To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, 2-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns ("The boy is gonna pilk a balloon"), but they have difficulty with pronominal frames ("He is gonna pilk…

The Aspect Hypothesis assumes that--in early interlanguages--the perfective past spreads from telic to atelic verbs because events occurring in the past are easier to be associated with predicates having an inherent endpoint in their lexico-conceptual representation. In this study it is questioned whether for initial L2ers knowing the general…

Discusses two naming experiments in which it was shown that response times for morphologically structured pseudowords are faster than those for orthographically matched controls. Argues that the results, which are consistent with those obtained in lexical decision tasks with morphologically structured pseudowords, provide support for compositional…

This article re-examines the role of the pronounceability of visually presented materials, following the idea that intergration on the vocal-auditory level may result from letter combinations that are easy to pronounce. (CLK)

Artifically constructed words were presented to kindergarten children, first graders, undergraduate and graduate students. (PR)

A study of children's acquisition of synonymy as a sense-property during the second childhood period (as defined by Piaget) suggests that, contrary to psychologists' claims, nominal realism is a linguistic phenomenon that should be studied as such. (75 references) (Author/CB)

The debate over whether primates can be taught visual language is examined, and evidence of use of nonverbal language in primate studies is compared with the language criteria of a number of linguistic researchers. Background information on language, visual language (including sign language), and the parameters of the studies is offered, including…

A study was conducted to examine syntactical development in spontaneous written language of selected preschool, kindergarten and first grade children. The two major experimental questions were: (1) Will there be development towards greater complexity in the syntax of spontaneous writing and how should it be described? (2) What transformational…

This news letter summarizes language research in composition, writing skills, and linguistic usage carried out over a three year period (Grades 4, 5, 6) with a sample of Swedish students. Subjective assessment of student compositions was carried out. The marks from these assessments will serve as criteria in evaluating various objective measures.…

A study investigated the processes used by bilinguals for organizing vocabulary by presenting subjects with bilingual word recognition tasks in two modalities (aural and visual) and using a repetition paradigm. Subjects were asked to decide whether a word presented to them was a nonsense word or a real word. Two separate experiments are described.…

A study investigated whether adult learners of a second language would judge grammaticality differently in visual and aural judgment tasks. Four groups were tested: English first-language, French first-language, English second-language, and French second-language. Results indicate judgments were slower and less accurate in the aural condition,…