Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the core domains of child language acquisition research (phonology, word-learning, inflectional morphology, syntax and binding) and includes a complete introduction…

This study explored the acquisition of regular and irregular past tense in 21 children with specific language impairment. The findings support a morphosyntactic rather than morphophonological learning model, such as the extended optional infinitive model, with regard to the limitations in finiteness marking and for affected children. (Contains…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their normally developing (ND) peers imitated proper nouns, the pronouns "he" and "you," and the article "the" in subject phrases. Both groups showed significantly more omissions of the function words than the proper nouns. A phonological explanation of subject article and pronoun omission is…

Trade-off effects among linguistic components were compared in 30 elementary school children with deficits in both oral and written language, deficits only in written language, or normal language development. Analysis of syntax, phonology, and fluency indicated group effects, with trade-offs between some linguistic measures and positive…

A theoretical framework is presented for understanding difficulties in foreign language learning, based upon a linguistic coding model that hypothesizes deficits in phonological, syntactic, and semantic information processing. Incidence of linguistic coding problems in 22 college-enrolled or college-bound students who petitioned to have the…

In this commentary on Linda Siegel's paper (EC221505), it is argued that a minimum level of general ability is needed for successful reading performance. Above this threshold other kinds of intelligence are required and more important is the contribution of verbal efficiency, which is predicated on the covariance of phonology, morphology, and…

Review of the contribution of various oral language abilities to early reading performances found that, although phonemic awareness was the best predictor of early reading skills, metasyntactic ability also often accounted for significant variance. Once children acquire initial decoding skills, narrative discourse and other metalinguistic skills…

This collection of symposium papers on varieties of the English language used in Ireland includes: "The Role of Irish English in the Formation of Colonial Englishes," by P. Trudgill; "Anglo-Irish Verse in Translation from Irish," by P. L. Henry; "The Methodology of Urban Language Studies," by J. Milroy;…

This study compared (1) performance on language skills and phonological process measures by 41 kindergarten children with speech/language impairments, and (2) their reading ability in first grade. Children with semantic-syntactic language deficits exhibited more difficulties in reading than did children with articulation impairments. Phonological…

Papers on French linguistics, most in French, address the following topics: micro structural treatment of regionalisms in three French dictionaries; effects of the use of Quebec French on the intelligibility of synthesized speech; reading comprehension as a constructive process; acoustic markers of the utterance in Quebec French; constraints and…