Language sample analysis measures have long been promoted as exhibiting greater ecological validity than formal testing in the assessment of language disorder in children. In practice, their use is often restricted to preschool children, owing to lack of normative information, as well as criticisms of the validity of commonly used measures for the…

The spelling of words in English is governed in part by the morphemes that make them up. This study examines the strength of children's knowledge of the role of root morphemes in spelling, specifically focusing on whether it can withstand interference by phonological changes. A total of 75 children between seven and nine years of age were given…

Three experiments are reported that examined whether stem complexity plays a role in inflecting polymorphemic words in language production. Experiment 1 showed that preparation effects for words with polymorphemic stems are larger when they are produced among words with constant inflectional structures compared to words with variable inflectional…

It is cross-linguistically common for languages to undergo a diachronic increase in the range of adverbial notions that can be expressed by means of infinitival constructions, and the Romance languages are a good example of this process. Examining the development of adverbial "prepositional infinitive" constructions in Spanish, Portuguese and…

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) lag behind children with typical language (TL) in their grammatical development, despite equivalent early exposure to recasts in conversation (M. E. Fey, T. E. Krulik, D. F. Loeb, & K. Proctor-Williams, 1999) and the ability to learn from recasts in intervention as quickly as do children…

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous…

The relationship between written words and their pronunciation varies considerably among different orthographic systems, and these variations have repercussions on learning to read. Children whose languages have deep orthographies must learn to pronounce larger units, such as rhymes, morphemes, or whole words, to achieve the correct pronunciation…

Several national reports have suggested the usefulness of systematic, explicit, synthetic phonics instruction based on English word structure along with wide reading of quality literature for supporting development in early reading instruction. Other studies have indicated, however, that many in-service teachers are not knowledgeable in the basic…

This study examines the effects of learners' production (i.e., pushed output) during a multi-stage reconstruction task on learners' noticing of Spanish past tense morphology, aural text comprehension, and development of preterite/imperfect usage in writing. Participants included 47 intermediate L2 Spanish learners in a content-based course at the…

The foundation of all learning is rooted in the development of language and literacy abilities. Literacy development begins well before children enter school and can accelerate in an early childhood classroom setting. Teacher educators often hear about the importance of literacy development. In particular, the significance of phonological…

Criticizes M. Halle's theory of morphology in word formation as too strong a generalization. (CK)

The study examined whether deaf children's gesture systems are structured at the morpheme level of analysis. A 3-year-old deaf child from the authors' previous study was selected and all of his characterizing signs produced during a 2-hour naturalistic play session in his home were videotaped. Each sign was coded in terms of its handshape, motion,…

Concerns the language development of four children between the ages of 19 and 26 months, as they progressed from single-word utterances to a mean length of utterance of 2.5 morphemes. The observed developmental sequence is described and possible linguistic and cognitive explanations for it are discussed.

Components of word analysis and synthesis that are important for vocabulary development instruction are word structure and morphemes. Morpheme study includes bases, prefixes, suffixes, epenthetic elements, and affixation processes. Word structure includes capitalization, abbreviations, contractions, number, possessives, and affixed words.…

Beginning readers must be made aware of the differences between elements of language such as words and sentences before reading instruction can proceed successfully. (MKM)