Examines the composition of the early productive vocabulary of eight Korean and eight English-learning children and the morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of their caregivers' input in order to determine parallels between caregiver input and early lexical development. (Author/VWL)

Analysis of the first 4 months of word combinations recorded for an Estonian-English learning child suggests that meaning-based generativity may play a role in this important transition in that mixed language utterances, sequence reversals, and errors revealing early attempts at analysis provide clear evidence that distributional learning alone…

The syntax of 14 child speakers of African American English (AAE) with and without language disorders were compared. Findings suggested that shared features between AAE and Standard American English may be more diagnostically salient than features not shared when identifying children of AAE language backgrounds with language disorders. (DB)

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)

Presents two probe recognition experiments investigating whether overt and null pronouns in American Sign Language (ASL) similarly reactivate their referents during online sentence comprehension. Both experiments indicated that an important link exists between spatial verb agreement and the ASL pronomial system and that nonreferent inhibition does…

Discusses the integration of Fluent 2, a two-medium immersive conversational language learning environment, into the pedagogical environment. The article presents a strategy to provide teachers and other designers of language lessons with tools that will enable them to produce lessons they consider appropriate. (seven references) (Author/CK)

Describes the Gateway to Educational Materials Project (GEM) at the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information and Technology at Syracuse University. Explicates the GEM metadata element set and how GEM metadata is created. Discusses the syntactic binding of GEM metadata and the mechanisms for its distribution. Concludes with a brief discussion of existing…

Investigates whether Spanish- and Turkish-speaking learners of English discover the semantic and syntactic constraints on the causative/inchoative alternation in the absence of overt morphological clues. Results of a picture judgment task show that second language learners do discover these properties and that overall verbs appear to cluster in…

This study compared word definition skills of 8 Spanish-speaking children with and 9 without language impairments (LI) (all aged 9). Children without LI tended to use formal definitions, while children with LI exhibited fewer formal definitions and appeared to show a limited use of their syntactic knowledge in their word definitions. (CR)

Examined in six experiments toddlers' use of syntactic cues to learn proper names and count nouns. Found that by 24 months, both girls and boys were significantly more likely to select a labeled object if they had heard a proper name than if they had heard a count noun. At 20 months, neither girls nor boys demonstrated this effect. (Author/KB)

Describes the Thai Learning System, which is designed to help learners acquire the Thai word order system. The system facilitates the lessons on the Web using HyperText Markup Language and Perl programming, which interfaces with natural language processing by means of Prolog. (Author/VWL)

We examine how attention to animacy information may contribute to children's developing knowledge of language. This research extends beyond prior research in that children were shown dynamic events with novel entities, and were asked not only to comprehend sentences but to use sentence structure to infer the meaning of a new word. In a 4 x 3…

Gaps in reading performance between Anglo and Latino children are associated with gaps in vocabulary knowledge. An intervention was designed to enhance fifth graders' academic vocabulary. The meanings of academically useful words were taught together with strategies for using information from context, from morphology, from knowledge about multiple…

Structure/function relationships are fundamental to understanding the properties of biological molecules, and thus it is imperative that biochemistry students learn how to analyze such relationships. Here we describe Chime-based web page templates and tutorials designed to help students develop their own strategies for exploring macromolecular…

In spoken German "weil" frequently occurs with verb-second (v2) word order instead of prescribed ver-last (vlast). This article provides an overview of the variation and its historical development and offers suggestions and materials for a linguistic unit in the advanced language classroom. Current research demonstrates that the variation is not…