Agrammatism is a frequent sequela of Broca's aphasia that manifests itself in omission and/or substitution of the grammatical morphemes in spontaneous and constrained speech. The hierarchical structure of syntactic trees has been proposed as an account for difficulty across grammatical morphemes (e.g., tense, agreement, and negation). Supporting…

This interlanguage pragmatics study of linguistic expressions of affect focuses on how Japanese learners of English may express themselves in an affect-laden speech act of indirect complaint. The English as a Second Language (ESL) learners' data are compared with the baseline data of native speakers of Japanese (JJ) and American English (AA). The…

Research suggests that characteristics of EFL input cause morphosyntactic features to be acquired in an order dissimilar to that found in ESL contexts. To determine whether acquisition order for Korean learners could be explained by characteristics of their EFL input, a Korean elementary school curriculum was analyzed. Morphosyntactic features…

This study reports on a comparison of the use and knowledge of tense-marking morphemes in English by first language (L1), second language (L2), and specific language impairment (SLI) children. The objective of our research was to ascertain whether the L2 children's tense acquisition patterns were similar or dissimilar to those of the L1 and SLI…

The role of morphology in reading aloud was examined measuring naming latencies to pseudowords and words composed of morphemes (roots and derivational suffixes) and corresponding simple pseudowords and words. Three groups of Italian children of different ages and reading abilities, including dyslexic children, as well as one group of adult readers…

The present study examined the general hypothesis that, as for nouns, stable representations of semantic knowledge relative to situations expressed by verbs are available and accessible in long term memory in normal people. Regular associations between verbs and past tenses in French adults allowed to abstract two superordinate semantic features…

The purpose of the present study was (1) to determine whether speech rate, utterance length, and grammatical complexity (number of clauses and clausal constituents per utterance) influenced stuttering-like disfluencies as children became more disfluent at the end of a 1200-syllable speech sample [Sawyer, J., & Yairi, E. (2006). "The effect of…

The quality of implicit morphological knowledge in adult Hebrew readers with developmental dyslexia was investigated. The priming paradigm was used to examine whether these adults extract and represent morphemic units similarly to normal readers during online word recognition. The group with dyslexia as a whole did not exhibit priming with visual…

Previous research suggests that children's behavior with respect to the interpretation of indefinite objects in negative sentences may differ depending on the target language: whereas young English-speaking children tend to select a surface scope interpretation (e.g., Musolino (1998)), young Dutch-speaking children consistently prefer an inverse…

Two experiments compared how relatively long novel prefixed words (e.g., "overfarm") and existing prefixed words were processed in reading. The use of novel prefixed words allows one to examine the roles of whole-word access and decompositional processing in the processing of non-novel prefixed words. The two experiments found that,…

This paper discusses a problem in semantic analysis of modern standard Thai. The synchronically polysememic morpheme /cay/ has meanings approximately equivalent to English "heart, mind, spirit" and "breath." A purely descriptive approach to this form would require two separate dictionary entries for /cay/. An examination of the…

Are the linguistic forms that are memorized in the mental lexicon and those that are specified by the rules of grammar subserved by distinct neurocognitive systems or by a single computational system with relatively broad anatomic distribution? On a dual-system view, the productive -ed-suffixation of English regular past tense forms (e.g.,…

A previous study of 10 patients with Broca's aphasia demonstrated that the advantage for producing the past tense of irregular over regular verbs exhibited by these patients was eliminated when the two sets of past-tense forms were matched for phonological complexity (Bird, Lambon Ralph, Seidenberg, McClelland, & Patterson, 2003). The…

We report on a study designed to examine children's understanding of (1) the connection between root morphemes and the spelling of inflected words and (2) the role of morphological awareness in this understanding. Seven- to 9-year-old children were given clues (e.g. "turn") to the spelling of inflected and control words (e.g. "turning" and…