Does child-directed language differ from adult-directed language in ways that might facilitate word learning? Associative structure (the probability that a word appears with its free associates), contextual diversity, word repetitions and frequency were compared longitudinally across six language corpora, with four corpora of language directed at…

This descriptive study analyzed the emergence of the imperfect in the written production of 30 beginning learners of Spanish. The analysis focused on the use of the imperfect and the morphological marking of state verbs. The results follow the patterns predicted by the aspect hypothesis (Andersen and Shirai, 1994), and support some refinements of…

This paper gives the results of a controlled experiment on word association. The purpose was to establish norms of commonality of primary descriptive adjective responses to common nouns. The stimuli consisted of 203 common nouns selected from 10 everyday topics of conversation, approximately 20 from each topic. There were 350 subjects, 50% male,…