For monolingual English-speaking children, judgment and production of stress in derived words, including words with phonologically neutral (e.g., -ness) and non-neutral suffixes (e.g., "-ity"), is important to both academic vocabulary growth and to word reading. For Mandarin-speaking adult English learners (AELs) the challenge of…

Acquisition of regular inflectional suffixes is an integral part of grammatical development in English and delayed acquisition of certain inflectional suffixes is a hallmark of language impairment. We investigate the relationship between input frequency and grammatical suffix acquisition, analyzing 217 transcripts of mother-child (ages 1 ; 11-6 ;…

Purpose: This study describes a post hoc analysis of segmental, stress, and syllabification errors in third graders' productions of derived English words with the stress-changing suffixes "-ity" and "-ic." We investigated whether (a) derived word frequency influences error patterns, (b) stress and syllabification errors always co-occur, and (c)…

Hesitations have been considered to serve both cognitive and linguistic functions. This study presents analyses of children's hesitations while producing English derived words with the suffix -"ity". Two questions were considered: Do children's linguistic skills influence their use and frequency of hesitations when producing derived…

Purpose: This study examined whether lexical frequency, semantic knowledge, or sentence context affect children's production of primary stress in derived words with stress-changing suffixes (e.g., "-ity"). Method: Thirty children (M[subscript age] = 9;1 [years;months]) produced a limited set of high-frequency (HF) and low-frequency (LF) derived…

This study examined the effects of lexical frequency on children's production of accurate primary stress in words derived with nonneutral English suffixes. Forty-four third-grade children participated in an elicited derived word task in which they produced high-frequency, low-frequency, and nonsense-derived words with stress-changing suffixes…

Purpose: Little is known about the phonological aspects of derivational processes. Neutral suffixes (e.g., "-ness") that do not change stress and rhythmic or nonneutral suffixes (e.g., "-ity") that alter stem stress were used in a production task that explored developmental changes in phonological accuracy of derived English…