Presents data from a positron emission tomographic study in which subjects were asked to produce the past tense forms of regular, irregular and nonce stems. Findings, which support the grammar/lexicon linguistic theories, reveal different amounts and areas of cortical activation in the regular and irregular tasks, as well as significantly…

Explores ways in which expert and novice roles are constituted and maintained in an academic counseling encounter. Characterizes the meeting as a socializing, problem-solving event and uses functional linguistics and discourse analysis to describe how the counselor and student mark stance through linguistic choices such as polarity, modality,…

A study investigated the first words produced by 17 bilingual children (ages 1-4) speaking English and Mandarin Chinese from environments where both languages were spoken. A greater number of nouns than verbs were produced as first words in both English and Mandarin Chinese. Verbs were produced only in Mandarin Chinese. (Contains references.)…

Preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLIs) and two groups of linguistically normally developing children described motion and change-of-state scenes while viewing a video, and patterns of verb use were analyzed. Although SLIs relied heavily on general all-purpose verbs, normally developing children used them more. SLIs made more verb…

A study assessed whether two children (ages 4-6) with autism could be taught a child-initiated query as a pivotal response to facilitate the use of grammatical morphemes. Children learned the strategy and acquired and generalized the targeted morpheme. Children also showed increases in mean length of utterance and verb acquisition. (Contains…

Examines the acquisition of the inflectional system by a Turkish child learner of English. Results from longitudinal data collected over 18 months are reported, presenting counterevidence for recent hypotheses on early second language acquisition according to which missing functional items reflect missing functional categories. (Author/VWL)

Twenty-four 12- to 19-month-old children were studied to examine the cognitive basis for the emergence of verbs. Substantial increases in verb comprehension across contexts, abstract cognition, and the ability to engage in symbolic action were observed, suggesting a relationship between underlying cognitive development and increased verb…

Noun and verb comprehension of 11 children with cerebral palsy or other motor impairments was assessed by presenting a linguistic stimulus and determining whether the child watched a video event that matched or did not match the stimulus. Subjects, aged 2-6, watched the match significantly more, especially when dynamic visual stimuli were…

Command of transitivity permutations in Hebrew, where a change in verb-argument syntax entails a change in verb morphology, were examined in 30 children aged 2, 3, and 8. Findings have implications for the development of derivational morphology, item-based versus class-based learning, and the impact of lexical productivity and language-particular…

In a sociohistorical variation analysis of verb inflection in Early Modern British and American English, corpus-based comparisons focus on several extralinguistic and linguistic factors that have influenced the choice of forms over successive periods of time. Contrary to customary theories of "colonial lag," the rate of change was faster…

Investigated the potential correlation of agreement marking with the expression of pronominal subjects in the speech of 10 Spanish speakers from Puerto Rico and 10 from Spain. The results show not only similar patterns of pronominal expression but also similar rankings of constraints on pronominal expression in both dialects. (MDM)

Argues that translation can be an effective learning tool for English speakers learning Chinese if semantic and discourse analysis are incorporated. Examples are given to illustrate various problems in such translation, including the division between state and action verbs, and the nonuse of -LE with verbs in past meaning. (15 references) (JL)

Examined past-tense inflection of verbs in Norwegian. Data from specifically language-impaired children, normally developing children, and adults were studied by a test constructed to find how input factors such as type and token of frequency and phonological acquisition influence acquisition of past-tense inflection. The goal was to learn whether…

A study analyzed development of French aspectual markers in 39 college students of French as a second language and 30 native French-speaking students. Results indicate classroom instruction may increase the rate at which learners develop this knowledge, and that lack of access to second-language discursive-pragmatic conditions may prevent learning…

Three experiments are reported that showed effects of "structure priming," the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across successive sentences. These effects were demonstrated in Dutch, a previously untested language. All experiments studied spoken sentence production. (Author/JL)