Two experiments investigated morphological decomposition in ambiguous novel compounds such as "busheater," which can be parsed as either "bus-heater" or "bush-heater." It was found that subjects' parsing choices for such words are influenced by orthographic constraints but that these constraints do not operate…

This investigation examined the possibility that features necessary for morphology, such as person and number, are absent from the underlying grammars of specifically language-impaired children. (46 references) (JL)

A longitudinal study of 43 typical children (ages 2 to 8) and 21 children with specific language impairments (SLI) found that a diverse set of morphemes share the property of tense marking, that acquisition shows linear and nonlinear components, and that mean length of utterance predicts rate of acquisition. (Author/CR)

Compares morphological processing of skilled and less skilled Dutch readers. Focuses on the role of prefixes as access units in visual word recognition. Finds evidence for differential use of prefix information in undergraduate students and elementary school children. Concludes that the information accessed by prefixes is semantically combined…

Examines the structural consequences of the contact between Dutch overseers and Eastern slaves during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the formation of Berbice Dutch, an unusual Creole because of its remarkably homogeneous substrate. (Author/VWL)

A study examined the extent to which linguistic variation in the English language might have been affecting the performance of 160 rural preschoolers in South Carolina. When dialectal variations were not considered, the performance of the children differed from that of the normative populations on tests that assessed grammatical morphemes.…

The authors evaluated the roles of auditory-verbal short-term memory, visual short-term memory, and group membership in predicting language comprehension, as measured by an experimental sentence comprehension task (SCT) and the Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language--Third Edition (TACL-3; E. Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999) in 38 participants: 19 with…

This meta-analysis pools data from 25 years of research on the order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes by students of English as a second language (ESL). Some researchers have posited a "natural" order of acquisition common to all ESL learners, but no single cause has been shown for this phenomenon. Our study investigated…

Previous studies of verb morphology in children with specific language impairment (SLI) have been limited in the main to tense and agreement morphemes. Cantonese, which, like other Chinese languages, has no grammatical tense, presents an opportunity to investigate potential difficulties for children with SLI in other areas of verb morphology, via…

An ongoing debate in Arabic morphology concerns the nature of the smallest unit governing lexical organization and representation in this language. A standard model maintains that Arabic words are typically analyzable into a three-consonantal root morpheme carrying the core meaning of words and a prosodic template responsible mostly for…

Morphological errors in reading aloud (e.g., "sexist" [right arrow] "sexy") are a central feature of the symptom-complex known as deep dyslexia, and have historically been viewed as evidence that representations at some level of the reading system are morphologically structured. However, it has been proposed (Funnell, 1987) that morphological…

The Malay language has a transparent morphological system and, unlike English, it is written in a very shallow alphabetic-syllabic script. We predicted that beginner spellers (six-to eight-year-olds) of this Rumi script would encode words at the level of the syllable and morpheme, rather than the phoneme. Using the results of a 75-item spelling…

Most models of visual word recognition in alphabetic orthographies assume that words are lexically organized according to orthographic similarity. Support for this is provided by form-priming experiments that demonstrate robust facilitation when primes and targets share similar sequences of letters. The authors examined form-orthographic priming…

The purpose of this study was to assess phonological and morphosyntactic change in children with co-occurring speech and language impairments using different goal attack strategies. Participants included 47 preschoolers, ages 3;0 (years;months) to 5;11, with impairments in both speech and language: 40 children in the experimental group and 7 in a…

Because the spelling of many words in the English language (and in many other languages as well) depends on their morphemic structure, children have to have some knowledge about morphemes in order to learn to read and write. This raises the possibility that children gain much of their explicit knowledge about morphemes as a direct result of…