Children's development of the functional category of articles can be explained in two ways. One approach assumes that children are equipped with innate knowledge of the category, while the other assumes that children's early articles are limited-scope formulae. Using Eisenbeiss's (2000) criteria for determining the status of DPs, developed for a…

Linguists are sometimes confronted with choices concerning language names. For example, one and the same language may be referred to as Persian or Farsi. This short paper discusses some principles that one might use for making decisions when there are variant forms in use, or when one feels that none of the existing names is appropriate. The…

Generative approaches to language have long recognized the natural link between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition. The basic idea is that the knowledge representations provided by Universal Grammar enable children to acquire language as reliably as they do because these representations highlight the…

Researchers on bilingual processing can benefit from computational tools developed in artificial intelligence. We show that a normalized Levenshtein distance function can efficiently and reliably simulate bilingual orthographic similarity ratings. Orthographic similarity distributions of cognates and non-cognates were identified across pairs of…

Background: Children who are bilingual and have speech sound disorder are likely to be under-referred, possibly due to confusion about typical speech acquisition in bilingual children. Aims: To investigate what is known about the impact of bilingualism on children's acquisition of speech in English to facilitate the identification and treatment of…

Corpora of child language are essential for research in child language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Linguistic annotation of the corpora provides researchers with better means for exploring the development of grammatical constructions and their usage. We describe a project whose goal is to annotate the English section of the CHILDES database…

Automatic syllabification of words is challenging, not least because the syllable is not easy to define precisely. Consequently, no accepted standard algorithm for automatic syllabification exists. There are two broad approaches: rule-based and data-driven. The rule-based method effectively embodies some theoretical position regarding the…

This article critically reviews strategy research on learning Chinese both as a second and foreign language. Through a careful examination of major data bases in both the Chinese and English languages, the article summarizes research in the field and the principal research methods used in the studies reviewed. Moreover, key limitations in research…

Describes the International Corpus of English Corpus Utility Program (ICECUP), a computer-based text retrieval program designed to search a tagged corpus for words, word elements, and their grammatical roles. Explains the search, display options, concordance, and subcorpus selection features of the ICECUP program. (MDM)

This is a report on the activities of the survey of spoken English at the University of Lund (Sweden), during the period 1975-81. The aim of the survey has been to make available in machine-readable form a corpus of material with its origin in speech. The corpus was built in conjunction with the survey of English usage project at the University of…

Examines a source of linguistic data--newspapers--and discusses related problems of text-type classification and feature interpretation. Using texts from East Africa as a database, the article assesses the influence of different production contexts on the text composition and analyzes the samples for the multifunctional variable of…

Offers additional means of evaluating parent speech by examining frequencies of individual nouns, verbs, and descriptors, and examining the learning task presented to children. Study one examines transcripts from the CHILDES database of English-speaking parents' speech to children at five developmental levels; study two examines 50 transcripts of…

A listing of substantial, known adult speech error corpora includes seven major corpora in English, 11 in languages other than English (German, Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese, Japanese, and Thai), information on seven collectors of smaller English samples, and two references for anecdotal samples, one in French and one in Welsh. Each major…