This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In…

This study examined the developmental trajectories of Arabic grammatical number in Arabic-English bilingual children. The samples consisted of 80 individuals (40 monolingual children residing in Jordan and 40 bilingual children residing in the USA), aged between 5 and 9 years. Data was collected through two tasks involving picture able objects and…

We present a series of experiments investigating English-speaking children's comprehension of "it"-clefts and "wh"-pseudoclefts. Previous developmental work has found children to have asymmetric difficulties interpreting object clefts. We show that these difficulties disappear when clefts are presented in felicitous contexts,…

This article focuses on the acquisition of mood in early complement clauses of European Portuguese (EP). Two semantic features are involved in the EP mood system--epistemicity and veridicality. An elicited production task administered to 80 children aged 4 to 9 showed that, even though children use the subjunctive in [-- epistemic] contexts, the…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of first language thinking-for-speaking patterns on the acquisition of Greek as a second language (L2), as well as to determine whether proficiency level and stays in the target-language country have an effect on such influence. The participants (N = 50) were Spanish/Catalan learners of…

Structural priming (or syntactic priming) is a speaker's tendency to reuse the same structural pattern as one that was previously encountered (Bock, 1986). This study investigated (a) whether the implicit learning processes involved in long-lag structural priming lead to differential second language (L2) improvement in producing two structural…

Some peculiar properties of children's passives have long been observed in various languages such as an asymmetry between actional passives and nonactional passives. These peculiarities have been accounted for under the hypothesis that children's early passives are adjectival, and as such exhibit properties of adjectival passives in adult grammar.…

High on the list of today's educational priorities is the effective programing of pictorial stimuli as language teaching tools. The value of any image depends on its content of information, and essential for clear comprehension of any picture are the principles of causality, parallelism, and contrast or negative comparison. Both artist and teacher…

To increase the efficacy of visual instruction, more must be known about the operational forces within the image, and the determining factors in picture quality as a means of communication. The theory of information applied to this analysis of pictorial content, the fundamental thesis being that the value of an image depends on its content of…

This programmed workbook and test booklet is designed for use with the Unit I reader for the beginning audiolingual Latin course. The workbook allows the student to work without direct teacher aid, to work and review at his own speed, to correct answers immediately, and to pursue good independent study habits. Like the reader, the workbook is…

As part of the development of a battery of tests to determine proficiency in black standard and nonstandard speech, the authors developed a two-part test consisting of 20 items designed to evoke a response by means of verbal and pictorial cues. Each cue was supposed to elicit a specific grammatical construction characteristic of either black…

This Radio-TV class reader contains material from the Introduction and Unit I of the beginning Latin course based on the audiolingual method. The text consists of listening exercises composed of words or sentences with corresponding pictures followed by pattern practices on sentence structure, and question-answer exercises. The reader is designed…

This introductory reader for beginning Latin is based on the audiolingual method and contains 12 lessons. Materials in this and successive units embody structural linguistic principles and methods, new vocabulary and basic structures being generated from five kernel sentences by substitution, transformation and expansion. Each lesson is an…

This reader is the first of eight units for a beginning Latin course based on the audiolingual method. Materials in this and successive units embody structural linguistic principles and methods, new vocabulary and basic structures being generated from five kernel sentences by substitution, transformation, and expansion. The unit contains eight…