All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children's knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focusing on the passive, whether children's and adults' performance is additionally semantically constrained,…

Purpose: This study tested children's sensitivity to tense/agreement information in fronted auxiliaries during online comprehension of questions (e.g., "Are the nice little dogs running?"). Data from children with developmental language disorder (DLD) were compared to previously published data from typically developing (TD) children…

Background: Morphosyntax has been well researched in specific language impairment (SLI) and there is general agreement that children with SLI have particular difficulties with tense-marking. Less well researched is the role that aspect plays in the difficulties found in tense-marking, especially as tense and aspect are often confounded in English.…

The purpose of this study was to determine if the frequent use of a targeted, computer software grammar instruction program, used as an individualized classroom activity, would influence the comprehension of morphosyntax structures (determiners, tense, and complementizers) in deaf/hard-of-hearing (DHH) participants who use American Sign Language…

This study taught the passive to two children with specific language impairment (aged 8;1 and 8;2). It employed usage-based principles including "constructional grounding"; using short structures as the basis for acquiring long structures, and "construction conspiracy"; encouraging analogies between partially overlapping…

One of the most intriguing findings on language comprehension is that violations of syntactic predictions can affect event-related potentials as early as 120 ms, in the same time-window as early sensory processing. This effect, the so-called early left-anterior negativity (ELAN), has been argued to reflect word category access and initial…

Complex complements are clausal objects containing tensed verbs (e.g., that she cried) or infinitives (e.g., to cry), following main verbs of communication or mental activities (e.g., say, want). This research examined whether English- and Cantonese-speaking 4-year-olds' complement understanding uniquely predicts their representation of other…

Findings of a seminar which explored the current linguistics methods of teaching elementary reading and examined the background of this approach and some programs constant with it are presented. The seminar established the following set of criteria for describing the important characteristics of a linguistics method: (1) task definitions of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether memory support and elicited production differentially benefited fast mapping of new vocabulary (comprehension, production accuracy, and speed) in adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) compared with typically developing (TD) children matched for syntax comprehension. The study also examined…