Presents various learning activities and instructional materials for helping students learn French or Spanish grammar and culture. These materials include flash cards and lists of items to be used on labels. Activities include using the flash cards, writing newspaper ads in the foreign language, and naming the different items in a house. (CK)

Investigated children's understanding of meaning of the cognitive verb "know" (as defined by an abstractness and conceptual difficulty hierarchy). Found that knowledge increased with development, and low levels of meaning were mastered before high levels, and more rapidly. Understanding in audio-taped stories was more difficult than in video-taped…

Preterite/Imperfect (PI) usage is one of the hardest grammatical features of Spanish to learn. Some of the blame lies with misleading textbook explanations. A discussion of problematic P/I textbook explanations shows why the presentation of a more reliable set of principles is a preferable alternative to questionable rules of thumb. (18…

Investigated adult and three- and five-year-old children's use of verb inflections to guide their initial mapping of verb meanings in two studies that explored use of the -ing and -ed verb inflections during mapping of novel verb meanings. Results are applied to implications for early verb learning and the use of the bootstrapping construct in…

Examined overregularization of irregular verb forms in children's language learning. Found that overregularization errors are relatively rare; occur at a constant rate; and are not correlated with the proportion of regular verbs in parents' or children's speech. Also found that a period of correct performance precedes the child's first error. (BC)

Examines the rate of phrase structure change in Yiddish, using quantitative methods to estimate the rate of change of structurally ambiguous verb clauses. Four subcases of phrase structure change are distinguished, three of which provide strong evidence for the Constant Rate Hypothesis of linguistic change. (MDM)

Examines grammaticality judgments on dative constructions among Korean, Japanese, and Chinese learners of English by replicating Ellis (1991). Focus is on predicting the learners' judgments on the grounds of lexical functional grammar (LFG). Examines six predictions derived mainly from LFG. (Author/VWL)

Looks at naturalistic samples of adult-to-child speech to determine whether variations in the input are consistent with reported variations in the proportions of nouns and verbs in children's early vocabularies. Naturalistic speech samples from English-, Italian-, and Mandarin-speaking children and their caregivers were examined. (Author/JL)

Examined how rules for interpreting empty category (EC) subjects of complement clauses vary crosslinguistically across structural and lexical dimensions. Twenty-three Greek-speaking 4- and 5-year-olds and 10 adults, 29 Spanish-speaking 4- and 5-year-olds, 18 6- and 7-year-olds, and 8 adults took part in act-out experiments. Results indicate an…

Examines the development of children's understanding of the difference between "want" and "need" in two different experiments. The first experiment required the children to respond verbally in choosing between the two concepts; the second required them to give an object to one of two characters who had made a request using…

Gives an account of converb (adverbial participle or gerund) systems in eight languages from Paleoasiatic and Altaic families spoken in northeastern Siberia. The rich converbal system is not the only relevant and peculiar feature common to the languages, but it is not common in other languages. The characteristics of converbs are described, and…

Examines the variable presence/absence of third person plural marking on French verbs in the speech of French immersion students. Considers both linguistic and social factors that condition variation and compares results with those found for native speakers of French. (Author/VWL)

Examines whether there is a strong relationship between second language learners' noticing of benefactive auxiliary verbs and their use in communication. Participants were university students who had acquired Japanese at home without receiving any formal instruction. Data were collected in face-to-face interviews, an interpretation task with 20…

Many recent generativist models attribute grammatical knowledge to young children on the basis that children's language patterns the same way as the target adult language. It has been proposed that the child acquires this knowledge early on in development by a process of parameter setting. Wexler (1996) presents the "Very Early Parameter Setting…

Narratives produced by 69 healthy Italian adults were analyzed for age-related changes of microlinguistic, macrolinguistic and informative aspects. The participants were divided into five age groups (20-24, 25-39, 40-59, 60-74, 75-84). One single-picture stimulus and two cartoon sequences were used to elicit three stories per subject. Age-related…