Offers some new evidence about sensitivity to morphemes and the decoding skills of American children in grades three through six. Focuses on knowledge of derivational suffixes, which is examined with sentence completion and sentence acceptability tasks that manipulate the suffixes in real words and nonsense derived forms. Indicates that knowledge…

Two experiments with 40 children (grades 4 to 8) found the children often used their knowledge of derivational suffixes in defining low-frequency derivatives, and knowledge of suffixes was significantly correlated with suffix production in a nonsense task. The children's morphological awareness of derivational suffixes included semantic…

Offers a detailed analysis of the English suffix "-ee" (employee, refugee, etc.) based on 1,500 naturally occurring tokens of 500 word types. Argues that certain semantic constraints, taken together, amount to a special-purpose thematic role that actively constrains productive use of derivational morphology. (Author/MSE)

Three experiments examined whether the survival of the phonological similarity effect (PSE) under articulatory suppression for auditory but not visual to-be-serially recalled lists is a perceptual effect rather than an effect arising from the action of a bespoke phonological store. Using a list of 5 auditory items, a list length at which the…

Infant bilingualism offers a unique opportunity to study the relative effects of language experience and maturation on brain development, with each child serving as his or her own control. Event-related potentials (ERPs) to words were examined in 19- to 22-month-old English-Spanish bilingual toddlers. The children's dominant vs. nondominant…

A study of reciprocals in Japanese compares two kinds: (1) a verbal suffix "aw"; and (2) an NP argument "otagai." Although "otagai" appears to be taken care of by syntactic binding theory, it is proposed that there is no evidence for the existence of a syntactic position of the object NP in the case of "aw." The suffix can be characterized as…

This study examines two views of lexical storage and word production, a derivational hypothesis and an independent unit hypothesis. Reaction times and errors were related to derivational complexity. A model of lexical retrieval process incorporating derivational processes is proposed. (Author/SW)

Presents two systems of word derivation. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Expanded version of a paper presented at the 3rd Regional Meeting of the Northeast Linguistic Society, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, October 21-22, 1972. (DD)

Paper prepared during a workshop conducted by Joseph E. Grimes, January-April 1971, at Ukarumpa, Territory of New Guinea, and partially supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. (DD)

Article supported by the Guggenheim Foundation. (DD)