To learn new words, particularly verbs, child learners have been shown to benefit from the linguistic contexts in which the words appear. However, cross-linguistic differences affect how this process unfolds. One previous study found that children's abilities to learn a new verb differed across Korean and English as a function of the sentence in…

Purpose: Punctuation is traditionally seen to represent grammatical structures in writing, but some authors argue that it can also reflect the intonation and pauses of speech. In two experiments, we examined the influence of grammar and prosody on adults' judgments of comma placement. Method: University students rated the appropriateness of commas…

Background: The body of literature on narratives of bilingual children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) is growing. However, little is known about the narrative abilities of bilingual preschool children with SLI and their patterns of growth. Aims: To determine the similarities and differences in narrative abilities between…

Analysis of children's spoken narratives represents a potentially informative approach to language assessment within early childhood settings. Yet, narrative assessment is not readily amenable to at-scale use given the time needed to collect, transcribe, and analyze a child's narrative sample and the lack of consensus regarding what aspects of…

This study evaluated the ability of 21 children (ages 5 and 6) with specific language impairment (SLI) to use verbs which can alternate between transitive and intransitive contexts to indicate or relinquish cause. SLI children were proficient in lexically alternating verbs, yet provided fewer passive and periphrastic constructions and more…

Approximately 480 deaf students (age 10 to 19 years) and 60 hearing students (age 8 to 10 years) were asked to judge the grammaticality of sentences containing auxiliary verbs, of sentences where the verb had been deleted, and of sentences in which the verb tense was not marked. (Author)

Discusses and compares the meaning of epistemic uses of modals. Demonstrates that the relation between them is not as simple as has been frequently suggested. The article bases its observations on the data from a corpus of parallel French and English texts, pointing out that such a corpus can open new avenues for investigation of an old topic. (18…

An effective approach to minimizing the difficulties ESL learners have with the English verb phrase is to associate a clear function with each form. Three main contexts for teaching and lines of development are discussed. (Author/ND)

A study was undertaken to determine how much knowledge children have of grammatical systems before they evidence the systems in their spontaneous speech in a productive way. A child aged about two and a half years was examined over several months through elicited imitation causing him to repeat a model sentence immediately after the researcher.…

Verbs (4800) from 1200 compositions written by Nebraska students (grades 3-6) were examined using the most sophisticated grammatical analysis available to determine children's use of the English verb system and to compare their use to recent studies of the verb in adult writing. Information obtained included the following items: Children used…

Presents a study based on the analysis of contrastive Swedish-English data on modal particles. The article maintains that the meaning of modal particles requires an analysis of their pragmatic aspects such as the relation between the interlocutors. The analysis most accurately accounting for the multifunctionality of the particles is based on a…

A system for classifying English predicates into four families that account for all forms, moods, voices, and tenses is examined as an approach to teach grammar to students of English as a second language (ESL). It is suggested that by focusing on one family at a time, then building by combining these families, students can learn more readily to…

Human beings who have been forced to acquire language through non-auditory modalities characteristically display an impoverished syntactic system. I.M. Schlessinger (1970) has shown, for example, that users of sign language have difficulty in communicating syntactic relations such as "subject of main verb,""object of the verb," and "indirect…

A number of errors which typify the English speech or writing of Egyptian students of EFL (English as a foreign language) were identified. A series of matched sentences -- some containing a deviant feature, others not -- were recorded by a native speaker of English and by a native speaker of Arabic. Groups of intermediate and of advanced EFL…

This essay considers three areas in Spanish grammar that generally cause difficulty to English-speaking learners: the use of "ser" and "estar," the difference in use between the preterite and imperfect tenses, and the use of the subjunctive. Like most problematic grammatical elements in any language, these points are difficult for non-native…