Examines mean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes as a predictor of the grammatical complexity of the natural language corpora of normal preschoolers and of children and adolescents with delayed language, Fragile X Syndrome, Down Syndrome, and autism. (43 references) (GLR)

Provides an analysis, based on theory-independent structural information, of the structure of postadverbials associated with the Mandarin morpheme "de," arguing that "de" does not stand for a unique morpheme, but for three homophonous ones. (24 references) (CB)

Examines arguments that language comes from innate, abstract knowledge of universal grammar that signers use to create new grammatical features. (12 references) (CK)

This study used grammaticality judgments to measure the sensitivity of four school-age children with severe speech and physical impairments (SSPI) to different morphological errors. Results indicated that the SSPI children and control groups made similar judgments. Participants with SSPI had greater difficulty detecting tense-marking errors…

All second language (L2) learning theories presuppose that learners learn the target language from the speech signal (or written material, when learners are reading), so an understanding of learners' ability to detect and represent novel patterns in linguistic stimuli will constitute a major building block in an adequate theory of second language…

This study investigates the phraseological patterning that occurs in reporting clauses used to make references to others' research. It examines finite reporting clauses with "that"-clause complement and draws upon two corpora of theses written by native speakers in contrasting disciplines: approximately 190,000 words in politics/international…

This article reports on a series of 5 analyses of spontaneous production of verbal inflection (tense and person-number agreement) by 2-year-olds acquiring French as a native language. A formal analysis of the qualitative and quantitative results is developed using the unique resources of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky, 2004). It is…

Purpose: This study addressed the effects of 3 different paradigms for scoring orthographic transcriptions of dysarthric speech on intelligibility scores. The study also examined whether there were differences in transcription accuracy among words from different linguistic classes. Method: Speech samples were collected from 12 speakers with…

This study extends the findings of Gaustad, Kelly, Payne, and Lylak (2002), which showed that deaf college students and hearing middle school students appeared to have approximately the same morphological knowledge and word segmentation skills. Because the average grade level reading abilities for the two groups of students were also similar,…

This article reports a case study investigating the relationship between three teachers' stated beliefs about and practices of focus on form in intermediate level ESL communicative lessons. Focus on form was defined and studied in terms of incidental time-outs taken by students and teachers to deal with issues of linguistic form during…

This study uses linguistic humor to show that awareness of only those linguistic units transcribed by the orthography bear a special relation to early reading success. The study is decribed following a review of the literature and a discussion of advantages and problems associated with the use of humor appreciation as a probe of children's…

The nature and source of onomatopeic words in Spanish are discussed in order of decreasing resemblance to the sound imitated. The first group of onomatopeic words are the interjections, in which sound effects and animal sounds are expressed. Repetition is often used to enhance the effect. The second group includes verbs and nouns derived from the…

A discussion of two aspects of Hindi phonology, schwa deletion and vowel nasalization, compares two theories concerning the processes behind these phenomena. A non-linear analysis is compared with a more traditional, linear notation. Results indicate that in most cases, both sets of rules work equally well but in some, the linear explanation is…

A study examined a vowel alternation occurring in Philadelphia English and some dialects of New York State. The alternation is of [E] and [ae], and the study investigated the application of the [ae] Tensing Rule, more specifically in the interaction of [ae] Tensing with several principles of syllabification and grammatical organization. Issues…

There is a set of morphemes in Alsea, an extinct Indian language of the Oregon coast, that are encliticized on the first word of the clause, similar to the second-position clitics in many languages. However, in some sentences these morphemes appear to be infixed rather than cliticized. True infixes are a rare phenomenon, and infixation of a…