Three studies test the link between word order in binomials and psychological and demographic characteristics of a speaker. While linguists have already suggested that psychological, cultural and societal factors are important in choosing word order in binomials, the vast majority of relevant research was focused on general factors and on broadly…

Background: Children who are bilingual and have speech sound disorder are likely to be under-referred, possibly due to confusion about typical speech acquisition in bilingual children. Aims: To investigate what is known about the impact of bilingualism on children's acquisition of speech in English to facilitate the identification and treatment of…

This investigation explored the conversational practices and conversational rule-conformity of children aged four, six, and eight. Procedures included observation of the conversational behavior of children in classroom interaction among peers and a controlled laboratory investigation of the conversations of 18 children, of varying age levels, who…

Recent research in linguistic theory and language acquisition theory has progressed to the point where more detailed hypotheses can be made about the interaction of language learning and linguistic theory. These hypotheses can be used to make more precise predictions about prerequisite knowledge for learning a particular construction and the…

Results of five experiments in which adults and children were exposed to two study strategies for vocabulary learning: (1) repetition of words with meanings and (2) associative elaboration (the keyword method). Subjects were asked to choose one of the two study methods for learning a 24-item list of new vocabulary words. (SL)

Two studies investigated whether young children acquiring verbs at an exceptional rate can use the syntactic structure of familiar and unfamiliar verbs to make conjectures about some aspect of the meanings of those verbs. The preferential looking paradigm (Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek, 1981) was used to set up a naturalistic pairing of scene and…

Examples of the Croats in the Burgenland and the Slovenes in Carinthia (Slavic minorities in Austria) are presented to illustrate the importance of comparing different multilingual communities to make a typologically relevant description of them to understand typological similarities and certain idiosyncratic characteristics. (Author/CB)

A study combining qualitative and quantitative research methods (a direct survey) investigated the attitudes of 75 working class individuals in Glasgow, Scotland toward differences in the speech of older or younger people and in the speech of the opposite sex. Results indicate that dialect lexis loss was neither as thorough nor as abrupt as older…

Infants under six months are able to discriminate native and non-native consonant contrasts equally well, but as they learn the phonological systems of their native language, this ability declines. Current explanations of this phenomenon agree that the decline in discrimination ability is linked to the formation of native-language phonemic…

It is the intent of this Master's Thesis to describe the nonstandard morphology and syntax of a representative sample of children in the Norfolk City schools. The description is organized according to the linguistic patterning of nonstandard English features and their social and ethnic distribution. The speech of both white and Negro children is…