Development of child language is tremendously complex, remarkable and wondrous. In a second language acquisition context, a child can acquire his second language in either acquiring both languages at the same time or learning the second language after mastering the first one. This present research is concerned to describe the syntactical…

This article explores aspects of early language and literacy that may predict later literacy development. It explores a range of assessment procedures used for oral language, vocabulary, sentence structure and phonology and early reading and writing. The article then describes a small-scale study which highlights the disconnections between the…

Two experiments indicated that sentence verification times were significantly longer when a discrepancy between target sentence and context was in the syntactic presupposition, rather than in the assertion. Findings are best explained by a structural hypothesis, not by strategies designed to locate given and new information. (Author/CP)

Examines, through two studies, how prosodic information affects syntactic processing in locally ambiguous sentences. The first study dealt with people's judgments of the continuation of locally ambiguous sentence fragments of differing lengths. The second concerned ratings of normality of sentence types with differing contours. (27 references)…

An experiment was conducted to determine whether the deep structure or the surface structure clause is more important as a speech planning unit, and whether syntactic decisions are made during sentence production. Results were discussed in relation to previous studies of pausing and speech disruption. (Author/CTM)

Describes a part of a study on children's acquisition of Warlpiri, an aboriginal language spoken in central Australia, which aimed to find out at what age the children respond consistently to particular word orders and case frames for simple transitive sentences. Makes comparisons with the acquisition of Turkish transitive clauses. (SED)

This assumption that non-standard speakers are limited in their linguistic ability is examined based on a larger study investigating the speech of working-class adolescents in Sydney, Australia's inner-city areas. Speech samples of four children are presented. An examination of verbal structures reveals that there is a predominance of simple…

Confronted with the problem of determining the frequency of syntactical patterns in present-day written Australian English, the author employs a method of analysis which produces an output in the form of a two-dimensional line diagram showing all the syntagms comprising the sentence under analysis. For the remaining problem of sorting the diagrams…

Examines the communication strategies used by adult second-language learners of English when performing contrasting pedagogic tasks. The article suggests that existing descriptions of communication strategies ignore the pragmatic function of such devices in interactive discourse and offers a reclassification that differentiates strategies…

Argues that a better understanding of the workings of one's first language--English, for most Australians--can facilitate the acquisition and appreciation of another language. The article exploits the morphology and syntax of English in the following areas: liaison, emphasis, stress, separable and inseparable verbs, dental suffixes, weak and…

This paper reports on a study of the efficiency of interactive tasks at eliciting targeted morpho-syntactic structures from child speakers of English as a Second Language (ESL). Two groups of subjects between 7 and 10 years of age were examined, one group with various first language backgrounds, and a second which used Spanish as their first…