Background: Vocabulary development is closely associated with morphological knowledge, yet work is needed to understand the mechanisms underpinning this relationship. One possibility is that because morphological relationships entail systematic mappings between word form (phonology and orthography) and word meaning (semantics and grammar),…

This document constitutes the first phonological grammar Betsimisaraka Malagasy, a form of the Malagasy (Austronesian) language spoken in the island nation of Madagascar. Betsimisaraka specifically is the name of an ethnic group with approximately a million members living on the East Coast of the island, as well as the various dialects they speak.…

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…

In this paper I review the methodology that I used in beginning my early fieldwork on a tonal Athabaskan language, including preparation through reading and listening, working with speakers, organizing data, and describing and analyzing the data, stressing how these are not steps or stages, but intersect and interact with each other.

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…

The present study investigated the role of overt phonological realisation of morphological marking on the implementation of subject-predicate agreement in language production. This study was conducted in Hebrew, and focused on subject-predicate gender agreement for inanimate nouns. In Hebrew, singular masculine forms are usually morphologically…

Abstract representations such as subsegmental phonological features play such a vital role in explanations of phonological processes that many assume that these representations play an equally prominent role in the learning process. This assumption is tested in three artificial grammar experiments involving a mini language with morpho-phonological…

Despite longstanding arguments concerning the grammatical categories, functions, and status of the Korean and Japanese copulas within each language system, hardly any attention has been given to their comparative study. Researchers have asked about the function and status of the variant forms of the Japanese copula, and whether they should be…

Background: Children with language impairment often exhibit significant difficulty in the use of grammatical morphology. Although English-speaking children with language impairment have special difficulties with verb morphology, noun morphology can also be problematic in languages of a different typology. Aims: Hungarian is an agglutinating…

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)…

Purpose: This study evaluated the effects of an intervention program aimed to improve reading and spelling ability through instruction in morphological awareness together with other forms of linguistic awareness, including knowledge of phonology, orthography, syntax, and semantics. Method: Sixteen children aged between 8;07 (years;months) and…

This dissertation describes the phonetic characteristics of a phenomenon that has previously been denominated "unstressed vowel reduction" in Andean Spanish based on the spectrographic analysis of 40,556 unstressed vowels extracted from the conversational speech of 150 residents of the city of Cusco, Peru. Results demonstrate that this…

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…

Phonological and semantic principles which underlie the derivation of verbs from nouns and adjectives in English are examined. There is intricate phonological conditioning for suffix "-ize" and for suffix "-(i)fy"; a third major process is zero derivation. These derivational processes cover more than a score of semantic relations (some with…