This study compared the lexical-semantic organization skills of bilingually developing deaf children in American Sign Language (ASL) and English with those of a monolingual hearing group. A repeated meaning-association paradigm was used to assess retrieval of semantic relations in deaf 6-10-year-olds exposed to ASL from birth by their deaf…

Infants in their first year manifest selective patterns of discrimination between languages and between accents of the same language. Prosodic differences are held to be important in whether languages can be discriminated, together with the infant's familiarity with one or both of the accents heard. However, the nature of the prosodic cues that…

Metalinguistic skills may develop differently in multilingual and monolingual children. This study investigated effects of immersion in Cherokee as a second language on young children's (4;5-6;1) skills of noticing morphological forms/patterns in English, their first language, by comparing English past tense skills on two nonword and two real-word…

Native English speakers tend to exclude regular plural inflection when producing English noun-noun compounds (e.g., "rat-eater" not "rats-eater") while allowing irregular plural inflection within compounds (e.g., "mice-eater") (Clahsen, 1995; Gordon, 1985; Hayes, Smith & Murphy, 2005; Lardiere, 1995; Murphy, 2000). Exposure to the input alone has…

The study sought to examine the effect of lexical aspect and narrative discourse structure on the pattern of acquisition and use of English verbal morphology exhibited by creole-speaking students. Findings indicated that the emergent pattern of morphology in the creole participants' written interlanguage appeared to be influenced not only by…

Reports the results of an experiment which tested the ability of native English-speaking students of Spanish and native Spanish speakers to comprehend an oral passage, in Spanish, and remember the word order of certain sentences. The findings indicate that word order significantly affected the degree of the English speakers' comprehension.…

Orthogonally manipulated three word characteristics in Dutch and English--word imageability; word frequency; and cognate status--and obtained similar data patterns for three groups of bilinguals different from one another in second-language fluency. Findings indicate that "concept mediation" is a universal process in translating words…

Compares the developmental patterns in the acquisition of negation by five French Creole-speaking and four Creole English-speaking Saint Lucian children ages five and six. Similar patterns of development and error types were found for both groups, but the French Creole speakers remained at a less advanced stage than did the Creole English speakers…