Languages spoken in larger populations are relatively simple. A possible explanation for this is that languages with a greater number of speakers tend to also be those with higher proportions of non-native speakers, who may simplify language during learning. We assess this explanation for the negative correlation between population size and…

There is growing recognition that multilingualism is a norm rather than an exception and that it constitutes a default state of human linguistic competence. This phenomenon has become particularly relevant due to widespread, yet variously motivated, population movements as well as job-related mobility and the introduction of multiple foreign…

Although it is a core component of a language user's overall linguistic competence, vocabulary has traditionally not received the kind of attention it deserved, being usually lumped with other kinds of competence till 1980s and 1990s when researchers started focusing on it with great interest. The present paper discusses what the notion of lexical…

This article examines how, in a multilingual perspective, language competence is experienced, talked about and practiced by language users themselves. By viewing children as active co-creators of the spaces in which language is used, this article contributes to a research tradition in which focus is shifted from viewing the individual's language…

Constituent structure is considered to be the very foundation of linguistic competence and often considered to be innate, yet we show here that it is derivable from the domain-general processes of chunking and categorization. Using modern and diachronic corpus data, we show that the facts support a view of constituent structure as gradient (as…

It has usually been psycholinguistics which has accommodated itself to alterations within linguistic formulations, but now there is a growing independence on the part of many psychologists in the study of language. The shift in emphasis is from competence to performance. (POP)

Evidence is offered to support the view that linguistic competence cannot in principle be divorced from linguistic performance in order to abstract universal properties of grammars, that rules of grammar inevitably incorporate perceptual strategies and constraints, and that grammaticality and acceptability are related to predictability. A theory…

Indicates a strong relationship between the various aspects of language proficiency and social class and race and discusses the complex relationships among aspects of language proficiency. (RB)

In response to earlier studies by Thompson and Chapman (1977) and Clark and Clark (1977), 16 middle-class and upper-class White children between 1.2 and 2.2 were tested for overextension in production and comprehension. (AM)

This article outlines a model of the two basic components of a text, namely, the system of formal linguistic rules, and the realization of these rules into concrete discourse, by means of particular transformations. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

The intermediate competence of adult second language learners is qualitatively different from native speaker competence. Learning strategies are constants in the diachronic modifications of learner competence. A study of the acquisition of interrogatives in French reveals limited strategies and the heterogeneity of linguistic models needed to…

The purposes of this study were to develop an informal language inventory for classroom teachers to use in screening a child's speech, to have classroom teachers use the inventory with students to determine if they could use it, and to determine if teachers would use the assessment form after they had had some experience with it. The development…

Two main viewpoints have been consistently implied in linguistic research on creativity. The externalist sees creativity as outside the normal language, and the internalist views creativity as a basic process of language use. In this paper, creativity is regarded as the adaptation of the potential of systems to the demands of a particular act of…