An examination of the syntactic consequences of a notionalist grammar assumption supports the differentiation of major word classes in terms of combinations of notional features and predication or nominality components. (35 references) (Author/CB)

A well-known characteristic of children with specific language impairment (SLI) is a significant deficit in grammatical morphology production compared with younger, language-matched, typically developing children. This is true for present tense be (am, is, are), as well as other inflectional morphemes. However, grammatical morpheme learning by…

This article compares two military investigative reports using the techniques of corpus linguistics and drawing on the interpretive framework provided by politeness theory and critical discourse analysis. The corpus data for the study comprise two bodies of texts investigating the Kandahar "friendly fire" incident of 17 April 2002: The…

An eye-movement reading experiment investigated whether the ease with which pronouns are processed is affected by the lexical frequency of their antecedent. Reading times following pronouns with infrequent antecedents were faster than following pronouns with frequent antecedents. We argue that this is consistent with a saliency account, according…

English-speaking children typically avoid using regular plurals in novel grammatical deverbal compounds as in "rat eater" but allow irregular plurals as in "mice eater" (Gordon, 1985). To explain these data, it has been argued that Kiparsky's (1983) level-ordering model constrains the production of morphologically complex…

We present empirical data showing that the relative frequency with which a verb normally appears in a syntactic construction predicts young children's ability to remember and repeat sentences instantiating that construction. Children aged 2;10-5;8 years were asked to repeat grammatical and ungrammatical sentential complement sentences (e.g., "I…

In this longitudinal study, quantitative and qualitative changes in responses of people with aphasia were examined on a phonemic fluency task. Eighteen patients were tested at 3-month intervals on the letters F-A-S while they received comprehensive, intensive treatment from 3 to 12 months post-stroke. They returned for a follow-up evaluation at an…

In two experiments we tested the hypothesis that children have a basic problem in mastering the attributive relation because it involves a two-step logical-semantic integration process of the head-noun and the attributive adjective. Hebrew-speaking children were asked to interpret highly familiar adjective-noun combinations by selecting a photo…

Building on Sheen's (2007) study of the effects of written corrective feedback (CF) on the acquisition of English articles, this article investigated whether direct focused CF, direct unfocused CF and writing practice alone produced differential effects on the accurate use of grammatical forms by adult ESL learners. Using six intact adult ESL…

We describe a computer assisted language learning (CALL) system that uses human-machine dialogue as its medium of interaction. The system was developed to help students learn the basics of the Maori language and was designed to accompany the introductory course in Maori running at the University of Otago. The student engages in a task-based…

We have noticed a change in the use of prepositions in English. In our work with student essays, we increasingly encounter non-standard uses of prepositions, such as "concern on," "afraid from," and "enamored with." This trend is evident in both native and non-native American English speakers. We believe that the…

Teachers may resist the notion of teaching as a performance but his or her voice, gestures, and movement in the classroom can help or harm student attentiveness. Strong skills in voice and movement can help illuminate a teacher's questions and ideas for students, drawing attention to what matters, holding their attention through a long class, and…

Children with Syntactic Specific Language Impairment (S-SLI) have difficulties understanding object relative clauses, which have been ascribed to a deficit in syntactic movement. The current study explores the nature of the deficit in movement, and specifically whether it is related to a deficit in the construction of syntactic structure and…

P. Bloom's (1990) data on subject omission are often taken as strong support for the view that child language can be explained in terms of full competence coupled with processing limitations in production. This paper examines whether processing limitations in learning may provide a more parsimonious explanation of the data without the need to…

Ute Bohnacker's (2006) article on the acquisition of the verb second (V2) property in German by native speakers of Swedish (also a V2 language) is an attempted rebuttal of Hakansson et al.'s (2002) work on first language (L1) transfer and aspects of the underlying theory on which the work is based: Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998). The…