The study explored the role of verbal fluency in determining reading and comprehension skills in Bengali among 10-year old typically developing Bengali children. Robust correlations were found between semantic fluency and word reading (0.63) as well as semantic fluency and comprehension (0.70). Good correlation was found between letter fluency and…

Various speech metrics have been developed to assess and monitor phonological development in young children. Process Density Index (PDI) is one such measure employed to determine the severity of phonological errors and speech intelligibility. The present study explored the utility of PDI as a measure of phonological development in 756…

India is currently home to one of the world's largest English-speaking communities, in a context where the language is increasingly seen as a gateway to the world. Given the plurality of the country's social and linguistic landscape, however, a significant amount of the population does not speak or have access to the language. The impact of…

This dissertation is concerned with how elliptical sentences are generated. To be specific, I investigate when and in what module ellipsis occurs, and what is elided as a result of ellipsis. With regard to the first research question, I propose that XP ellipsis occurs as soon as all the featural requirements of the licensor of XP ellipsis are…

The rise of English as a global lingua franca and the increasing use of it into the multilingual and multicultural contexts appear to be further indexing a number of new issues. These issues include from the discussion of its ownership -- that it is no longer only the language of native speakers of it, as statistically non-native speakers make up…

Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is…

Ho, an under-documented North Munda language of India, is known for its complex verb forms. This dissertation focuses on analysis of several features of those complex verbs, using data from original fieldwork undertaken by the author. By way of background, an analysis of the phonetics, phonology and morphophonology of Ho is first presented. Ho has…

Phonology is an area of linguistics that is concerned with the sounds of language. Since each language has its own unique system of sound patterns, there is a need to study phonological development in different languages. However, lack of published data necessitates the present study on phonological developmental pattern in Punjabi language…

The language of advertisements aims at precise, clear, pointed, and arresting communication. Like all communicative endeavours, in advertising, getting the message across is of prime importance. However, the use of language in advertising is of a particular character because the advertiser cannot afford to be delinquent or uncritical. The aim of…

The present study aims at analyzing speech samples of four Bengali speaking children with repaired cleft palates with a view to differentiate between the misarticulations arising out of a deficit in linguistic skills and structural or motoric limitations. Spontaneous speech samples were collected and subjected to a number of linguistic analyses…

This study investigated factors that could affect inter-examiner reliability in the pronunciation assessment component of speaking tests. We hypothesized that the rating of pronunciation is susceptible to variation in assessment due to the amount of exposure examiners have to nonnative English accents. An inter-rater variability analysis was…

This study investigates the literacy skills of 193 students across grades three, five, seven, and nine in one private English medium school in Kerala, India. Students were assessed on their ability to read phonologically regular and irregular words, fluency with grade-level text, vocabulary knowledge, and comprehension skill. Results showed that…

The history of the evolution of language assessments for children and adults with language disorders is described briefly. This is followed by a discussion on language assessment of the clinical population with an emphasis on linguistic profiling, illustrated through the Linguistic Profile Test. Discourse analysis, in particular, is highlighted…

Phonological process analysis was carried out using a 40-word imitation task with 30 11;6-14;6 year old Kannada-speaking persons with Down syndrome in comparison with 15 non-verbal mental age matched typically developing children. Percentages of occurrence were significantly higher for the Down syndrome group with certain exceptions. Some…

This essay mainly discusses the following issue: Do people from different cultures store English words in their minds in different ways; and what elements determine people's mental lexicon? The findings from my experiment showed that cultural factors only play a minor role on this stage. The leading dominants in this light are the linguistic…