Purpose: We measure typically developing monolingual child Spanish speakers' lexical development with a range of standard expressive and receptive tests. We also measure their comprehension of sentences with the existential quantifier "algunos" "some" to determine their abilities to generate "some, but not all" scalar…

Inaudible syntactic markers are especially difficult to spell. This paper examines how 455 fourth graders spell silent French plural markers in a dictation with real and pseudowords after one year of formal French instruction (L2). The Generalized Linear Mixed Model analysis shows first that noun plural spelling (real and pseudo) is a strong…

Morphological knowledge has been identified as a significant sub-skill in bilingual listening comprehension, and lexical researchers consider listening comprehension an essential means for language learning. The current research attempted to examine the crucial four derivative word classes (adverb, adjective, verb, and noun) to represent knowledge…

Reading comprehension in L2 has been shown to be correlated to vocabulary and grammatical knowledge. However, little is known about the relative contribution of morphosyntactic knowledge in this language competence. In the present study we investigated the contribution of morphosyntactic knowledge of some particular grammatical elements to the…

Cross-linguistically, monolingual children produce target-like inflected verbs much earlier than they can reliably distinguish between singular and plural subject-verb agreement morphology in comprehension (i.e. Johnson, V., J. de Villiers, and H. Seymour. 2005. "Agreement Without Understanding? The Case of Third Person Singular /s/."…

The two studies reported on in this paper examine the features of words that distinguish students' performances on vocabulary assessments as a means of understanding what contributes to the ease or difficulty of vocabulary knowledge. The two studies differ in the type of assessment, the types of words that were studied, and the grade levels and…

Background: Five-year-olds with specific language impairment (SLI) often struggle with mastering grammatical morphemes. It has been proposed that verbal morphology is particularly problematic in this respect. Previous research has also shown that in young typically developing children grammatical markers appear later in more phonologically…

This study investigates the development of plural morphology in Jordanian Arab children, and explores the role of the predictability, transparency, productivity, and frequency of different plural forms in determining the trajectory that children follow in acquiring this complex inflectional system. The study also re-examines the development of the…

Background: In many languages a weakness in non-word repetition serves as a useful clinical marker of specific language impairment (SLI) in children. However, recent work in Italian has shown that the repetition of real words may also have clinical utility. For young typically developing Italian children, real word repetition is more predictive of…

This paper seeks to explore the extent of definite article usage variation in several varieties of English based on a classification of its usage types. An annotation scheme based on Hawkins and Prince was developed for this purpose. Using matching corpus data representing Inner Circle varieties and Outer Circle varieties, analysis was made on…

Verbs are one of the basic building blocks of grammar, yet few studies have examined the grammatical, morphological, and phonological factors contributing to lexical access and production of Spanish verb inflection. This report describes an online data set that incorporates psycholinguistic dimensions for 50 of the most common early-acquired…

This paper examines the use of singular and plural pronominal references to split antecedents such as "John and Mary." Current opinion suggests that under the right circumstances, singular reference should be difficult, and plural reference facilitated, but currently only the first of the these predictions has been demonstrated. We report four…