Reviews research on the acquisition of second-language (L2) phonology, focusing on whether adult learners have access to the principles and parameters of Universal Grammar (UG). It argues that UG is still accessible in L2 phonological acquisition, and parameters can be reset but that the Subset Principle can impede learning success. (51…

Reviews research that supports the view that readers strip prefixed words of their prefix and lexically assess the words on the basis of their stem. An experiment using real and nonword stems found that nonwords that are considered to be stem morphemes are treated as being more wordlike than those that are not. (36 references) (MDM)

Two experiments assessed the performance of subjects on prefixed nonwords resulting from the incorrect combination of a prefix and a real word in Italian. The results support the view that prefixes may be represented as units of access or representation in the mental lexicon. (41 references) (MDM)

Presents a quantitative study of children's noun plural overregularizations on recent comparisons of connectionist and symbolic models of language. The speech of 10 English-speaking children aged 1;3 to 5;2 were analyzed. Results pose challenges to connectionist models, but are consistent with the blocking-and-retrieval-failure model in which…

Syntagmatic relationships receive less attention than paradigmatic relationships in the development and study of index languages. Exposes misperceptions in linguistic characterization of syntagmatic relationships, and proposes the expansion to include conceptual syntagmatic relationships (CSRs), and characterizes CSRs to determine their role in…

Through analyses of text corpora, sentence completion, and self-paced reading, examined role of structurally defined parsing principles, local information (lexically specific biases), and contextual information (referential pragmatics) in resolving syntactic ambiguities. Subjects were 32 undergraduate native English speakers. Found that local and…

Discusses the language of criminal justice ("rehabilitation" and "incapacitation") and public policy. Uses statistics from the United States Bureau of Justice to show that United States society deals with convicted felons with an approach that does not put much emphasis on either rehabilitation or incapacitation. (SR)

Presents a critical review of the published accounts of the "Genie Case," involving psycholinguistic research conducted by Susan Curtiss and others in the 1970s with an adolescent with extremely limited language ability. The review maintains that serious discrepancies still remain in the accounts of the subject's language abilities. (21…

This case study examined the development of language skills in a bonobo and a chimpanzee raised by human caregivers since infancy, focusing on the primates' ability to comprehend simple speech, understand referential symbol use, and engage in intentionally communicative routines. It is argued that comparative results from these primates can…

This article responds to MacIntyre's (1995) critique of the Linguistic Coding Differences Hypothesis (LCDH), which posits that language aptitude is the primary source of individual differences in foreign language (FL) achievement. It defends the LCDH and suggests that difficulties exist with theories that attribute affective and social context…

This article responds to Sparks and Ganschow's (1995) defense of their Linguistic Coding Differences Hypothesis (LCDH), arguing that the LCDH ignores the context in which language learning occurs. It asserts that LCDH is so focused on the learning of the sound system of language that it ignores affective variables. (22 references) (MDM)

This article examines the acquisition of wh-questions and relative clauses in Sesotho, a language with no wh-movement in either questions or relatives, and in which wh-questions must be clefted. (10 references) (JL)

Evidence is presented from an experimental study with 21 children ages 4 to 5 years suggesting the coincident emergence of certain Determiner Phrases (DPs) as barriers to wh-movement and as separate binding domains. It is argued that the default assumption for children's grammar may be to assume NP is the maximal projection for a structure until a…

Addresses native monolingual U.S. and Chinese incipiently bilingual children's ability to detect and identify inter- and intraword boundaries. Young children demonstrate similar patterns in their segmentation behavior and there is a developmental progression in this behavior. Mandarin Chinese subjects learning to read Chinese and English…

Varying definitions of formulas, or apparently nonproductive utterances in children's speech, are compared, and criteria for formula recognition are reviewed. A preference rule system is proposed, which distinguishes conditions for formula recognition. Formulas found in the data of one child acquiring Irish are examined. (29 references) (KM)