A study was conducted to delineate the qualitative differences in the language abilities of two disadvantaged groups and one advantaged group of kindergarten and first grade children who were tested on the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities. (As part of a larger study, the present report deals only with a part of the pretest phase.)…

Considers the significant divergency of functions of connectives in speech from those of their counterparts in written language and points out that, because learning materials are based mainly on sentence grammars, the former functions are in the main neglected in them. (CB)

Presents research conducted within the Freetext project to build an automatic error diagnosis system for learners of French as a foreign language. Review the main features of the project and the learner corpus collected and used within the project, focuses on the error diagnosis system and specifically on a syntactic checker. (Author/VWL)

Describes a study that analyzed 2,032 sentences from the literature of subject disciplines representing the social sciences and hard sciences to examine their use of syntactic features. Discussion covers the finding that there were significant differences primarily between, not among, the social science and hard science disciplines, and the…

Four experiments on the acquisition of binding are compared, two conducted with Italian-speaking children and two with English-speaking children. English-speaking children's mastery of pronominal binding is found to lag behind their mastery of binding for anaphors and R-expressions. (61 references) (Author/LB)

Provides a general overview of two books--"The Second Time Around: Minimalism and Second Language Acquisition" and "Second Language Syntax: A Generative Introduction--and shows how the respond to key issues in second language acquisition, including the process of second language acquisition, access to universal grammar, the role of…

Three studies examined adults' generic noun phrases in English and Mandarin Chinese from child-directed speech of caregivers interacting with their toddlers. Found that generic noun phrases were reliably identified in both languages. Generic noun phrases most frequently referred to animals. Non-generic noun phrases were used most frequently for…

Event-related potentials were recorded to substantiate the claim of a distinct psycholinguistic status of (a) pronouns vs. proper names and (b) ellipses vs. proper names. In two studies 41 students read sentences in which the number of intervening words between the anaphor and its antecedent was either small or large. Comparing the far with the…

In this cross-sectional investigation, syntactic development was compared in conversational versus expository discourse in 120 typically developing children, adolescents, and adults, age 7 to 49 years. Each participant was asked to discuss common topics such as school, family, and friends to elicit conversational discourse and to explain the rules…

Background: Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is the most common known inherited cause of intellectual disability, yet very few studies have explored the language comprehension skills of children with FXS. We examined the receptive vocabulary, grammatical morphology and syntax skills of boys with FXS (who were additionally classified as having autism,…

Recent research on comparatives in the Muskogean language, Alabama, suggest similar work for Koasati, the language most closely related to Alabama. Koasati has a system parallel to that of Alabama. Although the actual morphemes used for comparative constructions in Koasati are almost identical to the ones used in Alabama, the syntax of such…

Comments upon phonological, grammatical-syntactic, and lexical interference phenomena affecting the German learner of English, their causes and effects. Similarities between such phenomena in the two languages cause more difficulties than contrasts do. There is greater danger of under-differentiation than of over-differentiation. (Text is in…