acquisition of negation in American Sign Language (ASL) and the developmental relationship between the communicative and grammatical (or linguistic) headshakes for negation in deaf children acquiring ASL. Results indicate that the systems for communication and language are differentially mediated. (35 references) (Author/CK)