Purpose: The study examined the use of percent grammatical utterances (PGUs) for assessing grammatical skills in Mandarin-speaking 3-year-old children. Method: Participants were 30 Mandarin-speaking 3-year-olds with typical development. Language samples were collected in two visits for each child using a picture description task. Children were…

Working memory is necessary for a wide variety of cognitive abilities. Developmental work has shown that as working memory capacities increase, so does the ability to successfully perform other cognitive tasks, including language processing. The present work demonstrates the effects of working memory availability on children's language production.…

We investigated toddlers' phonological representations of common vowel-initial words that can take on multiple surface forms in the input. In French, liaison consonants are inserted and are syllabified as onsets in subsequent vowel-initial words, for example, petit /t/ éléphant [little elephant]. We aimed to better understand the impact on…

The current study investigates the effects of dynamic and non-dynamic oral corrective feedback in response to learners' errors on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' English wh-question development over three treatment sessions. Sixty-eight EFL learners were assigned randomly to one of two experimental conditions that received either…

We propose that attraction errors in agreement production (e.g., the key to the cabinets are missing) are related to two components of executive control: working memory and inhibitory control. We tested 138 children aged 10 to 12, an age when children are expected to produce high rates of errors. To increase the potential of individual variation…

This study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive. The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific…

Purpose: This study investigated the level of grammatical accuracy in typically developing 3-year-olds and the types of errors they produce. Method: Twenty-two 3-year-olds participated in a picture description task. The percentage of grammatical utterances was computed and error types were analyzed. Results: The mean level of grammatical accuracy…

This paper compares explicit instruction in second-language Spanish with a control treatment on a written picture description task and a timed auditory grammaticality judgment task. Participants came from two intact, third-year US high school classes, with one experiencing a week of communicative lessons on the Spanish clitic "se"…

Previous evidence shows that nouns are easier for many language users to retrieve than verbs, but scant research has been conducted with children in bilectal environments (where both standard and non-standard forms of a language are spoken). This study investigates object and action naming in children who are native speakers of a non-standard…

This dissertation tests a grammatical structure, differential object marking (DOM), which is particularly difficult for L2 learners to acquire. DOM is a phenomenon in which some direct objects are morphologically marked to distinguish them from subjects (Comrie, 1979). In Spanish, animate and specific direct objects are marked with the preposition…

The purposes of this study are to test whether the processing of subject relative (SR) clauses is easier than that of object relative (OR) clauses in Turkish and to investigate whether the comprehension of SRs can be better explained by the linear distance hypothesis or structural distance hypothesis (SDH). The question is examined in two groups…

This study examined ten children with specific language impairment (SLI), 16 normally developing children, and ten adults for the production of novel root compounds. The participants were asked to invent names for pictures of 24 pairs of contrasting, novel objects. For half of the pictures, the context supported a grammatical novel root compound,…